Laziness, sloth or indolence is, depending on who you ask, a sin, a psychological characteristic, or a basic human right. It is usually used as a pejorative and is considered a disinclination, a personal choice where one the lazy person decides not to carry out an activity despite having the ability, the time […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Scientists in Antarctica find evidence of neutrinos’ existence The existence of cosmic neutrinos has been confirmed by scientists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. Researchers combed through years of data collected by sensors buried in the ice and pinpointed 21 ultra high-energy muons created by rare neutrino interactions with other particles. They say the […]
¨The chemical bond¨ is one of the most often used concepts in chemistry. It is also one of the eldest terms since the first definition of chemical bond comes from the studies of G.N. Lewis who published his classical paper on interactions between atoms in 1916 . Lewis stated that ¨ we shall say that […]
One of the first things that we are taught in school is that living things are born, grow, reproduce and die. We can think of aging as the line that connects these events, lifespan as the length of that line and senescence as the step that goes from reproducing to dying. The three terms bring […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Small Jupiter-like exoplanet viewed directly by Earth-based telescope An exoplanet resembling a young Jupiter has been found by astronomers using an Earth-based telescope, the Gemini Planet Imager in Chile, according to findings published online in Science. The gas giant has been dubbed 51 Eridani b and is about 96 light-years from Earth. “To detect planets […]
Chemistry • Condensed matter • Materials • Physics • Quantum physics
Minimizing losses in any kind of electronic device is always important, but it is paramount in nanoelectronics. Still, most of the phenomena that lead to inefficiencies in the operation of these nanodevices are poorly understood. Consider the case of quantum dots. A quantum dot is a nanometric crystalline structure of semiconductor materials. In a quantum […]
You come back home really tired after a long day at work and you decide to take that loooong bath you’ve been waiting for. You stay in the water for some time and suddenly you realize your fingers are wrinkling. Oh boy, that is telling you that you’ve been there for a while and reminds […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Horses have distinct facial expressions much like humans Despite facial structure differences, horses have similar facial expressions to humans and use these expressions as social cues. Using their Equine Facial Action Coding System, researchers found that horses have 17 distinct facial movements as opposed to human faces, which have 27. The Christian Science Monitor Physicists […]
In the standard representation of the periodic table, we find below two separated rows of elements. Their chemistry and electronic configuration belong to a group three element, so what these two separated rows really mean is that in this representation of the table they are all located on top lanthanum and actinium, three-dimensionally building a […]
Plants are sessile organisms, which means they can´t move around. Of course, they have some types of movements like turning towards the sun but the place where the seed germinates the plant will stay during their entire life cycle. Obviously, this fact has important consequences on how plants respond upon variations of their surrounding environment […]