Category archives: Science

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) […]

ESA’s Planck satellite finds the missing baryons

ESA’s Planck satellite finds the missing baryons

AstrophysicsCosmologyPhysics

By Francisco R. Villatoro

Where is the half of the ordinary matter in the universe not observed yet? Computer simulations of cosmological galaxy formation predict the existence of large intercluster filaments of hot and low-density gas, the so-called cosmic web. For the first time, ESA’s Planck satellite has observed one of such filaments in the merging cluster pair A399-A401 […]

Autophagy, epilepsy and neurodegeneration: what came first?

Autophagy, epilepsy and neurodegeneration: what came first?

Molecular biologyNeurobiology

By Carlos Romá-Mateo

The molecular base underlying neuronal processes is being constantly enriched by extended research focused on the investigation of mechanisms involving neurological pathologies. This broad field ranges from widely extended diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, to other less well-known, generally low-incidence neurodegenerative pathologies. However, one of the most challenging aims of modern neuroscience is the understanding […]