Category archives: Science

The most widely used metaphors for nuclear fusion reactors are the recreation of the Sun on Earth and the controlled explosion of a hydrogen bomb. In both cases, the first thing that comes to mind is the need for high-performance radiation-resistant materials to contain the fusion reaction. The selection and design of new materials that […]

Psychologists and neurologists have been interested in the problem of free will since the beginning of their specialities, though the first clearly devised and relevant experiments on the topic were those of Libet and colleagues, in the early eighties. In this famous experiment, subjects who were before a clock, and whose brain electrical waves were […]

Advances in the knowledge of the molecular basis of life have provided some of the most impressive and certain proofs to the notion that all organisms on Earth form part of a unique and ancient lineage. One of the most typical examples is the fact that the molecular machinery regulating the biochemical processes common to […]

Slow shaking under Tokyo could mean a giant earthquake Slow-motion earthquakes beneath Tokyo are becoming more common, raising concerns of another megaquake like the one in 2011. GPS sensors are being used to track the slow shifts, which are unreadable by seismographs, and scientists have found that the shifts are coming more frequently but seismologists […]

Let’s try a little game. If I’d show you only parts of a famous building: a column, part of a wall, the ceiling…Would you be able to tell me which building it is I am telling you about? Most likely not. With these elements you could still doubt whether I am talking about an old […]

…and the vision that was planted in my brain still remains, within the sound of silence. (Simon and Garfunkel, The sound of silence 1964) Sound is made of waves. One fundamental trick of speech is that it surfs those waves by slicing them up into discrete bits. Recently, Mesgarani et al. (2014) (see also ) […]

Fruit flies can make sudden turns similar to fighter jets Fruit flies are capable of sharp turns, like those of fighter pilots, according to researchers studying the ways the insects evade predators. When sensing a threat, the Drosophila hydei flies can execute banked turns at speeds five times faster than when turning normally. Los Angeles […]

Can you name a polygonal feature in any of the Solar System atmospheres? None? Up to our current knowledge there is only one: Saturn’s Hexagon. Not only it is the one and only of its kind but it is also the longest-lived planetary-scale atmospheric feature in any planet. A recent paper by Agustín Sánchez-Lavega and […]

Irradiated scrap metal helps researchers recreate a supernova Scientists have simulated a supernova with the help of some radioactive waste and a particle accelerator at CERN. Researchers took leftover irradiated scraps of metal containing titanium-44, which is made naturally by supernovae, to produce a beam and sent it into a chamber filled with helium to […]

In the last days there has been an important breakthrough in physics and particularly in cosmology due to the publication of the results of the BICEP2 collaboration on the measure of certain polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) we refer to as B-modes. These modes are thought to be sensible to the density of […]