People , like cats, are curiosity-driven creatures that manifest unique inclinations towards certain stimuli. Curiosity´s unavoidability has been immortalized in the proverb of the cat. Could we be so extremely pulled by this impulse to the level of endangering ourselves for the mere sake of its satisfaction? The flip side of the coin is an […]
We all have heard stories about young blood-consuming vampires remaining eternally youthful. Although lots of literary fictions have become true with scientific progress, no one would ever believe that young blood could have rejuvenative effects on the elderly. Surprisingly, this is recently becoming true with the increasing evidence in biomedical research showing that old mice […]
You have probably heard this sentence: “the brain is the most complex organ in the universe”. Let´s dive inside such assertion to get a deeper feeling. The human brain contains around 86.000 million of neurons distributed across a bunch of brain areas ( roughly 190 ). That´s one thing, not everything. Even more complex is […]
Endemic species are part of the natural heritage of a region, and their preservation for future generations should receive the same kind of priority and public understanding as historical sites, because they share a common trait: if they disappear, they will be lost forever. Of course, conservation becomes especially thorny if we are not sure […]
Nowadays there are still people that believe in destiny. However the scientific community more and more is bringing light to that subject showing that although the genetic material could program ourselves to suffer some pathologies, the day-to-day experiences are the ones that lead us towards a healthy or pathological aging. And how is that? Our […]
Think on a cell, it is alive and, among other things, it lives to reproduce itself. The paradigm of cell division is the mitosis, a wonderful dance orchestrated to equitably distribute the possessions of the mother cell: molecular structures, machinery and, especially, the genetic material. Prior to distribute, a good mother always amasses a fortune […]
For any animal, the real world is an ever-changing environment. Continuously, even then they are just remaining in a peaceful, awake state, animals receive multiple sensory signals encoding different features of their surroundings, or even carrying information about their own internal state (orientation, body movement, or internal temperature, for example). Some of these signals might […]
The functioning of the human brain goes far beyond a bunch of cells packed together; each of them is able to produce, receive, and transform electrical signals into a concrete response that affects the neighboring cells, counted by hundreds. This image is already complex, but if we say that the electric signals are constituted by […]
The term reinforcement learning is well known among researchers in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence. It refers to a type of algorithms which are designed to solve a task by maximizing some kind of reward. In a simplified way, we could say that a typical reinforcement learning algorithm works as follows: our […]
When contemplating a high-technology device, one can often realize how much the design and the different pieces have been optimized for the goal they try to achieve. It does not have to be a modern-day technological device; think for example in a classic, mechanical clock: all its parts are assembled in a clean and neat […]