A cement is any of various substances used for bonding or setting to a hard material. A popular one, Portland cement, is a mixture of calcium silicates and aluminates made by heating limestone (CaCO3) with clay (that contains aluminosilicates) in a kiln. The product is then ground to a fine powder. When Portland cement is […]
As more and more people around the world are getting vaccinated, one can almost hear the collective sigh of relief. But the next pandemic threat is likely already making its way through the population right now. My research as an infectious disease epidemiologist has found that there is a simple strategy to mitigate emerging outbreaks: […]
Quantum objects are not abstract entities. On the contrary, they are quite real, As such, individual quantum objects can be detected, manipulated and their characteristics analysed using the appropriate techniques. Take the case of a single molecule adsorbed on a substrate. Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) would reveal electron densities of molecular orbitals, could be used […]
Astronomy • Biology • Microbiology • Physics
Authors: Predrag Slijepcevic, Senior Lecturer in Biology, Brunel University London and Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe, Honorary Professor, University of Buckingham Are we alone in the universe? The famous Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programme has been trying to answer this question since 1959. American astronomer Carl Sagan, and many others, believed that other human-like civilisations must […]
Mitochondria are the energy-making machines in the cell. Also, since evolutionarily they are thought to evolve from symbiotic bacteria, they have their own little genomes, which are mainly evolved through the maternal side, and also maybe because of their important function, mutations in genes affecting them are very damaging, and even lethal. However, mitochondrial DNA […]
Teeth play a central role in the ecology of most vertebrates – for catching prey, processing food and even attracting a mate. It’s no surprise that scientists such as ourselves have long been interested in how teeth first evolved. For many years we regarded shark teeth, with their conveyor belt system of tooth replacement, as […]
By now, we’re all experts in the common symptoms of the oh so omnipresent COVID-19 – say, for example, dry coughing, fever, and loss of smell ( Sauer, 2021 ). While we’re all hyper-vigilant about th ese symptoms, a new factor behind the spread of this virus may be on the rise: language. That’s right: […]
People might once have considered oxygen a human right. But the pandemic has revealed that access to oxygen – in a pure form, for medical use – is a luxury in most low and middle-income countries. Getting access to pure oxygen for medical treatments is a complicated, expensive and often very dangerous business. The current […]
Original: Eduardo Angulo (2017) Preparados para matar: algunas ideas para el debate. Translated and adapted by Julio Nicanor Ozores, M.D. “ …the proper application of Darwinian thinking to human issues- of mind, language, knowledge, and ethics, for instance- illuminates them in ways that have always eluded the traditional approaches, recasting ancient problems and pointing to […]
Euclid is an ESA mission to map the geometry of the Universe and better understand the mysterious dark matter and dark energy, which make up most of the energy budget of the cosmos. The mission will investigate the distance-redshift relationship and the evolution of cosmic structures by measuring shapes and redshifts of galaxies and clusters […]