Category archives: Science

Poor Math Skills Make a Mortgage Default More Likely Unprecedented numbers of American subprime mortgage holders began defaulting on their loans in 2006, precipitating two years later the most severe global recession since The Great Depression. Pundits have offered numerous theories about what started the mortgage mayhem, but firm evidence has remained elusive. According to […]

Human brain has about 85 billion neurons. Each neuron forms thousands of chemical and electrical synapses with other neurons. To record the synaptic activity of each neuron in the brain an intracellular probe with a millivolt scale is required. Glass electrodes are widely used, but they are fragile and they have high impedance. An intracellular […]

Seed germination can be defined as the restart of growth of the embryo of the mature seed. Germination depends on the same environmental conditions as vegetative growth does, water and oxygen must be available, the temperature must be suitable and there must not be inhibitory substances present. However, it is common that even in favorable […]

Saturn is truly a weird place. Apart from having quite a peculiar thermal history and one of the most interesting satellites in the Solar System, this planet displays arguably the most fascinating meteorological phenomenon ever seen. Suppose for a moment that next spring a storm raises in your hometown. Nothing unusual to care about, probably […]

Violence against women at epidemic proportions Three in ten women worldwide have been punched, shoved, dragged, threatened with weapons, raped, or subjected to other violence from a current or former partner. Close to one in ten have been sexually assaulted by someone other than a partner. Of women who are murdered, more than one in […]

Decision making in areas such as production planning, distribution and grid management, logistics or financial portfolio management is usually based on mathematical models, mathematical optimization themselves. Let us assume that we have to take a decision of how many units to produce of two products A and B. The production system is common and has […]

Entanglement is a fundamental tool in quantum computing and several quantum information protocols, such as quantum teleportation, quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution. The basic unit of entanglement is the entangled bit ( ebit ), represented by a maximally entangled state of two qubits (quantum bits). Entanglement can also be implemented in a higher dimensional […]

The mad hatterpillar These caterpillars are native to Australia and eat eucalyptus trees. Why do they build themselves a hat? No one really seems to know why the caterpillars keep their old heads hanging around. Bug Girl’s Blog When Cleaning fMRI Data is a Nuisance A flaw in data processing could be leading to biases […]

Among his around 1525 papers, Paul Erdős considered On sets of distances of n points as his most important contribution to discrete geometry. There, he stated: On the boundary of every convex body, there exists a point P such that every circle with center P intersects that boundary in at most 2 points. (Note that […]

The word “species” is one of the most relevant and controversial in the history of Biology and has often become the main topic of many books and articles. It seems that biologists can do their job quite well and understand each other as if all of them shared a tacit agreement on the meaning of […]