By Zsuzsa Román When we hear the word “bacteria” we immediately think of diseases. Let’s be careful though, we may not be right! There certainly are bacteria that cause even serious diseases, but there are also various types of bacteria that “collaborate” with other living beings in a positive way. In an ecosystem, these “constructive”…

By Ornella Valenti One of the final frontiers of human knowledge, the most fascinating from my perspective, lies within us: it is our mind. Here, recent years have witnessed terrific progresses in the understanding of cognitive processing. We now know that thoughts, memories, decisions, all arise from the activity of tiny cells in our brain, the neurons,…

By Bernadette Bourjade When thinking about the ecological system, what often comes to mind are the disparity of certain species, natural selection, competition or even negative rivarly. However, there are also plants that are called facilitating plants, mother plants or nurturing plants. For example, in the Sahel desert, there exists a bush called Guiera Senegalensis, which,…

By Micaela Gliozzi During evolution, some bacteria that could obtain the energy needed for their survival using oxygen, were incorporated into other bacteria that were unable to use oxygen because it blocked their growth. This process of incorporation did not lead to the extinction of the two different species, but instead became a mutual advantage…

By Daniele Spadaro The most relevant results in natural sciences, especially in astrophysics, highlight a picture of the Universe where a relational aspect prevails: every thing is related to another thing. Here are some examples. The Sun together with a number of planets make the Solar System, which is part of a much larger ensemble…

By Susana Rebelo The atoms of different chemical elements are made up of a positive nucleus and electrons that have a negative charge and move around the nucleus. These electrons are distributed in different levels of energy (shells) and for most elements, their outer shell is not complete. Chemical bonding is based on the sharing…

By Antonino Puglisi In 1869 the Russian chemist Dmitrij Mendeleev proposed a way to organise the sixty or so known chemical elements at the time in a form that has arrived to us as the Periodic Table of the Elements. In it, elements are arranged according to the magnitude of their atomic weights and display a…

By Luca Fiorani The Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa suggested in 1935 that the force between elementary particles, the building blocks of all matter in our universe, can be explained as an exchange of a special kind of elementary particles, similar to two kids who come closer to pass each other a ball while playing. Later, the exchanged…

By Wieslaw M. Macek Modern studies in physics and cosmology provide new insight into an old general, emotional, philosophical question about the reality of the world, as formulated by G.W. von Leibniz in 1714: Why does something exist instead of nothing? Admittedly, the evolution of the universe according to the Big Bang model has now become…