Category archives: Science

In the basement of the Prado Museum, Madrid, there is a small yet astonishing group of fresco paintings that do not receive as many visitors as other masterpieces of the collection. They were painted in the 11th century by an anonymous mozarab artist and configure a set of hunting scenes and wild animals. One of […]

Talking seems easy to us, so much so that we take it for granted, but the cognitive machinery responsible for this capacity is extremely complex. Among the many cognitive processes involved in speaking, people who know more than one language face an added challenge: they not only need to ensure that the words they select […]

Researchers try to figure out sea worm’s blue glow Researchers are a step closer to figuring out why a common sea worm glows blue on the shallow seafloors it calls home, thanks to a pair of experiments conducted by biologists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. First, they found that the worm, unlike other light-emitting organisms […]

As you listen to music played in a guitar, you are getting much more than just plain sound. In fact, when the motion of the pulled strings translates into air waves, a big deal of information is carried along with the notes. You could say that mechanical properties of the musical instrument such as mass […]

When the nymph Calypso was finally convinced by Hermes to let Odysseus go back to Penelope and his island, she gave the Greek hero very precise instructions. After leaving Calypso’s island, Ogygia, Odysseus should “keep [the Great Bear that men call the Wain] to larboard as he crossed the waters”. In the northern hemisphere, all […]

China’s Forbidden City had rocks transported via ice sheets. The massive stones used to build parts of China’s Forbidden City in the 15th century were pulled by several hundred workers more than 40 miles on sledges across artificial ice, researchers say. China had discovered the wheel, but a sign at the Forbidden City hinted that […]

If you were told something like “there is chemistry between us” , you certainly would not think that the speaker is referring to actual molecules flying across the space but, more appropriately, you would take it as a figurative way of talking. However, the saying turns to be more literal than it may seem: there […]

Even though the Kepler mission stopped working in May 2013, the data provided by this extremely prolific mission still wonders the scientific community. The mission discovered some 150 planets and proposed more than 3,500 candidates, supplying the basis for a realistic estimation of the number of planets in our Galaxy, whether Earth-like or not. Now […]

Brains wired to be wary of snakes The brain is wired to detect the threat of snakes, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers studied a pair of macaque monkeys born in captivity who had not encountered snakes before the experiment. When shown an image of a […]

Some plants have the capacity to develop tubers. Tubers are storage organs that serve as a survival strategy to better cope with adverse environmental conditions such as dry periods and cold. Tubers are sometimes also a means of asexual reproduction. In fact, tubers can persist in the soil during unfavorable conditions and generate a new […]