Category archives: Technology

In nature, light harvesting organisms make extensive use of energy and electron transfer between adjacent molecules. Thus, in the photosynthetic cell of an algae, bacterium, or plant, there are light-sensitive molecules called chromophores, which contain a π-conjugated system (a system with alternate single and double bonds), arranged in an antenna-shaped structure named a photocomplex. When […]

Nerve cells that block itches in mice Scientists have found nerve cells in mice that can block itches caused by a light touch, which could one day lead to treatments for people suffering from chronic itch problems. Researchers genetically engineered mice without those spinal cord nerve cells, producing rodents that had the urge to scratch […]

With “many-body problem” we usually make reference to one that is very difficult to obtain exact solutions for, because the system involves interactions between more than two bodies. This kind of problem appears both in classical and quantum systems. In order to understand the physics of many-body systems, it is necessary to make use of […]

Evidence of plague found in Bronze Age skeletons DNA testing of Bronze Age skeletons has found evidence of a plague outbreak that occurred thousands of years before the Black Death that devastated Europe in the 1300s. Researchers found enough Yersinia pestis DNA in skeletons that tested positive for the bacteria to produce complete genome sequences […]

Imagine you want to study the biology of an animal that no one has been able to capture. First, you devise a way of trapping it, then a method of calming it down so that you can manipulate it. This is exactly what David Wineland did, but his long-sought prey was not an animal, but […]

Still trying to make sense of New Horizons’ Pluto data Pluto’s frozen mountain ranges Norgay Montes and Hillary Montes are among many of the dwarf planet’s features described in the first published study of data gathered so far from the close flyby of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in July. The mission scientists acknowledge they still […]

The field of electronic transport through nanometer-scale systems, such as molecular junctions or atomic wires, has been an extremely active area during the last decades. The effect that the development of a post-silicon era might have on our daily lives, together with the existence of a number of extremely interesting scientific and technological open questions […]

We devoted the first part of this article to introducing the problem of motion planning for autonomous vehicles at a qualitative level and to briefly describing two of the most commonly-used algorithms, RRT and RRT* . Next, we will continue getting into deeper mathematical details about the topological structure of the state spaces associated to […]

Portion of rat brain reconstructed in computer A group of 82 neuroscientists have built a portion of a rat’s brain in a computer. The reconstruction is the work of the controversial Blue Brain Project, which hopes to complete a rat brain and move on to a human brain one day. The computerized brain section, culled […]

The German mineralogist Gustav Rose (1798 – 1873) made important contributions in the fields of petrology and crystallography. He was the first to use a reflective goniometer in Germany and developed a particular interest in the relationship between the crystalline form and the physical properties of minerals. As a consequence, he contributed significantly to the […]