Everything needs a story. It's how humans understand and explain the world. And the best stories are always those of its origins. First there is nothing, and then there is something. It happens with superheroes, with music groups, and, yes, also with scientific theories. The problem is that tracing the exact origin of a theory to identify it as a point in space-time is an activity that contains a good dose of innocence and another of arbitrariness. This is where the power of stories comes into play. The quality of a story is the arbiter that can decide, without any kind of innocence, the instant at which a theory is born.

The development of the quantum mechanics The discovery that began with German physicist Werner Heisenberg's discovery on the island of Heligoland has allowed us to understand how matter works at microscopic scales with an unprecedented degree of precision and detail. And, as always, with understanding comes applications. Surely, as he strolled headlong along the cliffs of that remote island, Heisenberg wasn't thinking about the applications of his quest. He was driven by the pure curiosity to understand nature at its most fundamental level, the intellectual challenge it posed, and, most likely, the ego-sting that represented the possibility of solving a puzzle that Einstein himself was struggling with. But what Heisenberg discovered on that island, and which many other people helped to expand, changed the world. And it did so because it contained the seeds of three types of ideas: scientific ones, which explain how nature works; technological ones, which manipulate matter for practical benefit; and social ones, which redraw the organization of society.

There are photographs in every home. Of children, granddaughters, parents, grandmothers. People are usually shown in a slightly artificial position, in the middle of some activity that defines them or at an emblematic moment in their lives: about to kick a ball, on top of a mountain, or dressed in a wedding suit. In the dining room of our house, there was a photograph of my great-grandfather Manelet next to a three-meter hammerhead shark. It had accidentally become entangled in the net of the boat in which he was fishing, and when they arrived at the port of Arenys, someone immortalized that extraordinary catch, which even made the news in the United States. The Vanguard. Like everything that becomes normalized because it forms part of the foundation upon which one acquires the use of reason, perhaps I never attributed to it the importance it had. It was simply there. It was part of the domestic landscape, like the rosebushes and loquats in the yard, the pottery workshop on the porch, or the Creedence Clearwater Revival vinyl records.

The particles that make up the fingers that typed these words and the particles that make up the fingers that are sliding them across the screen in front of you existed 13.8 billion years ago (give or take a trillionth of a second). They were just organized differently. The recombination process they underwent to give rise to something capable of thinking about itself in order to write it down, and something capable of reading about itself in order to think about it, as is happening now through this text, is a mystery. Ideas like this are what the film makes you think about. Superradiance, by artists Memo Atken and Katie Peyton Hofstadter, which recently opened the Radical Science program at the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, a cultural project that proposes a reflection on current frontier science through the eyes of various disciplines.

These two lines of dialogue could sum up the beginning of many of the most important scientific discoveries in history. They also sum up the beginning of the discovery that has made it possible for billions of people to be immune to covid-19 without having to go through the disease. This is only possible thanks to vaccines, of course. And, of all the vaccines being administered around the world, the ones from Pfizer and Moderna stand out because they are made with a technology based on a type of molecule called messenger RNA. Developing it was not easy.

Many people wonder whether organic food is healthier and better for the environment. At the conference "Organic food", held at the City and Science Biennial and framed in Barcelona, the capital of sustainable food in 2021, has tried to give them an answer.

Researchers at the Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) have found T lymphocytes capable of destroying cells infected by SARS-CoV-2 in the lungs of patients who have recovered from the disease. The finding, published in the journal Nature Communications, confirms that these cells can remain in the lung for up to ten months after infection and offer protection against reinfection.

The world watches with concern as covid is wreaking havoc in India. In addition to shocking figures and images, from the Asian country comes the information that there is a variant of the virus that accounts for 60% of the sequences analysed. The WHO has issued a statement on this variant known as B.1.617, which for the moment is considered as a variant of interest, that is to say, to be studied in detail. Other variants, such as the so-called South African, Brazilian and British (which already represents more than 90% of the samples sequenced in Catalonia), have long been classified as variants of concern because, among other things, they are more transmissible than the virus identified in Wuhan.

The writer Vladimir Nabokov was horrified at having to forcibly lose consciousness eight hours every day. Without sleep, however, he would not have written anything resembling a masterpiece such as Pale Fire, because his brain would not have been capable of it. Sleep is essential for the proper functioning of the brain. At the same time, the brain regulates when we fall asleep and when we wake up by means of a hormone called hypocretin. Lluís de Lecea, professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, is one of the scientists who discovered it.

Marred by constant distribution breaches, changes in age criteria and now also dogged by its link to rare cases of thrombosis, the Oxford/AstraZeneca (UK) vaccine was approved for use on 29 January 2021 and the UK had already licensed it in December. The technology it uses - genetically modified attenuated virus, in this case chimpanzee adenovirus - has previously been used to produce vaccines against Ebola and Zika. It is the same mechanism of action as the Janssen and Russian Sputnik V vaccines. It is licensed in a dozen countries, although some have stopped vaccination after the cases of thrombosis.

