President Obama has been reproached for not being African American, despite having 50% of his DNA inherited from an African father and the other 50% inherited from a mother with European roots. In fact, there are African Americans who have a lower percentage of African DNA in their genome than he does, but socioculturally it is considered that only the descendants of African slaves who were kidnapped and transported to America as forced laborers are African Americans.

The sunglasses in her hands betray the age of the image. "It's not that I want to look younger," Matilde Ferrer excuses herself with a laugh, it's that the photograph in that Berlin restaurant reminds her of the happy trip she took with her children and she always likes to look at it again. In the background, there is no green or any plant to be seen. Nor any of the flowers that she has dedicated herself to hybridizing for more than forty years.

His story could well turn into a movie. In the seventies, when Robert Proctor (Texas, 1954) was investigating the reason why we get cancer –at a time when there was an intense debate about the role that tobacco, pesticides, and other pollutants played in it–, he delved into the secret archives of the big tobacco companies and discovered a chilling fact: for decades, they had manipulated science to sow doubt about the deadly effects of their products.

It is May 7, 1959, and a tall, burly man with little hair on his head walks decisively into the Senate House, an 18th-century neoclassical building. This is Charles Percy Snow, a chemist, successful novelist, and advisor to the British government, recently named Baron of Leicester by the Queen for his services to the country. He is preparing to give the Rede Lecture, a prestigious conference held every year at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. He does not know it yet, but he is about to create a considerable stir that will awaken the wrath of many powerful people and generate a public debate that will last for years.

This past week the Generalitat has announced that it will take charge of 75 million euros of the costs caused by the recent torrential rains. The figure is a small sample of the constant drip of public spending caused by the effects of the ecological crisis. But the climate problem does not only affect the public treasury, it also entails an economic drain for families and insurance companies. To know the monetary impact of these phenomena, the European Environment Agency has compiled the annual losses that extreme weather phenomena have meant in the European Union (EU). Although the economic figures only take into account direct expenses – for example, those registered by governments and insurers – and not indirect ones, the data are implacable.

Margaret Hamilton, a computer science pioneer who led the software development for NASA's Apollo space program, has died at the age of 90, as reported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Figures such as Margaret Hamilton or Katherine Johnson, who calculated the precise moment the probe had to leave the lunar surface to arrive in time to dock with the service module, made the arrival of humans on the Moon possible for the first time.

If two molecules are practically identical, why does nature end up favoring one? To understand this phenomenon, which is known as homochirality, we can perform an exercise of imagination with a pair of shoes: the right and the left are mirror images of each other – as if one were the reflection of the other in a mirror – but they cannot be swapped because each fits a different foot. With some molecules, like amino acids, the same thing happens: they exist in two almost identical forms, but they cannot be superimposed. They are the so-called chiral molecules.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced this Tuesday that the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics is University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Francis Halzen. Born in 1944 in Belgium, Halzen has been awarded for having laid the foundations for a radically new type of astronomy: neutrino astronomy. His contributions have been decisive in creating the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica and in discovering high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin, which allows researchers from all over the world to learn more about the cosmos and its characteristics, some of which are still unknown.

Three researchers have been distinguished with the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, for having developed optogenetics, a technology that has radically changed the way the brain is studied. They are Peter Hegemann, from Humboldt University of Berlin; Karl Deisseroth, from Stanford University in California, and Georg Nagel, from the University of Würzburg. The world's most prestigious award has recognized this neuroscience technique because it allows for the control of specific neurons with light in real time while an animal is moving, sleeping, or performing some activity. It also opens the door to understanding how memories, feelings, and behaviors are generated. Currently, laboratories all over the world use it to try to unveil the mysteries of the brain.

"I am not in favor of recycling, because there are many chemical substances in plastics and many that we still do not know are there or how they act." This is how forcefully scientist Laura Monclús, from the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI), expressed herself this Monday in Barcelona. This toxicology expert has stated that increasing the percentage of recycled plastic will not solve the plastic crisis, but rather what is needed is to rethink the "essentiality" of plastic products: "If there is any product that is essential to be made of plastic, which there are, it will be necessary to ensure that they are completely safe (for health), but the majority of the plastics we consume are not essential," warned Monclús, during a conference on the Global Plastics Treaty organized by the Waste Agency of Catalonia.

She has the soft, welcoming tone of someone who knows how to listen, but when she speaks about neuroscience, she does so with surgical precision and a confidence that leaves no room for doubt. Emilia Redolar Ripoll (Teruel, 1974), a tenured professor at the UOC and director of the Cognitive NeuroLab at the same university, has dedicated her career to deciphering how the brain makes us human. In Lo que somos bajo la piel (Destino), her latest book, science is explained through Almudena, a trans woman whom we accompany from childhood and who, as the author acknowledges, is her own mirror. Redolar combines science and testimony to remind us that the brain is also biology, that identity cannot be reduced to genitals, and that diversity is the most natural way life has of expressing itself.

We have all experienced the evocative power of scents at some point. The aroma of a familiar dish can transport us to childhood, or the scent of rain on dry earth, to a distant summer. Scents have an extraordinary capacity to awaken emotions and memories. Now, a study has just added a new dimension to this phenomenon. A father's scent can help synchronize his baby's brain activity. The study, published in Science Advances by researchers Yaara Endevelt-Shapira, Linoy Schwartz, and Ruth Feldman, specialists in social neuroscience at Reichman University in Israel, addresses a previously little-explored question: what role does paternal body odor play in infant brain development.

