An atomic state in which two spin angular momenta of electrons cancel each other, resulting in zero net spin, is called a singlet. If the angular momenta combine to give a total non-zero spin, then that state is called a triplet. A triplet state usually has lower, sometimes substantially lower, energy than a singlet. Importantly […]
As you can imagine, a human intelligence test doesn’t really cut it for birds. It isn’t that easy to assess how an animal perceives information from the environment, processes it and decides to act. But researchers have developed a range of clever experiments to find out more about their cognitive abilities. Do they recognise each […]
Author: Marta Irigoyen is a postdoctoral researcher at CIC bioGUNE Since COVID-19 disease arrived in our lives at the beginning of last year, we are giving increased importance to our immune system status. We are worried about if it is working properly and can attack correctly the SARS-CoV-2. For this reason, lot of people are […]
Poland is planning to build a wall along its border with Belarus, primarily to block migrants fleeing the Middle East and Asia. But the wall would also divide the vast and ancient Białowieża Forest, a UNESCO World Heritage site which harbours more than 12,000 animal species and includes the largest remnants of primeval forest that […]
Entanglement is the purest and most important quantum property. Unlike classical systems, quantum objects can be connected independently of their distance and if we perform a measurement in one part the other one is affected instantaneously. Intuitively, this can be considered a violation of relativity because this theory states that no information can travel faster […]
When the most massive stars die, they collapse to form some of the densest objects known in the Universe: black holes. They are the “darkest” objects in the cosmos, as not even light can escape their incredibly strong gravity. Because of this, it’s impossible to directly image black holes, making them mysterious and quite perplexing […]
We live in a time when scientific applications are growing by leaps and bounds. This exponential growth has been possible, among other tools, thanks to the application of nanotechnology. There is something that nanotechnology has taught us: In science, size matters. When studying matter at nanometric levels, we find that the properties are completely different […]
Electrons do not move around nuclei in defined curved orbits. Our current understanding of how electrons are to be found in atoms and molecules is based on clouds of probability called orbitals as it is not possible to give a definite path for an electron. Thus, an orbital is a region in which an electron […]
Catalysis-based approaches for the activation of anticancer rely on the use of metal catalysts capable of deprotecting inactive precursors of organic drugs or transforming key biomolecules available in the cellular environment. Nevertheless, the efficiency of most of the schemes described so far is rather low, limiting the benefits of catalytic amplification as a strategy for […]
The brain plays an essential role in how people navigate the world by generating both thought and behavior. Despite being one of the most vital organs of life, it takes up only 2% of human body volume. How can something so small perform such complex tasks? Luckily, modern tools like brain mapping have allowed neuroscientists […]