Category archives: Science

It is widely accepted that low carbon technologies will contribute to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, mostly those coming from carbon dioxide, and thus slow down the global warming. That’s why most of the largest economies in the world have committed to reduce their gas emissions by supporting an unprecedented transition from the current fossil-fuel based […]

At low temperatures, the resistivity of a metal (the inverse of its conductivity) is nearly constant. As the temperature of a material is lowered and as we approach absolute zero the resistivity should approach a constant value. Many metals, known as normal metals, behave in this way. The behaviour of another class of metals and […]

Achieving room temperature superconductivity is among the most pursued but elusive goals of scientists. A paper uploaded to the arXiv in December 2014 claims to have observed superconductivity as high as 190 K in hydrogen sulfide at high pressure, breaking all the records thus far. If this observation is confirmed, cuprates will be knocked from […]

A uthor: Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo, Permanent Researcher, University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU) Although «cracking the origins-of-life puzzle», regardless of the reputation of the journalist who tells the news, is clearly not within the reach of science quite yet, the article published a few weeks ago by Sutherland and colleagues in the UK , does constitute […]

Diagram shows newly-found giant magma reservoir underneath Yellowstone A huge reservoir of mostly solid hot rock has been found underneath a magma chamber beneath Yellowstone National Park, part of the vast volcanic plumbing of the area diagrammed in a study published in Science. This system has been there for about 17 million years, and scientists […]

“In the beginning, there was simplicity” Richard Dawkins, “The selfish gene”, chapter 2 The question of how life began on Earth is as old as the human race and has occupied the thoughts and time of scientists and philosophers for centuries, often causing conflict throughout history. From a scientific point of view, the several possibilities […]

There are some concepts in physics difficult to grasp. Mainly because we have no direct evidence of them and, in orther to get some understanding, we rely on analogies that are not strictly correct. One of these difficult concepts is the spin of the electron. The analogy for the spin usually goes this way: Imagine […]

Blindness is a world wide problem. As of 2012 there were 285 million visually impaired people in the world, of which 246 million had low vision and 39 million were blind. Most people with poor vision are in the developing world and are over the age of 50 years. One basic aspect for quality of […]

Everybody has heard about that. They say that plants are able to hear. Who has not ever heard from someone or read somewhere that talking to your plants makes them grow better and to be more splendid than if you treat them like a vegetable? You can believe it or not, but believer or skeptic […]

Capitanian event a mass extinction A group of paleontologists would like to add a sixth mass extinction event that occurred at the end of the Capitanian age to the five generally accepted in science. Researchers have linked mass extinctions in China during that time period 260 million years ago with a major die-off in what […]