Category archives: Science

Pele is the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. Pele’s hairs are thin strands of molten basaltic glass drawn out from lava, thrown into the air from lava fountains, lava cascades or vigorous lava flows, and spun out by the wind. Each hair-like strand has a diameter less than 0.5 millimeters and is as long as 2 […]

Could cellulose feed the world? Researchers have discovered a way to turn cellulose into starch, a technique that could be used to create more food to feed the hungry. Science Now Chun You eta al (2013) Enzymatic transformation of nonfood biomass to starch PNAS DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1302420110 Fire ants prefer shortest route in terms of time […]

In areas with dense cover or little snow, the wolf is one of the most difficult animals to census. In the Iberian Peninsula and other southern regions of wolves’ global range, snow is rare in winter, so wolves must be surveyed without snow. Spanish researchers Blanco and Cortés described in a recent paper the diverse […]

One of the things we learn first, when we get in touch with chemistry, is how important the acidity or alkalinity of a given solution is. This is also and quite often our first affair with the chemical equilibrium, because the pH is nothing more than a viewpoint of the water ionization. We were taught […]

Locations with an extreme climate are more sensitive to changes in the global conditions. We could say that such places live in the razor’s edge, where a subtle change makes the difference between life and death. A good laboratory for testing those ideas is Greenland. Once settled by Norsemen and Icelanders, at the end of […]

An abrupt and widespread climate shift in the Sahara 5,000 years ago The Sahara Desert’s shift from lush grasslands to barren sands happened quickly and simultaneously across the entire region. Scientists say the brief African Humid Period began and ended suddenly, about 5,000 years ago. MIT news D. McGee, P.B. deMenocal, G. Winckler, J.-B. Stuut […]

For several decades now, physicists, mathematicians, neurobiologists and other specialists have been joining efforts to build realistic mathematical models of neurons. A typical model consists on one or several differential equations that are able to predict the evolution of the membrane potential of a neuron for a given input. When introduced in a computer, these […]

Strange as it may sound to many people, the fact is that some of the most interesting work on epistemology that is being currently done in Spain is carried out at the headquarters of the Spanish gendarmerie (the well known force called Guardia Civil), in particular, at the Area of Statistics within the corps’ Service […]

Scientists use 3D printer to create networks of artificial cells Researchers have developed networks of water droplets that can act like biological tissue cells. The researchers created the networks using a three-dimensional printer. The networks can support up to 35,000 droplets and have the potential to be a scaffold for growing synthetic tissues or a […]

Poles are truly interesting places for planetary scientists. On Earth, the southern pole and its low surface temperatures sustain a polar vortex, most famous for the related hole in the ozone layer. On Saturn, for example, both poles have astonishing structures, including a hexagonal wave in the northern hemisphere. Not surprisingly, Venus also has something […]