It is not an exaggeration to say that the question of where and when the Black Death, the deadliest pandemic ever, originated is one of the biggest mysteries in human history. After all, the Black Death was the first wave of the second plague pandemic of the 14th to early 19th centuries. It killed some […]
A single MRI scan of the brain using standard equipment could be enough to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, according to new results. The research uses machine learning technology to look at structural features within the brain, including in regions not previously associated with Alzheimer’s. The advantage of the technique is its simplicity and the fact that […]
I think I am not assuming much if I say that we are all familiar with the concept of satellite. But just in case, I should say that a satellite, within an astronomical context, is an entity in orbit around a larger body. For example, the Earth’s companion in our journey through the Milky Way […]
Humans are unrivalled in the area of cognition. After all, no other species has sent probes to other planets, produced lifesaving vaccines or created poetry. How information is processed in the human brain to make this possible is a question that has drawn endless fascination, yet no definitive answers. Our understanding of brain function has […]
How fast is evolution? In adaptive evolution, natural selection causes genetic changes in traits that favour the survival and reproduction of individual organisms. Although Charles Darwin thought the process occurred over geological timescales, we have seen examples of dramatic adaptive evolution over only a handful of generations. The peppered moth changed colour in response to […]
Somewhere between 250 million and 3 billion years ago, Venus’s temperate climate gave way to a runaway greenhouse state. New research reveals how such a scenario could well occur on Earth and possibly turn Earth into a Venus. Venus, Earth’s nearest neighbour and once-potential twin, is a hot mess. Surface temperatures average about 475 degrees […]
Many parents feel guilty when their children play video games for hours on end. Some even worry it could make their children less clever. And, indeed, that’s a topic scientists have clashed over for years. In our new study, we investigated how video games affect the minds of children, interviewing and testing more than 5,000 […]
Concluding that the neutrino is a Majorana particle would be really a turning point in our understanding of the universe. It would mean the non-conservation of a magnitude called the leptonic number, one of the key characteristics in a fermion, meaning that there would be an explanation to the matter-anti matter asymmetry: the creation of […]
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a debilitating autoimmune condition whereby neurons lose their myelin sheath leading to impaired neural transmission, neural degeneration and motor symptoms. Multiple factors have been considered to influence its development, like vitamin D, but now, a couple of studies have shown that the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is linked to multiple sclerosis. You […]
Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are layered compounds which can be thinned down to the single-layer limit. While mechanical exfoliation generates atomically thin TMD flakes possessing an area of a few square microns, chemical and physical methods provide high-quality monolayers on large-area substrates, which are suitable for actual technological applications. TMDs are a class of van […]