By Lucian Pasieka Every day we use objects or consumer goods made of a variety of different materials. When these objects are used, a relative movement between at least two components is usually required, e.g., when closing a classical espresso machine with a rotary movement or when opening and closing a window. All these movements…

By Zsuzsa Román We are connected with our environment in a very complex way, not only with some part of ourselves, but in our entirety. The life of big cities presents us with an example: everyday noise arrives to us inevitably. The WHO document entitled “Environmental Noise Guidlines for the European Region”1 indicates the importance…

By Bernadette Bourjade Human beings and animals are in their essence beings made for communication. They have senses that help them in this: a mouth, ears, smell, touch. But plants often appear to us as insensitive, impassive. But is this really so? They, like us, are part of the “living”. We can ask ourselves: are plants…

By Susana Rebelo Graphene became a very popular material following the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. “In proportion to its thickness, graphene is about 100 times stronger than the strongest steel. Yet its density is dramatically lower than any steel”. Moreover, it conducts heat and electricity very efficiently, it has significant magnetic behavior and…

By Antonino Puglisi When I was a kid, playing with LEGO was one of my favorite games. I was deeply fascinated by the seemingly endless possibilities for creation, starting from a relatively small set of simple building blocks. Growing up I found a similar sense of fascination and creativity studying chemistry and later on as a…

By Daniele Spadaro It is evident that the human body, in addition to containing a few litres of hydrogen produced during the initial phases of the Universe, according to the well known Big Bang theory, is composed largely of chemical elements that did not exist at the beginning of the Universe and that have been…

By Micaela Gliozzi The long journey of bees is extremely fascinating since it highlights how reciprocity translates into a way of being in nature. In fact, even when an action is directed to individuals of the same species, it can cause a series of events that connect different species among each other. But how is…

By Wieslaw M. Macek The question of how to interpret quantum mechanics is not yet understood clearly in terms of reality.  Contrary to the founders of quantum mechanics, especially Niels Bohr (1885–1962), Albert Einstein (1879–1955), with Boris Podolski and Natan Rosen, defended a simplified version of realism in nature, postulating the concept of hidden parameters. They…

By Ornella Valenti It was the early 90s and prof. Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues (Parma, Italy) were studying how tiny cells in our brain, the neurons, orchestrate the activity of the muscles. Neurons send electrical signals to other cells within the brain or to the muscles at the periphery. These signals can be thought…