A team of scientists led by the Spaniard Juan Carlos Izpisua, from the Stalk Institute in the United States, and the Chinese Ji Weizhi, from Kunming University, have created monkey embryos containing human cells. Of the 132 embryos created, three have survived 19 days in the laboratory and have come to form spherical structures of about ten thousand cells, at which point the scientists have stopped development. The work, published in the journal Cell has reopened the controversy over the creation of hybrids between humans and other animals, even more so because of the use of monkeys, which enjoy greater protection than animals such as mice in the field of scientific experimentation.

All experts agree that vaccines are the key tool to overcome the pandemic. Countries that have a significant percentage of the population with at least one dose, such as Israel, with more than 60%, or the United Kingdom, with almost 50%, are seeing a sustained reduction in the number of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths from covid-19. Now that the vaccination campaign seems to be gaining momentum in Europe, we spoke to three experts to answer some questions about the protection offered by vaccines.

Covid-19 vaccines are already being tested in adolescents and children under 12. Pfizer has announced this week that their vaccine is 100% effective in boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 15, and both Moderna and AstraZeneca are already being tested in adolescents and children under 12. Janssen has begun testing its preparation in 12 to 17-year-olds, and hopes to do so soon in younger children. The Johnson & Johnson subsidiary is currently recruiting volunteers in Spain and the UK. "It is a phase II trial in which various dosages and administration patterns will be evaluated", explains Alberto Borobia, coordinator of the central unit of clinical research and clinical trials of the Paz University Hospital in Madrid, the first in the State that has begun to administer vaccines to minors, always in the framework of clinical trials.

Astronauts' hearts shrink. It is not a metaphor for the fright caused by the sight of the place where, as Carl Sagan said, everyone they know, everyone they have heard of, everyone they love, has lived. No. It is a real, studied, physical effect. During his 340-day stay on the International Space Station, the heart of a NASA astronaut, Scott Kelly, went from 190 to 139 grams, a reduction of 27%, as published in the Circulation journal in an article signed by cardiologist Benjamin Levine, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

It's called M87* and it became famous on April 10, 2019, when a photo of it went around the world. It is a black hole that is 40 billion kilometres in diameter and has a mass equivalent to 6.5 billion suns and is at the center of a galaxy located 55 million light years from Earth. After presenting it in society two years ago with the first image captured of one of these cosmic monsters, the scientific team of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has just published a new image that contains more information and that has allowed exploration of its inside.

The term algorithm is used much more now than when the 9th century Persian mathematician from whom it derives, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, devised methods for solving first and second degree equations. The reasons are clear: now there is more data and more computing power. But there have always been algorithms, which are nothing more than a set of instructions aimed at executing a task. The recipe for a chocolate cake or a Valencian paella are algorithms. The way to light a fire with two sticks is an algorithm. The hunting technique used by some groups of killer whales, when they expel air while spinning under their prey to catch them in a cylinder of bubbles, is an algorithm, in this case generated and transmitted in a pre-linguistic way. So are the nuptial dances of the bird of paradise or lullabies.

Throughout the strict lockdown that began a year ago, images of animals in urban environments or habitually frequented by people proliferated on social networks. "Nature recovers", was proclaimed in many of these posts. It is true that, coinciding with spring, there was an increase in the proliferation of weeds in parks and gardens, tree wells, road verges, and roundabouts. But did those images of groups of deer strolling with the philosophical air that all ruminants have in the squares and streets of cities around the world really indicate an explosion of wildlife caused by the decrease of human presence?

"The devil is already here", infectious disease physician Charles Chiu of the University of California, San Francisco, said a few days ago. And he did so in statements to the Los Angeles Times, the second most widely read newspaper in the United States after the New York Times. This assessment referred to the variant of the coronavirus discovered in California. As Chiu explained, the variant is more contagious, more deadly, and more easily escapes the antibodies generated by natural infection and vaccines. "I wish it were different, but science is science", he added. What science was he referring to? Let's look at it.

Fertilisers used to increase wheat yields around the world could be one of the factors behind the increase in cases of celiac disease in recent decades, according to a study by an international team of scientists led by ecologist Josep Peñuelas, a researcher at the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF), which has been published in the journal Foods. "We are dedicated to global ecology and we have seen that an important factor of global change is that we fertilise the planet with more and more nitrogen, which has effects on microorganisms, plants and animals, one of which is us," explains Peñuelas.

In the last two weeks three spacecraft have arrived on Mars: one from China, one from the United Arab Emirates and one from the United States. Mars is therefore on the media agenda. All this coincides by chance with the inauguration next Thursday, February 25, of the exhibition Mart. El mirall vermell ('Mars. The red mirror') at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). "In fact, we've been working on this exhibition for two and a half years", explains Juan Insúa, the curator of the show. "It was scheduled to open in November, but the pandemic has delayed everything", he says, which has made the exhibition coincide with the Martian news. But Mart. The Mirall Vermell goes far beyond this chance opportunity. The sciences and the humanities need each other more and more", Insúa argues, "so this exhibition, like all the projects I do, is born from a third culture perspective".