By Antonino Puglisi Learning a new language is no easy task, but it can be a lot of fun! I find it particularly fascinating to see how our brain gradually gets to grips with new rules, pronunciation and idiosyncrasy until the magic happens and one just ‘gets it’. With its special set of signs, arrows and…
Hydrogen – energy carrier of the future?
By Lucian Pasieka So-called renewable energy (electricity from wind, water, sun) enables us to follow a path that is more closely aligned with natural circulation processes. During the generation of electricity from solar energy, i.e. photovoltaics, hydropower and wind, there is the additional desire and need to store surplus energy. So, how can we store…
Viruses appear to be enemies, but are they really?
By Zsuzsa Román “Coronavirus” is perhaps the most used word in the media and on social networks today, where some speak of the war against this virus. The question then arises: but is every virus harmful, does every virus cause diseases or are there also good viruses? Viruses are “obligatory parasites” in the sense that…
The marvellous balance of the Sun
by Gabriel Ferrero During the current, long stage of its evolution, the Sun shines because, very deep in its core, millions of tons of protons (nuclei of hydrogen atoms) fuse every second to form nuclei of helium. For each four protons fused, one new helium nucleus is formed. However, the mass of a helium nucleus…
Positive disasters
By Jozef Klembara Over the course of the last 550 million years or so, the evolution of the Earth has, with all its organismal worlds, been at certain intervals interrupted by drastic events called mass extinctions. The event that occurred between the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic eras of the Earth’s history (about 245 million years ago) is…
Diverse but united: A story of brain cells
By Ornella Valenti The cerebral cortex of mammals is the most recent, developed and specialized of the brain regions. Thousands of brain cells, the neurons, support its operation. Cortical neurons can be essentially grouped into two big classes, namely pyramidal cells and GABAergic interneurons. However, while only three types of pyramidal neurons have been characterized, interneurons…
Living in a star’s atmosphere
By Daniele Spadaro Recently, two spacecraft started their journey to the Sun, to approach the star at the centre of the Solar System closer than ever before. The first is the Parker Solar Probe, launched by NASA on August 12th, 2018, and the second is the Solar Orbiter, launched by ESA in cooperation with NASA on…
Memory color: seeing the present through the past
By Ján Morovič At first, it might seem like viewing the world around us is a unidirectional process, albeit one that is complex and fundamentally derived from how various aspects of the world relate to each other (as has been explored here before). It might seem like a process that starts with electromagnetic radiation of…
Remember ants?
By Peter Morovic Memory is commonly understood to be the ability to recall something, to repeat a previously executed task, to recognise a previously experienced situation and then act accordingly. This makes memory also key to learning and evolving one’s behaviour. While commonly memory is thought of in the context of a single entity, one…
The colors of life
By Susana Rebelo What do the green leaves of plants and red blood have in common? First, the colors of both are given by pigments with the same base structure. These molecules called porphyrins or chlorins are large cyclic and planar molecules with a metal ion at the center. Some of the electrons that form…
Wonderverse 