C ardiovascular diseases currently form the most important class of non-contagious diseases and a leading cause of mortality in industrialized nations . Specifically, coronary heart disease is the first cause of death among the cardiovascular diseases . The myocardial infarction (MI), commonly known as a “heart attack”, occurs when blood flow decreases or stops in […]
In most animal species, males and females differ. This is true for people and other mammals, as well as many species of birds, fish and reptiles. But what about dinosaurs? In 2015, I proposed that variation found in the iconic back plates of stegosaur dinosaurs was due to sex differences. I was surprised by how […]
How an organism can sense and cope with warming temperatures is key for survival, particularly under current global warming trends. The importance of this subject was recognized by 2021’s Nobel prize in Physiology & Medicine awarded to work on TRP channels, key mammalian peripheral heat sensors. Endotherms -such as mammals and birds – maintain their […]
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 […]
Author: Martha R. Villabona works at Subdirección General de Cooperación Territorial e Innovación Educativa of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Vocational Training, where she coordinates the area of multiple literacies. Vaccination is one of the topics vulnerable to online disinformation. Although opposition to vaccines has existed since they became widespread in the 19th century […]
Once upon the time, or to be precise between 200 and 150 000 years ago, the incipient humanity was struggling with climatic conditions in its land of origin, Africa. A long glacial era, M2 , had made it difficult to find food. And, although to what extent the population was reduced to a few hundred […]
“The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning.” So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe. The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch […]
mTOR has nothing to do with Norse mythology, it stands for “mammalian target of rapamycin” or “target of rapamycin in mammalian cells”. mTOR is involved in important cellular processes, including growth, proliferation, motility, survival, protein synthesis, transcription and autophagy. The history of rapamycin is so suggestive that I cannot avoid mentioning it: in the 1960s […]
For the first few million years of human evolution, technologies changed slowly. Some three million years ago, our ancestors were making chipped stone flakes and crude choppers. Two million years ago, hand-axes. A million years ago, primitive humans sometimes used fire, but with difficulty. Then, 500,000 years ago, technological change accelerated, as spearpoints, firemaking, axes […]
Since humans are not very good at predicting the future, even if the help of a magic ball, scientists have developed a new system based on artificial intelligence to help us predict the future risk of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease by analysing certain parameters in brain scans. The research, recently published in the journal Diagnostics […]