Technology

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) today confirmed the discovery of the Higgs boson, an essential subatomic particle to understand what matter is made of, which is popularly known as the "God particle". According to statements by CERN scientist Joe Incandela, it is now totally clear that what they found last year in their experiments was the Higgs boson, "although there is still a long way to go before we know what kind of Higgs boson it is. ". That is, if it is the boson of the Standard Model of particle physics or the lightest of bosons predicted by theories that go beyond the standard model.

Change.org is an online activism platform. The idea is very simple: if you want to promote a change to improve your environment, you publish your request and ask Internet users for support. And if you get significant support, you may change what you don't like. Change.org was born in 2007. It has more than 20 million users in 196 countries, and Spaniards are among the most active, according to Francisco Polo, director of Change.org Spain. The platform won the iRedes Institutional Category Award at the III Ibero-American Congress of Social Networks "for breaking the digital barrier and being recognized on the street as a useful instrument to generate changes, as well as for the enormous diffusion achieved by its campaigns."

The size of an organism determines many of its functions, such as metabolism and even birth and mortality. Furthermore, in a population not all individuals are the same size, but there is a whole gradation from the largest to the smallest individuals. Now, a team of scientists from the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (Switzerland) has found what could be a universal equation that, based on the mean size, predicts the complete distribution of measurements for each of the living species on the planet.

Samples of Martian rock taken last month by NASA's American robot Curiosity contain sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon - some of the chemical ingredients essential for living things. "One of the fundamental objectives of this mission is to find out if there was a habitable environment on Mars," explained Michael Meyer, scientist in charge of the space agency's Martian Exploration Program. "From what we know now, the answer would be yes," he adds.

One of the most repeated arguments in the history of science fiction cinema is the ability to travel through time. From the mythical Back to the Future, with its multiple cinematic sequels to one of the latest examples, Looper, which has just been released on DVD and Blu Ray, through Terminator or Trapped in Time. Is there really a scientific basis for this type of travel?

Every time you click on a "Like" on the Facebook social network, you are leaving a trace of your personality and your preferences, as an article published in PNAS magazine suggests today. Its authors, experts from the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), demonstrate in a massive study with 58,000 users that it is possible to find out the age, race, level of intelligence, sexual tendency, political preferences, drug use, religion, basic personality traits and other information of any Internet user automatically tracking and analyzing what content stands out with a "Like" when browsing through Facebook.

The famous Roman quote "Mens sana in corpore sana" already has a scientific foundation. Researchers from the University of Granada have shown that staying in good physical shape is related to a better functioning of the central nervous system (CNS) and the autonomic nervous system (ANS).

Fashions change and the clothes and accessories that were worn two years ago are very different from today. Although it seems a phenomenon typical of the current era, it seems that our ancestors behaved in a very similar way, according to a study published in the Journal of Human Evolution that has analyzed some "jewels" from 75,000 years ago.