In 1912, a French chemist named Louis Camille Maillard published a paper to explain what happens when amino acids react with sugars at elevated temperatures . And I guess you are thinking: so what? Well, it turns out that this chemical reaction is one of the most important flavor-producing reactions in cooking since produces what […]
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Stability improved by allowing plasma closer to fusion reactor walls Researchers studying magnetic confinement fusion have found that allowing plasma to get closer to reactor walls may make the system more stable. It was a scary proposition because if their experiment didn’t work, it would have melted the reactor. Teams from China and the US […]
Mutualistic interactions are ubiquitous phenomena occurring between many classes of organisms . The mutually beneficial relationship between ants and honeydew-producing mealybugs (hemipterans) is a very well-studied example. Mealybugs belong to the family Pseudococcidae and they are unarmored scale insects found in moist and warm climates. The ants collect and exploit the honeydew produced by the […]
We know that incident light can provoke a strong optical response in metallic nanostructures due to the excitation of resonant plasmonic modes, i.e, the electrons in the metal become excited by the photons in the incident light and oscillate collectively. One of the most interesting properties of plasmon resonances is their associated enhancement and confinement […]
It seems that we are definitely heading towards the bio-based society, a new way of interacting with the environment where fossil fuels won’t be needed anymore and “ more natural ” processes for producing energy, food and materials will prevail. Remarkably, this bio-turn often involves highly advanced biotechnology and strict competitive targets, both facts that […]
Swarm robotics studies the coordination of many simple physical robots that act as a single multirobot system. The interactions between the individual robots and the interaction of the robots with the environment generate a collective behavior that is named swarm behavior. This new discipline moves from the artificial intelligence to the biological world and vice […]
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Mars atmosphere stripped away by solar storms Solar storms have been stripping away the air on Mars, according to data collected by NASA’s Maven spacecraft. Researchers say this could help explain why Mars’ atmosphere became so thin so rapidly, turning a once warm planet with liquid water into the dry, desolate landscape it is today […]
People who are diagnosed with dementia may initially report problems on memory and/or language that affect their activities of daily living. Once factors such as depression, delirium, or mild cognitive impairment, are disregarded, these people are typically referred to a neurologist, radiologist, and neuropsychologist or speech therapist who will help them to understand the reason […]
In nature, light harvesting organisms make extensive use of energy and electron transfer between adjacent molecules. Thus, in the photosynthetic cell of an algae, bacterium, or plant, there are light-sensitive molecules called chromophores, which contain a π-conjugated system (a system with alternate single and double bonds), arranged in an antenna-shaped structure named a photocomplex. When […]
A hot topic of research nowadays is the energy transfer in quantum systems. One important reason for this interest is the famous 2007 experiment that suggests quantum effects in the dynamics of the photosynthetic complex FMO, from the green sulfur bacteria . This complex plays a crucial role in natural photosynthesis transferring an excitation from […]