By Antonino Puglisi Science is increasingly able to show the relational character of Nature. Our Wonderverse blog has been a fascinating way to showcase how the universe we live in is more than just a collection of separate objects and everything shines as in a cloud of interconnected bursts of energy. I have recently been involved in…
… and don’t say it’s so useless!
By Alessio Valente It can still be seen along the country roads we travel, or by the paths that climb towards the hills; it is often the site of precious crops or more or less dense woods: the Earth’s soil. The insatiable need for urbanization and overbuilding have left the soil as a mere backdrop…
Green Chemistry: learn from nature
By Susana Rebelo Since the beginning of the scientific revolution in the 17th century there has been an amazing development of chemical knowledge and of chemical industry. Progressively more compounds and materials have been produced and have transformed our daily life. The chemical industry was also at the source of significant progress in medicine, agriculture,…
Nature in the human heart
By Micaela Gliozzi Thinking about the previous posts of this blog, a new concept of Nature emerges. In particular, it is amazing to discover that a loss is often compensated by a benefit for the whole community, as occurs in tissues, among cells, or in communities of bees or ants. Moreover, similar dynamics can be detected…
The galactic dance of star formation
By Gabriel Ferrero A galaxy is composed of a huge number of stars (usually around 100 000 million), gas (mainly hydrogen and helium) and dust, bound by its own gravitational force. There are many types of galaxies. According to their morphology, the main types are elliptical and spiral. In fact, we live within a spiral…
Sight, touch and pain
By Ján Morovič The sense of sight has been explored in previous posts from the perspective of how it is tuned to and built on relationships among features of the stimuli it responds to. They have looked at how vision derives from relationships among energies of electromagnetic radiation at different wavelengths, from relationships among different…
Atmosphere, biosphere, anthroposphere: challenging relationships
By Luca Fiorani The story of our planet is a story of relationships among its parts. Let’s focus on three of them, atmosphere, biosphere and anthroposphere. 2.5 billion years ago, oxygen was not present in the atmosphere and human life would not have been possible. Then, thanks to the small contribution of countless and (apparently)…
A loss for one, a greater benefit for all
By Ornella Valenti How wonderful and rich in diversity is Nature! We will never get tired of admiring it and being amazed by it. As showcased in our blog, Nature is permeated with phenomena that, using anthropological language, we could define as being of cooperation, mutualism, solidarity, and even selfless altruism. That’s right! Even altruism…
Imagination and Nature
By Miguel Oliveira Panão Although we still live in the Age of Information, we might be entering a new age: the Age of Imagination. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity……
Unity in diversity
By Catherine Belzung In the life sciences, systems can be described according various epistemological levels, from macroscopic to nanoscopic scales: the scale of the ecosystem, the one of an individual, that of organs, of tissues, of cells, of molecules, and so on. However, whatever the level, one can observe that these systems are generally composed…
Wonderverse 