Category archives: Science

Smelling the taste

Smelling the taste

Neuroscience

By Moisés García-Arencibia

When animals eat, both the olfactory (odour) and gustatory (taste) systems send information to the brain about the food being eaten. This combined information is very valuable to determine whether the animal is about to swallow something poisonous or something nutritious. That odours can influence the processing of taste is well known, and most people […]

MI weekly selection #2

MI weekly selection #2

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

Five hundred phases Condensed matter physics – the branch of physics responsible for discovering and describing most of these phases – has traditionally classified phases by the way their fundamental building blocks – usually atoms – are arranged. The key is something called symmetry. Classifying the phases of matter by describing their symmetries and where […]

Nature cares about the direction time flows: T symmetry breaking measured

Nature cares about the direction time flows: T symmetry breaking measured

Particle physicsPhysics

By Mario Herrero-Valea

Back in the decade of 1950, and inspired by the beauty of the formulation of Quantum Electrodynamics, carried out by Feynman among others in the first half of the twentieth century; scientists thought that all physics had to be invariant under three fundamental symmetries that could relate different physical processes between them. These symmetries were […]

A mediator for horizontal gene transfer between eukaryotes and prokaryotes

A mediator for horizontal gene transfer between eukaryotes and prokaryotes

BiologyGeneticsMicrobiology

By Enrique Royuela

In biology few issues are as basic as the division and classification of living things. Despite the differences shown by taxa that occupy each of the categories, all living things have a common ancestor and characteristics that unite them. Since Linnaeus (in 1735) to the newest division created by Cavalier-Smith (in the late twentieth century) […]