Category archives: Science

Disclaimer: What I will relate in this post is the result of my research during the last year and specially the results of my last paper, uploaded as a preprint to ArXiv.org with reference arXiv:1307.2060 . Apart from the self-promotion, I think this is interesting since it can give people an insight on how short […]

BMI may not be accurate predictor of fitness, study suggests Metabolism and body mass index do not go hand-in-hand, according to a study published in the journal Science. According to the study, it is possible to have a normal-range BMI while also having an abnormal metabolism, indicating that it’s not prudent to rely on BMI […]

Current safe sugar levels may not be so safe Female mice fed a diet with 25% added sugars died at twice the normal rate, while males were less likely to reproduce. That amount of sugar is considered a safe level for human consumption. “Added sugar consumed at concentrations currently considered safe exerts dramatic impacts on […]

Go to a dark place and look to the night sky. How many stars you can count? This is an ancient question which can be traced back at least to the classic Greek philosophers. However, no matter how dark your sky is, the stars you are seeing are all related to our home, the Milky […]

The crossing number of a graph, defined as the minimum number of edge crossings arising when the graph is drawn in the plane, turns out to be a mathematical concept with a fascinating history. Lowell Beineke and Robin Wilson trace the origins of the crossing number, with particular emphasis in the war-time experiences of the […]

Herbal remedy has cancerous side effect Aristolochia plants, which have been used in China for herbal remedies, have been found to cause cancer, according to two studies published in Science Translational Medicine. The plants contain a naturally carcinogenic compound called aristolochic acid, which causes more cell mutations than those caused by tobacco smoke and UV […]

TW Hydrae is a peculiar star. Although it is not bright enough to be visible to the unaided eye, it is relatively close to us, just 180 light-years away, and this makes it the closest T Tauri star in the sky. A T Tauri star is a solar system being born, they are still to […]

The locomotion of every moving system, alive or manufactured, is produced by the interaction between some movable components or appendages and the surrounding environment. This applies for every kind of surroundings: land, water or air. For water and air, Navier-Stokes equations allow predicting the interaction with the fluid with very high precision. In the case […]

Varied smelling ability linked to genes Scientists at the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research sequenced test subjects’ genomes to see if they could predict an individual’s smelling ability, and found clusters of genes that reliably predicted the person’s ability to smell four of 10 chemicals. “All of these genes are on different […]

This article is focused on a recent paper [PDF] written by Jo Day from the Department of Classics of the University College Dublin exploring the links between botany and archaeology using case studies from ancient Mediterranean civilizations. Archaeology is more associated with the discovery of tombs and ancient human remains than with plants. However, the […]