Irish writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1997. She died two years later, at the age of 79, and the study of her brain confirmed the signs of the disease: beta-amyloid protein plaques and tau protein tangles. But when might the first symptoms of cognitive decline have appeared? In 2004, researchers from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London published in the journal Brain a comparative study of three novels: the first, Under the Net, from 1954, her most highly valued work; The Sea, the Sea, from 1979; and the last one she released, Jackson's Dilemma, from 1995, poorly received by critics. The study showed that the vocabulary used by Murdoch had decreased and the language had been simplified.

He does not put his face on WhatsApp but the sky reflected in the Amazon because he believes that communication always goes beyond the person you have in front of you. “We are inside a whole and this photograph represents it”, says Michel André (Toulouse, 1963), professor of bioacoustics at the UPC and director of the LAB, the only research center dedicated specifically to the study of noise pollution in the ocean. His network of aquatic microphones collects, in real time, the cry for help of marine fauna.

Congratulations to everyone because we are one step away from overcoming September, which would be like a huge Monday in which everything starts up again to, most of the time, stay right where it already was. If you have children in your care, you will have experienced an extra point of stress because, as Laura Camps wrote in this newspaper: “The bureaucracy of child-rearing is a job in itself, the fourth workday.” Especially for mothers, because care is a feminized task to which, says UN Women, they dedicate 2.8 hours more per day than men do. With this, I don't think I am revealing any exclusive, because sometimes we can call statistics science, but also confirmation. However, let's talk about the why. Is there something that compels us, women, to care more? Popular culture, always one step ahead in terms of spite, speaks of a “nothing box” that allows men to “go blank” and not think about anything for certain periods. But this, let's be fair, has no scientific evidence. What has been studied are the differences between male and female brains and the conclusion, grosso modo, is that we cannot conclude anything because science, as Jorge Wagensberg summarized in one of the aphorisms he wrote when he was not designing sensational museums like the CosmoCaixa, is “to observe to investigate, to investigate to know, and to know to live in uncertainty.” One example is enough: an article in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews from 2021 analyzed three decades of studies on male and female brains and concluded that the differences do not go much further than size (11% larger in men). But a commentary published shortly after responded that, although it agreed with many ideas, it would be necessary to take into account other factors (hormones, social experiences, environment...) to analyze it properly.

How did life on Earth begin? This is a question we have asked ourselves for centuries, and although we have a few formed ideas, the most accepted theories still have quite a few gaps to fill. The exploration of comets that have recently passed nearby has given wings to the hypothesis that suggests that the basic elements for building living beings could have arrived from outer space. Indeed, it seems that comets may contain some of these key elements, and perhaps in the past they brought them to our planet, who knows from where.

"The Selfish Gene", Richard Dawkins (Veles i Vents, 2026)

This month of September, a classic of 20th-century scientific popularization is being published in our country, The Selfish Gene. Although it has been translated into more than thirty languages, it is only now that we will be able to read it for the first time in Catalan. The work takes Darwin's theory, applies it to genes, and asserts that they are the true fundamental evolutionary unit: we, the individuals, are merely their survival machines. With this idea, the author explores the biological roots of selfishness and altruism to try to unravel the logic that governs the natural world. From the publisher Veles i Vents, with a translation by Oriol Ràfols Grifell and a cover illustrated by Blanca Martí, this edition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication by including a new epilogue by the author, Richard Dawkins.Pioneer

On October 1st, 2025, dies Jane Goodall

Primatologist, anthropologist and pioneer in the behavioral study of wild chimpanzees. Through her field studies, Goodall demonstrated that chimpanzees had behaviors that, until then, were only attributed to humans. The most important was that these primates constructed and used tools. This challenged the boundary we believed separated us, humans, from the rest of the animals and shook the foundations of the very conception of humanity.At a glance

So far and so close

Jane Goodall already anticipated that humans and the rest of the animals are not as far apart as we sometimes think. Now, comparative genetics proves it to us.

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Aging is a natural process and not a disease. Even so, accumulating years is considered the main risk factor for the most prevalent health problems on the planet, such as cancer or Alzheimer's. The passage of time leaves traces inside cells and causes them to deteriorate. And now, Catalan researchers, led by the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (Idibell), have managed for the first time to identify these traces in blood stem cells in microscopic images.

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Sea level rise is one of the impacts of the climate crisis that are already irreversible, as the UN warns. As the oceans warm, water rises mainly due to a phenomenon of thermal expansion, and to this is added the water poured in by both melting terrestrial glaciers and the continental ice of the poles as it thaws. It is precisely this last cause, the melting of the polar ice caps, that has been accelerating the most in recent years. Now, a new study published in Scientific Data, from the Nature group, offers the most precise portrait obtained to date on ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica.

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"I am the concrete one", assures Miguel Pita, geneticist and professor at the UAM, with a laugh. On WhatsApp, his profile picture is a fragment of an abstract painting by his father, the architect and painter Juan Pita. The scientist has published El cerebro enamorado (Periférica, 2025), an informative book about the biology of love, from the first sting to the last argument.

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