Category archives: Science

Curiosity has been studying the surface of Mars since its landing on August 6, 2012, at Gale Crater. One of its primary goals was to determine Mar’s habitability, present or past, as written in the geology of the red planet. For doing so, and after not a little debate, the landing site was selected to […]

Beluga whales infected with cat parasites Parasites known to infect cats have been discovered in Arctic beluga whales. Toxoplasma gondii can cause people to go blind. Scientists have issued a health advisory for those in the Western Arctic region who eat beluga meat. BBC News Higgs boson bubbles sent shock waves throughout nascent universe Bubbles […]

Competition, evidence suggests, is a constant in nature. Looking from the largest to the smallest structures that Mankind has been able to observe, one can easily find examples: in clusters of galaxies (in which sometimes galaxies compete with each other to pull in the matter from their outer regions), stars (like binary systems with planetary […]

With most of the conferences scheduled between June and October, beginning of the year brings with few novelties in robotics. During this time, roboticists must wait and wonder what the advances and “hot research topics” will be in their respective fields. Most likely, this year too one of those “hot” areas will be robotic insertion […]

Mesozoic-era ichthyosaur had live births on land The fossil remains of a 248 million-year-old ichthyosaur have revealed that the Mesozoic-era reptile died while giving birth with two offspring still inside it. Scientists were surprised to note that the birth was occurring on land, which goes against a long-held belief that the sea creatures delivered their […]

Visual illusions, a perceptual behavior where what we “see” differs from the physical reality, are used in vision science to understand the nature of human perception. Most of the known visual illusions come from 2D pictures and their motions, but not so many make use of 3D solid objects. An example of the latter is […]

Nowadays we are more aware than ever about the relevance of eating a balanced and assorted diet. However, in the more industrialized countries obesity has become almost epidemic, and it is a condition that lies at the base of many different health issues, being the cardiovascular complications probably the most obvious. But also immunological and […]

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 […]