A s a recent mom, I can attest to the fact that at least some humans don’t quite get enough sleep, but the thing is, independently of why my baby thinks sleep is for cowards, in a new article researchers Charles Nunn and David Charles, have shown by comparing sleep patterns of 30 species of […]
During the Cold War the competition between both sides, Russia and the United States of America, caused a quick development of military and spacial technology: while the Soviet Union was the first country responsible for an orbital launch (Sputnik 1), the first nation to ever send a man to space and pioneered spacewalks, the U […]
Condensed matter • Physics • Quantum physics • Theoretical physics
You may have read somewhere that atoms are actually made up mostly of empty space. The usual description goes more or less as follows. At the centre of each atom there is a very tiny nucleus, which carries all of the positive charge and nearly all of the mass of the atom. Surrounding the nucleus […]
Among the group 13 elements, boron alone forms halides of the type X2B-BX2 (X=F, Cl, Br, I), known as tetrahalodiboranes. Over the past five years, the filing of patents involving tetrahalodiboranes has outpaced their appearance in journal articles at a rate of two to one, mostly due to the current interest in B2F4 for the […]
The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia is one of those must go places for any brain enthusiast. The collection beautifully represents the history of modern medicine, including a repository of skulls used in phrenological studies, broken cranial bones à la Phineas Gage, diseased coronal cuts, American civil war surgical memorabilia, and a great little gem: a […]
In the previous post, Family unification 1, we reviewed the historical development of Grand Unified Theories (GUT) of force and matter, i.e. Comprehensive Unification. We saw how the SO(18) spinor, 256, is able to accomodate the Standard Model (SM) family structure, however it contains too many families and, also, phenomenologically dangerous mirror families. During the […]
How long does it take a photon to split a molecule? It is apparent that the answer must be well bellow a second, but, how much bellow? Attoscience focuses on these kind of phenomena that occur at the attosecond time-scale using pulses of electrons or photons. The prefix ‘atto-‘, symbol a, means 10-18, hence an […]
It is commonly said that Astronomy is an observational science. We cannot create and study stars or galaxies in our laboratories and, thus all the information we have from the Universe comes from observations. However, there is another approach: simulations. Astronomers use complex algorithms and computational techniques, in combination with the laws of physics, to […]
Like the river of Heraclitus, our bones are constantly changing. Although it may look tough and immutable , the bone is a very dynamic tissue that is constantly formed and destroyed, having different appearances during each of the stages of life. Bone destruction or reabsorption is mediated by a particular cellular type known as the […]
During the last decades, the electronics industry has been very successful in pushing forward the advancement of electronic building blocks, but the limit of silicon-based electronic devices especially in terms of miniaturization are almost reached. There are many ideas how to overcome this problem, for example, by adding functionality based on approaches originating from molecular […]