Category archives: Science

MI weekly selection #68

MI weekly selection #68

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

Salamanders may be getting shorter due to climate change Appalachian salamanders have gotten shorter in the past 50 years, possibly adapting to warmer, drier weather conditions. Researchers compared specimens they collected with those collected by museums from the same areas since 1957. They found that each generation of salamanders in several species grew 1% smaller […]

Living beings: systems all the way back to their chemical origins

Living beings: systems all the way back to their chemical origins

BiochemistryBiologyChemistryEvolution

By Invited Researcher

A uthor: Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo, Permanent Researcher, University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU) The effort of mapping ignorance in biology is especially frustrating –or, if the mood and attitude of the scientist afford it, especially motivating– because solid, definite answers remain minimal compared to the amount of open issues and uncertainties that new discoveries in this […]

Hawking’s information preservation and weather forecasting mess

Hawking’s information preservation and weather forecasting mess

AstrophysicsCosmologyPhysics

By Mario Herrero-Valea

Last month, a lot of newspapers and websites have been promoting this article on Nature referring to a recent preprint uploaded by Stephen W. Hawking to the internet repository ArXiv. In this work, summarizing what he talked about in a conference given last August, the English physicist argue that, since event horizons, the definitory property […]

New hope against tuberculosis: spectinamides

New hope against tuberculosis: spectinamides

BiologyBiomedicineMicrobiology

By Ignacio López-Goñi

Tuberculosis (TB) represents a serious public health problem. The latest reports estimate an incidence of 8.7 million cases in 2001 and over 1.4 million deaths per year. The disease is usually be treated with a first-line drugs, isoniazid and rifampin, the two most potent anti-tuberculosis agents. However, the prevalence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis cause by […]