Chair of Scientific Culture of the University of the Basque Country

Science

Science

[:es]Why many scientists say it’s unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a “lab leak”[:]

[:es]During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the “lab leak” theory gained little traction. Sure, U.S. President Donald Trump suggested SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China—and called it “the China virus”—but he never presented evidence, and few in the scientific community took him seriously. In fact, early in the pandemic, a group…
Science

[:es]Ancient genomes offer rare glimpse of Neanderthal family groups[:]

[:es]More than 49,000 years ago, a family of Neanderthals set up camp in a cave high in Siberia’s Altai Mountains, overlooking a river valley where bison, red deer, and wild horses roamed. In the cave’s main gallery, a teenage girl lost a tooth, perhaps while gnawing on bison that her father or his kin had…
Science

[:es]COVID-19 affects men and women differently. So why don’t clinical trials report gender data?[:]

[:es]COVID-19 doesn’t strike the sexes equally. Globally, for every 10 COVID-19 intensive care unit admissions among women, there are 18 for men; for every 10 women who die of COVID-19, 15 men die. In the United States, a gender gap is emerging in vaccination rates, with women ahead of men by 6 percentage points, according…
Science

[:es]European plan for gigantic new gravitational wave detector passes milestone[:]

[:es]It’s far from a done deal, but plans by European physicists to build a huge new gravitational wave observatory with a radical design received a boost this week. The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), which advises European governments on research priorities, added the €1.9 billion observatory, called the Einstein Telescope, to a road…
Science

[:es]Millions of electric cars are coming. What happens to all the dead batteries?[:]

[:es]The battery pack of a Tesla Model S is a feat of intricate engineering. Thousands of cylindrical cells with components sourced from around the world transform lithium and electrons into enough energy to propel the car hundreds of kilometers, again and again, without tailpipe emissions. But when the battery comes to the end of its…
Science

[:es]Mongoose mothers help their colonies thrive—by forgetting which pups are theirs[:]

[:es]Pregnant mongooses in a colony all give birth on the same night, a phenomenon that makes it harder for mothers to know which pups are their own. But that confusion works in their favor—and may even lead to a fairer distribution of scarce resources—researchers report today in Nature Communications.[:]
Science

[:es] The Mystery Formation of Extremely Rich Gold Veins Might Finally Be Solved [:]

[:es]Gold, for all its wonderful uses, isn’t hugely abundant in Earth’s upper layers. For each ton of crust material, there’s an estimated just 0.004 grams of the precious metal. Yet somehow, there are regions that contain “bonanza” abundances – hyper-enrichment, in the scientific parlance. How these gold veins form in time spans as short as…
Science

[:es]More Accurate Clocks Unleash More Disorder in The Universe[:]

[:es]What’s the price of an accurate clock? Entropy, a new study has revealed.[:]
Science

[:es]No shared language? No problem! People across cultures understand clues from ‘vocal charades’[:]

[:es]One of the hardest questions for evolutionary linguists is why humans speak at all. When people don’t share a language, they quickly resort to using their hands, rather than their voices: It’s easier to mime “drink” than it is to make a noise that sounds like drinking. Those gestures, over time, can easily blossom into…