What keeps Earth-scientists busy? The present list aims at summarizing the most relevant open problems addressed by geoscientists nowadays. Some of these 49 open questions are recent; others have been standing unanswered for centuries. They cover from the early stages of the Earth to the present or near future threats; from the deeper interior of […]
As a child I was told that Earth’s atmosphere has a number of layers: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, ionosphere and exosphere (hope I have not forgotten anything in the list!). This looked much like an onion and, to be honest, the taxonomic subtleties did not make much sense to me at that point. Aside from […]
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Ancient strips of bamboo hold multiplication table A multiplication table in base 10 has been revealed in ancient strips of bamboo found in China that date back to around 305 B.C. About 2,500 bamboo strips were donated to Tsinghua University in Beijing five years ago, and researchers discovered ancient Chinese calligraphy written on the strips […]
The second law of thermodynamics is one of the oldest and most tested physical laws. Unfortunately, it prevents us from doing very useful things, like creating a perpetual motion machine of the second kind. This law is extremely important for both theoretical and practical purposes and, because of that, it has been broadly studied since […]
Different TV shows have popularized some details of the scientific methodology used in forensics in order to unravel the circumstances of a death. Regardless of the accuracy of your favorite TV series, sources of relevant forensic information are truly diverse and multidisciplinary: projectile physics, rate of chemical reactions or the knowledge of ecological processes, among […]
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Quake lights likely caused by grinding rocks in rift zones The mysterious lights sometimes reported before or during earthquakes occur most frequently in geological rift zones. Researchers say the glow emanates from electricity generated as rocks grind together along vertical faults during temblors. Nature News Sea anemones living underneath Antarctica ice shelf A large number […]
Time scales for astrophysical phenomena are sometimes thought to be overwhelmingly large and to exceed by far human life. While this is true for many cases, there are others which take the blink of an eye. Halfway between them, some interesting facts seem to happen in historical time scales and therefore have been analyzed by […]
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Vaccine to protect against staph infections in rabbits Researchers have created a vaccine that has the potential to prevent pneumonia caused by Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, including Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in an animal model. The vaccine targets toxins secreted by the staph bacteria, preventing it from causing serious infections. Results may explain why human trials have […]
For any animal, the real world is an ever-changing environment. Continuously, even then they are just remaining in a peaceful, awake state, animals receive multiple sensory signals encoding different features of their surroundings, or even carrying information about their own internal state (orientation, body movement, or internal temperature, for example). Some of these signals might […]
Since the emergence of the microscope in the early seventeenth century, many claimed its invention, but many more have tried to improve it. Many problems have been resolved on the way, allowing us to poke directly with our own eyes about the heart of the living or inert matter as far as optical physics allows […]