Just past the border between the Costa Brava and the Vermilion Coast begins the most protected stretch of sea on the Roussillon coastline. It is a zone where navigation is prohibited and even an exclusion area where divers are not accepted. It is part of the Gulf of Lion Natural Marine Park, between Cerbère and Leucate, which covers more than 4,000 km² of French coastline. It is the area with the coldest water in the entire Mediterranean.

More than two thousand years ago, Greek medicine attributed some women's ailments to a uterus that moved through the body as if it were a restless and mischievous animal. It was believed that it could cause choking, convulsions, pain, or fainting depending on the place where it moved. It was even recommended to use pleasant or unpleasant odors to make it return to its place. Over the centuries, hysteria, a word derived from the Greek hystéra (uterus), became a label that grouped together very diverse manifestations, often interpreted based on the gender stereotypes and prejudices of each era. When medicine did not know how to explain what was happening to women, it seemed that the answer was always found in the fact of being women.

Autumn has begun, as you know, with the sky breaking over us as in the worst nightmares of a Gallic village. For a DANA to occur, there must be a mixture of warm sea and cold air at altitude, which is not strange at this time of the year. But that the sea is warmer than before we all know, as reported by the scientific records and it is rejected by denialists who also believe that neither sexism nor feminism exists and that their grandfather smoked and lived to be 90. The solution, I fear, is not near: my youngest son when he was 2 years old also said that two plus two was five and I couldn't convince him otherwise, but the difference is that he has grown up over time and the others, over time, have increased.

Catalonia had not recorded any wolf births in the last hundred years, but it seems that this trend is beginning to change: for the second consecutive year, a pair of wolves (Canis lupus) has bred in our region. As confirmed this Wednesday by the Rural Agents, in the last few days, five pups have been born to a pair of wolves in Alt Empordà and Alta Garrotxa.

Perhaps one of the most used metaphors in biology is the one that compares DNA to an instruction manual. Indeed, just as if it were an encyclopedia, a genome contains all the necessary information to make any cell of that living being function. Continuing with the simile, this data is only used when needed: at each specific moment in the life of the cell, it will be necessary to read some pages or others of the book (or, to put it in a way closer to reality, it will be necessary to activate or deactivate a gene, the basic unit of information of this encyclopedia). But what happens afterwards? This part is not usually explained as often.

With exquisite care, Núria Nogués (Barcelona, 1965) opens a small blue box and extracts a teardrop-shaped pendant with a red stone in the center. She looks at it with delight and, almost as if making a confession, lets out: "Blood is a truly extraordinary tissue." This jewel contains her story: a career dedicated to deciphering the secrets of blood groups, to understanding what makes each blood unique, and to preventing this uniqueness from becoming a health obstacle.

'Fungarium', Katie Scott and Ester Gaya (Símbol, 2020)

Although in Catalonia we are great fans of mushrooms, humans know very little about fungi. In fact, we only know 5% of the millions of fungal species (from 2.2 to 3.8 million) that are estimated to exist on Earth. Fungarium aims to be an introductory guide to the knowledge we have of the Fungi kingdom and its relevance to ecosystems. Intended for a young audience, it is part of the Welcome to the Museum collection, which is characterized by presenting large-format books that simulate a visit to a museum. With a carefully crafted edition, it features descriptions of high rigor and scientific level for each of the species exhibited in its pages. The texts are accompanied by naturalist illustrations of great beauty and detail.

Digitization shook the music industry at the end of the nineties: the internet and MP3s allowed songs to circulate around the world without physical media, and this forced an adaptation of copyright and royalties. Now biodiversity is facing a similar challenge: with the arrival of Digital Sequence Information (DSI), the DNA and RNA sequences of plants, animals, and microorganisms can be consulted in open-access databases, without the need to physically travel to the place of origin. This is the case of the Madagascar periwinkle, a plant from which vincristine and vinblastine are derived, two cancer drugs with which it is now possible to innovate without having to obtain new samples of the plant, which makes scientific research cheaper and easier.

