Smell has often been the neglected sense, despite—or, hopefully, until—the increasing number of interesting discoveries being made about and around it. Trivially, smells are interpreted as a series of neurochemical reactions mediated by receptors; this is no novelty, and at the single-molecule and single-neuron level the mechanism (how a molecule triggers a specific receptor which […]
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Could Earth be constantly crashing through dark matter? Scientists are looking to new techniques to search for evidence that the Earth is constantly breaking through walls of dark matter. Researchers are acting on a theory that dark matter, made up of weakly interacting massive particles, are tied up in domain walls, which they liken to […]
Think about yourself for a second: how did you react to the epidemic of the avian or the swine flu (H1N1) a couple of years ago? Did you go through special cares or measures in order to avoid the infection? Did you even really consider changing your everyday habits because of the fear and panic […]
Neurons are known to display irregular behavior in many areas of the brain. When recording the evolution of the membrane potential of a given neuron in the prefrontal cortex (for instance, during in vivo electrophysiology), we can observe its erratic dynamics, with spikes occurring in a random and rather unpredictable fashion. This one and other […]
Diabetes is a metabolic disorder characterized by an inefficiency to respond to the glucose requirements of the body, a process largely regulated by the popular hormone known as insulin. Insulin is produced and secreted in a specific type of cells in the pancreas called β-cells, which are able to detect and respond to high glucose […]
Quantum mechanics is one of the most fruitful and accepted physical theories. Nevertheless, its foundations and philosophical implications are still a vivid topic of debate. Because of that reason, during the conference “Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality,” held in July 2011 and organized by Anton Zeilinger, a set of experts were polled. A […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Anyone can find an exoplanet A team of volunteer amateur astronomers has discovered evidence of 42 alien planets. The volunteers were sorting through NASA data as part of the Planet Hunters crowdsourcing program. Professional astronomers have yet to confirm the proposed planets. Space.com Planethunters.org Drought predictions in East Africa Variations in sea-surface temperatures of the […]
Life is full of compromises, and so is evolution. We often wonder about the explanation for particular traits that we find in many different organisms; distinct characteristics present in some of those organisms but not in others. We may hypothesize their story, and it can make sense, but finding actual evidence to support it will […]
One traditional and difficult question in philosophy and metaphysics has been the knowledge we have of other minds. It is well known that for the founder of contemporary philosophy, the Frenchman René Descartes, non-human animals were probably what we would call today ‘robots’ or ‘zombies’: mere complex machines with no consciousness (in the sense of […]
It took a multi-million-dollar collaborationship between Discovery Channel and NHK to obtain the first images of a giant squid in its native environment. The broadcasters announced this month that they finally succeeded on filming a relatively small specimen of Architeuthis dux at a depth of 630m in the northern Pacific Ocean. But what makes this […]