That female fertility is not stable during a woman’s lifetime is nothing new, but now a new study in the journal Science has found an explanation to its inverted U shape: chromosome errors! This inverted U shape for female fertility means that adolescent women and women over their mid-30s are not as fertile as those […]
A star cluster is a group of stars that are sufficiently close to each other for them to be physically associated. Stars belonging to the cluster are formed together from the same cloud of interstellar gas and have approximately the same age and initial chemical composition. Because of this, and sin the stars in a […]
Ladybugs are beautiful beetles and many present what is called an aposematic coloration, bright and striking colors that warn: do not eat me, I am dangerous. When they are disturbed, they defend themselves with legs and jaws, expel a poison and their brightly colored elytra with black dots are a warning to anyone who tries […]
There is a variety of predictions from the general theory of relativity. And usually they are treated in the popular imagination somehow independently. This would be the case of gravitational waves and gravitational lenses, but in reality nothing prevent them to combine, even at a ‘micro’ level. A gravitational lens is any object that deflects […]
As bea u tiful as it is, the natural world has always been a tough place to live in. Since their dawn, nearly 4 billion years ago, living organisms have faced a myriad of threats to their existence which have seen the majority of those who ever existed to perish. Only those organisms that managed […]
A crystal lattice is formed by a repeated arrangement of atoms, ions, or molecules. Due to the enormous amount of atoms involved it is extremely unlikely that all these will be arranged in perfect order. Some atoms will not be exactly in the right place with the result that the lattice will contain defects. The […]
After the big scandal of the CRISPR babies at the end of 2018, some might have thought that would be the end of CRISPR in the clinic, but luckily that has not been the case and despite the public outrage of last year, today we can report on its successful use as gene therapy against […]
You have probably heard before about the origin of the word salary. Indeed, it comes from the allowance that Roman soldiers received to purchase salt. The trace left on the language tells about the importance it had. There is no doubt about the key role salt had for the preservation of food. Analogously, words derived […]
Originally developed in the context of condensed-matter physics and based on renormalization group ideas, tensor networks have been revived thanks to quantum information theory and the progress in understanding the role of entanglement in quantum many-body systems . Ikerbasque Research Professor Román Orús, one of the world foremost authorities in the field, has just published […]
Forming large groups (flocks, banks, swarms, herds, schools, …) is characteristic of many species. The generally accepted idea is that it is an adaptive process, in which the individual improves its chances of survival by being part of a numerous group. A shark does not know which fish to attack in a sardine bank and […]