Creo que tal vez para el primer artículo debimos haber empezado con una cita elegante de algún poeta o científico, dicha hace mucho tiempo y que sea vigente aún. Pero no lo vamos a hacer. En lugar de eso, empecemos con un pequeño experimento. Llená una taza de algún líquido. No, no café. Ya sé que estabas pensando en eso. Es mejor algo más claro, más transparente. Tenés que poder ver a través del fluido. Necesitás también algo que flote homogéneamente en el líquido, como semillas de chía cuando se ponen suavecitas, o esa bebida de aloe que venden ahora…

A friend of mine recently suggested a documentary to me about the mind’s healing power. Terrible pseudoscience all around, but it landed some nice points about stress. Nevertheless, I was horrified at how easy the word quantum was dropped, without any context, and any reason. And this is not an isolated event, I have seen this trend for some time. And I think that is not only a trend in the circles of pseudoscience. In science-fiction and superhero movies for instance, quantum jargon is used as mumbojumbo and plot devices, admittedly a whole more harmless way. …

I don’t think we have to tell you that the Universe is a very complex and huge place. But in case we actually do, here it is: the universe is bigger and more complex than the human mind can fathom. Think about our galaxy, with its millions of stars, which have their own solar systems with some planets and hundreds of asteroids and general debris. All of them attract each other gravitationally and modify the path that each other has,literally all the time! …

Things are about to get messy.

Give me a moment of your day, and let me put a picture in your mind. Imagine you and a friend have each a soup in a plate, and each soup has two carrot pieces, one potato and not so much broth. You are bored, it is a slow afternoon, so you decide to perform a little experiment.

You decide to probe the properties of the soup, and the best way to do this, assometimes it tends to be, is to run and pitch the soups against each other, as in a culinary mirrored…

A microscope is an essential instrument in the collective imaginary that surrounds science. But what do we scientists resort when normal techniques are not available? What do we do when we want to see into the smallest known systems, into atomic nuclei? This is where extreme microscopes are needed!

I remember the first time I saw a magnifying glass. I was absolutely fascinated by such an object. It allowed me to see so much more than I could normally (even then, when I could actually see something without glasses or contacts). It was the most amazing thing I had seen…

This post was written during the 27th instalment of the Quark Matter conference held in Venice in May, 2018

Today, in Venice, the sun does not shine, it roars. Yesterday, the city was completely soaked as a storm paraded through it, giving thunderous signals of its arrival. But today golden hues flood the air, contrasting with the shadows of the trees near the Palazzo del Casinó. The wind blows calmly and the smell of sea salt fills the air. Outside, the sea hums, the boats sail, and the tourists roam the streets of the islands in search of a taste…

It is an amazing, yet often overlooked, feeling to go out of your house, fully clad in summer clothes, look up to a blue sky and a bright sun and knowing it will be like that all day. That a storm will not suddenly pop up and ruin your grilling and make you walk soaked to your house, right?

Well, we owe that nice feeling to the countless meteorologists that devote their lives to studying the weather and also try to apply that science to everyone’s everyday life. This is a fundamental property of any scientific theory: prediction. …

We really should have started with some fancy quote, spoken in the past, and reverberating into the ages to come. But we didn’t. So let’s start instead with a small experiment. Fill a cup with something. No, not coffee, we know you were thinking about it. Something clear. You need to see through it. You also need to have some little pieces of something floating homogeneously around in your cup, like chia seeds once they are really squishy, or that weird aloe drink they sell at the supermarket. The latter, in fact, proves to be the best for this experiment.

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