Category archives: Science

Ceres was discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi in the very first day of the XIX century somewhere between Mars and Jupiter orbits. It was once considered the biggest asteroid in the Solar System but the 2006 Pluto demotion resulted in an upgrade of Ceres into the newly created dwarf-planet category, in which it became the smallest […]

Highly conductive graphene nanoribbons Graphene nanoribbons can conduct electricity much better than was expected. The new graphene nanoribbons differ from other forms by having no rough edges allowing electrons to move ten times more swiftly than theory says they should. The results could have implications in the development of high-end electronics. Nature News Advanced bionic […]

Let me tell you a story about serendipity in research , a story that involves the evolution of Earth’s landscape and floods of unprecedented scale. This is related to research of our own group here at CSIC . Classical authors such as Aristotle, Galileo, or Leonardo da Vinci, used to describe the birth of the […]

Nelson Mandela was an extraordinary man with an extraordinary talent for negotiation. He was also an outstanding public speaker. Among the many words of wisdom he left behind, there is this piece of advice for negotiations: “ If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you […]

Paleontologists find evidence sauropods lived into Cretaceous period A sauropod belonging to the dinosaur group Titanosauria appears to have lived during the Early Cretaceous period providing evidence that sauropods lived beyond the Jurassic period. The remains of a juvenile Yongjinglong datangi were uncovered in northwestern China. International Science News Luhman 16B, where it rains liquid […]

As the Hungarian mathematician Alfréd Rényi famously put it (although usually misattributed to Paul Erdös), mathematicians are devices for turning coffee into theorems. Other people drink coffee for a variety of reasons, and considering that coffee is very far from being the only popular beverage containing caffeine, it is not difficult to believe that caffeine […]

Light on X chromosomes To better see how females turn on and off their X chromosomes, scientists at Johns Hopkins University have developed a way to get X chromosomes from different parents to light up in different colors. Dr. Jeremy Nathans and his team engineered mice to breed female babies with X chromosomes from one […]

Recently, a very interesting article has appeared in Nature . It is mainly directed to non-specialists, in order to help to interpret the scientific results with care, making the appropriate conclusions and, sometimes even more important, avoiding the wrong ones. The twenty tips can be directly applied when the results coming from statistical analysis are […]

Imagine you were a watchman, having to patrol some streets. Today you were assigned to straight, well-illuminated, and wide streets, that can be checked with a glance from the intersection. Before starting the route, you want to determine the shortest route allowing to check all your streets. How difficult can this be? Dumitrescu et al […]

Tiniest particles can now be put on the scale Tiny technology that uses a fluid-filled microchannel in a silicon cantilever can measure the mass of particles down to the attogram, or one-millionth of a trillionth of a gram. The technology, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sends particles through the microchannel. Their passing changes […]