For a long time it has been posed that induced pluripotent stem cells or iPSC have a great potential in the treatment of certain health issues, what’s more, attending to the results of a recently published study in the journal PNAS , iPSC can be helpful to revert brain stroke damage in mice. Sara Palma-Tortosa […]
The concept of vector should be familiar: a quantity for which both magnitude and direction must be stated. This compares with a scalar quantity, where direction is not applicable, like temperature in a precise point. But, what if the magnitude varies with the direction? A vector would be a particular case, with only one direction […]
Author: María Girbés Mínguez is a doctoral student at Center for Molecular Neurobiology Hamburg (ZMNH) / UKE (University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf) A recent study published in the journal Cell Systems uncovered that bacterial communities (biofilms) can store complex patterns of information through membrane potentials at the cellular level, in a similar way to neurons. But […]
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 was awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart and Ben Feringa “for the design and synthesis of molecular machines”. Molecular machines are made by one or a few molecules linked together, comprising several hundred atoms. If a molecule can use an energy input to perform a mechanical movement (output) it […]
Humans are not the only animals with a taste for alcohol. It has been described in different animals in the wild, especially mammals, that they do like to eat overripe fermented fruit, and with it experience similar effects to the ones almost all of us are familiar with. It turns out that some mammals cannot […]
The Hodgkin-Huxley model for the generation of the nerve action potential is one of the most successful mathematical models of a complex biological process that has ever been formulated. Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley described the model in 1952 to explain the ionic mechanisms underlying the initiation and propagation of action potentials in the squid […]
When we consider the variety of possible wonder applications of plasmonic nanoparticles we usually forget a key aspect: how these laboratory results can be transformed into something really usable in everyday life. For that to occur some not-that-simple problems must be resolved first. For example, plasmonic nanoparticles exhibit excellent light-harvesting properties in the visible spectral […]
Everything is connected. Are you familiar with the butterfly effect? According to this idea small changes could have dramatic consequences. Well, I have been thinking about this lately as one question was forming in my mind: Could it be that the ultimate answer to why I am writing this blog post is intimately related to […]
In a new publication led by Dr. Albert Giralt, the researchers discovered the interaction between a transcription factor identified as “Helios” and a protein called “WDFY1” that could help elucidate the link between immunity and schizophrenia . Schizophrenia is an incurable mental illness characterized by relapsing episodes of psychosis. This disorder affects approximately 1% of […]
One of the most mysterious features of quantum mechanics is that if two particles (or photons) interact at some point in time then the properties of these particles will remain connected at future times. A consequence of this is that determining the quantum state of one of the particles simultaneously determines the quantum state of […]
