Metacognition is «cognition about cognition», or «knowing about knowing». It comes from the root word «meta», meaning beyond, and the word «cognition» that includes all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge: attention, memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning, biological computation, problem-solving, decision making, comprehension and production of language, etc. Metacognition can take many forms; it […]
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Nerve cells that block itches in mice Scientists have found nerve cells in mice that can block itches caused by a light touch, which could one day lead to treatments for people suffering from chronic itch problems. Researchers genetically engineered mice without those spinal cord nerve cells, producing rodents that had the urge to scratch […]
In the previous articles (I, II), we have characterized the simplest class of supersymmetric heterotic compactification backgrounds. In particular, we have finished the second article with the following result: There is a class of admissible Heterotic internal manifolds characterized as being six-dimensional, oriented, spin, Riemannian compact manifolds admitting a parallel spinor respect to the Levi-Civita […]
With “many-body problem” we usually make reference to one that is very difficult to obtain exact solutions for, because the system involves interactions between more than two bodies. This kind of problem appears both in classical and quantum systems. In order to understand the physics of many-body systems, it is necessary to make use of […]
Sleep has a critical function in metabolic homeostasis. Its restorative function may be a consequence of the enhanced removal of potentially neurotoxic waste products that accumulate in the awake central nervous system . The glymphatic system is a functional waste pathway involved in this clearance in the mammalian central nervous system. The pathway consists of: […]
In recent years, when I enter into a bakery my decision of which bread to buy is getting more and more complicated because of the high variety of bread available. Bread is “in appearance” a simple product just made out of flour, yeast and water mixed together and baked. Of course, the complexity of bread […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Evidence of plague found in Bronze Age skeletons DNA testing of Bronze Age skeletons has found evidence of a plague outbreak that occurred thousands of years before the Black Death that devastated Europe in the 1300s. Researchers found enough Yersinia pestis DNA in skeletons that tested positive for the bacteria to produce complete genome sequences […]
As everybody knows, the people from Bilbao are born wherever they want. And, according to one of the most captivating conjectures in contemporary archaeology, this might have been so in a totally unexpected way even from many millennia ago. The conjecture I am referring to is the ‘Solutrean hypothesis’ about the first human population of […]
Imagine you want to study the biology of an animal that no one has been able to capture. First, you devise a way of trapping it, then a method of calming it down so that you can manipulate it. This is exactly what David Wineland did, but his long-sought prey was not an animal, but […]
An «earworm» is a tune that arises seemingly spontaneously in the mind and becomes “stuck” in the head for hours or days. It is also called brainworm, musical imagery repetition, involuntary musical imagery, and stuck song syndrome. Sometimes we feel that it is driving us insane hampering a straight thinking and complicating concentration although usually […]