Science in the media

El fenómeno de El Niño, pronosticado para este año, podría afectar los mercados de alimentos a nivel global. Si se manifiesta con fuerza, puede provocar un aumento en los alimentos básicos como el arroz, el café, el azúcar y el cacao, según explicaron científicos.

The science of cosmology has achieved wonders in recent centuries. It has enlarged the world we can see and think about by ontological orders of magnitude. Cosmology wrenched the Earth from the centre of the Universe, and heaved it, like a discus, into its whirling orbit around one unremarkable star among the billions that speed…

Today he stands alone as the record-holder for most retractions by a single author, at a breathtaking 183, representing roughly 7 percent of all retracted papers between 1980 and 2011. His story represents a dramatic fall from grace, but also the arrival of a new dimension to scholarly publishing: Statistical tools that can sniff out…

The study finds evidence that 50,000 to 200,000 years ago, natural selection drove changes in six genes involved in brain development. This may have helped to increase the connectivity of neurons, making modern humans smarter as they evolved from their hominin ancestors. But that new intellectual capacity was not without cost: the same genes are…

“El autor fue un hominino [primates homínidos de postura erguida y locomoción bípeda a los que pertenecemos], pero de momento no es posible determinar cuál”. Esto supone la primera evidencia de que un grupo anterior de protohumanos, primos del actual Homo sapiens, tuvo la inteligencia necesaria para fabricar utensilios con bordes afilados.

Researchers have pinpointed the driest location on Earth in the Atacama Desert, a region in Chile already recognised as the most arid in the world. They have also found evidence of life at the site, a discovery that could have far-reaching implications for the search for life on Mars.

Before we started reporting on health, we had no medical training. We came at this beat with fresh eyes and lots of questions. More than ever, we appreciate how complex — and sometimes opaque — medicine can seem. This daily study has deepened our understanding, and here we wanted to share some of what we learned…

When a legendary mathematician found a mistake in his own work, he embarked on a computer-aided quest to eliminate human error. To succeed, he has to rewrite the century-old rules underlying all of mathematics.

Un nuevo estudio muestra que en los cromatóforos de la piel del pulpo actúa el mismo mecanismo celular que en sus ojos y que esto les permite responder a la luz sin pasar por el cerebro.