Category archives: Technology

Achieving room temperature superconductivity is among the most pursued but elusive goals of scientists. A paper uploaded to the arXiv in December 2014 claims to have observed superconductivity as high as 190 K in hydrogen sulfide at high pressure, breaking all the records thus far. If this observation is confirmed, cuprates will be knocked from […]

Diagram shows newly-found giant magma reservoir underneath Yellowstone A huge reservoir of mostly solid hot rock has been found underneath a magma chamber beneath Yellowstone National Park, part of the vast volcanic plumbing of the area diagrammed in a study published in Science. This system has been there for about 17 million years, and scientists […]

There are some concepts in physics difficult to grasp. Mainly because we have no direct evidence of them and, in orther to get some understanding, we rely on analogies that are not strictly correct. One of these difficult concepts is the spin of the electron. The analogy for the spin usually goes this way: Imagine […]

Blindness is a world wide problem. As of 2012 there were 285 million visually impaired people in the world, of which 246 million had low vision and 39 million were blind. Most people with poor vision are in the developing world and are over the age of 50 years. One basic aspect for quality of […]

Capitanian event a mass extinction A group of paleontologists would like to add a sixth mass extinction event that occurred at the end of the Capitanian age to the five generally accepted in science. Researchers have linked mass extinctions in China during that time period 260 million years ago with a major die-off in what […]

We all have listened about gene therapy, and for those who are old enough not in a good way, at all. Gene therapy became the most promising clinical therapy in the 1990s and this technology was meant to transform medicine. In essence, the concept of gene therapy is pretty simple: the introduction of an exogenous […]

Magnetic bands around sun may help predict solar flares Tracking the movements of traveling magnetic bands in the sun’s atmosphere may help predict solar flares, which can cause damaging power problems on Earth and wreak havoc on satellites, according to a study published in Nature Communications. Solar flares are at their worst when formed by […]

In lay people’s minds, railway lines are composed by rails and wooden sleepers on a bed of stones. These medium-sized stones are called ballast, and it is true that they are the most common material to lay the track on; at least when you are not building it in a tunnel or a bridge, where […]

A quantum dot is a nanometric crystalline structure of semiconductor materials. In a quatum dot electrons are confined in a region of space, thus creating a well defined structure of energy levels that depends very much on the size and shape of the quantum dot. This structure resembles that of atoms, that is why sometimes […]

One of the main goals for anyone in the Academia, for any research group, is to publish the results of their research . Therefore, enormous amounts of time and effort are devoted to producing manuscripts which will be evaluated for publication in scientific journals or international conferences. Being this goal so central to the career […]