Animal cafés are places where customers can enjoy food and drinks while interacting with animals such as cats, rabbits, or dogs. These cafés have become popular in many Asian cities, especially where apartments are small and the cost of living is high, making it difficult for young adults to own pets. In Europe, animal cafés […]
DNA sequencing is getting cheaper than ever. This, coupled with advances in speed and portability, are allowing us to apply deep sequencing beyond the lab to environmental substrates, and analyse this eDNA to gain information and monitor biodiversity at a time where it is being lost at an unprecedented rate. This environmental DNA can be […]
Probably, the most common assumption about scientific knowledge amongst the general public, and certainly amongst a substantial percentage of the philosophers of science, is that science attempts to find out the truth about the world (just like many other institutions or professions, like the courts, the police or whoever that needs to look for information […]
Authors: Sven Vanneste, Professor of Clinical Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin and Elva Arulchelvan, Lecturer in Psychology and PhD Researcher in Psychology and Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin Forgetting is part of our daily lives. You may walk into a room only to forget why you went in there – or perhaps someone says hi on the […]
reading Author: Juan F. Trillo, PhD in Linguistics and Philosophy (U. Autónoma de Madrid), PhD in Literary Studies (U. Complutense de Madrid). Science often ends up confirming what we have always known —or at least suspected— through research whose results are in line with what intuition suggests. This is the case of reading in young […]
Polaritons attract wide attention due to their ability to confine and guide light at the nanometre scale. These capacities are key for the development of ultrasmall resonators and waveguides that can be used for sensing, heat transfer and optical circuitry applications. But, what are polaritons in the first place? If, for the sake of the […]
Jupiter feasted on baby planets to fuel growth Researchers constructed a model based on gravitational data from NASA’s Juno space probe and other sources to examine the core of Jupiter, finding its center is filled with planetesimals, baby planets that the massive giant used to fuel its own growth. Full story: Live Science Lack of […]
Milky Way’s closest quasar brimming with radio emissions Using a newly developed technique known as “self-calibration,” a team of Japanese astronomers has captured revolutionary photos of the closest quasar to the Milky Way, revealing a soft band of radio emission in the quasar’s galaxy. “By applying the same technique to other quasars, we expect to […]
Humanity is the unlikely result of 4 billion years of evolution. From self-replicating molecules in Archean seas, to eyeless fish in the Cambrian deep, to mammals scurrying from dinosaurs in the dark, and then, finally, improbably, ourselves – evolution shaped us. Organisms reproduced imperfectly. Mistakes made when copying genes sometimes made them better fit to […]
The American evolutionary psychologist David Buss contends in his 2005 book The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill that the evolutionary process humans acquired psychological adaptations to facilitate homicide. Natural selection, it is hypothesized, winnowed and perfected psychological mechanisms that solved certain problems by facilitating homicidal behavior. Of course, to solve […]