“They told me I had three months to live.” In 2016, Elena Madorell was 49 years old, full of desire to live, and had a dire diagnosis of metastatic cancer. A few months earlier, she had found a lump in her left groin, and a biopsy had revealed it was melanoma, even though she had no skin lesions. She underwent surgery to remove the affected lymph nodes, but half a year later, the cancer had spread to her lungs and liver.

Mr. X is a renowned designer who has recently achieved considerable success with t-shirts featuring witty and poignant phrases about current social issues. So much success that on the black market they are valued well above their price and counterfeits have already begun to appear. This worries him, but he has found a solution: in the pigment of the short text on the t-shirts, he has left chips that are invisible to the naked eye, but which, when viewed under a microscope, carry an unmistakable pattern. Imitating and placing these chips is beyond the reach of potential counterfeiters.

When the pop-rock group The Police released the song Every breath you take, in 1983, many people interpreted it as a romantic song. But a close reading of the lyrics reveals another reality. It describes obsessive surveillance and possibly a case of stalking. "Every breath you take, every move you make... I'll be watching you". What probably no one imagined is that, four decades later, neuroscience would end up giving an almost literal meaning to this title. Not because someone is observing us from the outside, but because our own brain seems to follow each of our breaths very closely. According to a recent study led by Bradley Voytek, a specialist in cognitive science at the University of California San Diego, which has been published in The Journal of Neuroscience, each inspiration and each expiration leaves a specific imprint on brain activity.

After months of shortages in Spanish pharmacies, the Spanish Agency of Medicines and Medical Devices (AEMPS) has given the green light to the importation from abroad of Lenzetto, an estradiol spray used in hormone replacement therapy to treat the symptoms of menopause and which is also prescribed to trans women and non-binary people. The measure, however, is not a general authorization to access the medication, but rather, for the moment, only a limited number of units have been imported, which is why the supply will be reserved, as the organization specifies in a statement, for "those patients who most need the drug and cannot use other available treatments".

"It is an exhibition that will leave no one indifferent: it will impress first and then lead to awareness." This is explained by the director of CosmoCaixa, Valentí Farràs, accompanied by Kim Mckay, the director of the Australian Museum. But it is almost impossible to look at them. An immense great white shark stands right behind them. It is four and a half meters long and bares its teeth next to the director of the Science Museum, stealing all the attention. It does not do it alone: a dozen life-sized shark replicas have invaded the -5 floor of CosmoCaixa in one of the most complete exhibitions ever held in the world about these unfairly feared sharks. Barcelona will be the first European city to host the exhibition Sharks. Guardians of the Ocean, which has been exhibited for two years in Australia and is the result of an exhaustive three-decade investigation by experts from all over.

Over the last two decades, Catalonia has led one of the most extraordinary scientific transformations in Europe. What was a bold commitment at the beginning of the 2000s to build a modern, competitive, and international research system is today a reality recognized throughout the world. We have created centers of research excellence, attracted global talent, developed first-rate scientific infrastructure, and positioned our institutions among the most competitive in Europe in terms of resource acquisition and scientific production.

Vaccines that cause autism, stars that decide characters and destinies, sugar pills that alleviate incurable diseases, and an Earth as flat as a plate. Pseudoscience has left behind the time of fake diplomas hanging on the walls of invented clinics. Now it is more subtle: it has appropriated scientific language, speaks from the loudspeakers of power, and, often, makes money. Where is the border between science and pseudoscience, why even educated people end up believing falsehoods, and how they can be fought are some of the questions addressed by biologist Jaume Bertranpetit and physicist and historian of science Xavier Roqué at the debate The keys to pseudoscience, organized by the newspaper ARA and the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC) and moderated by the director of the ARA science supplement, Cristina Sáez.

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 American.

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.