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 here, 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. Brought to us by 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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"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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The day she arrived at the laboratory and saw that the mice were moving again, Zaida Álvarez (Barcelona, 1984) could not help but shudder. Behind her lay more than six years of research, from Monday to Sunday, and a risky bet to outsmart evolution and repair the irreparable: the central nervous system of a mammal. "It was mind-blowing. Those animals, which had a severe spinal cord injury and were paralyzed, were walking again," she recounts, still moved, this bioengineer and researcher at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC).

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For those of us dedicated to astronomy, this has been a very special summer. The solar eclipse has put us in the spotlight like never before. Rarely does it happen that the object of our work becomes a social phenomenon of this magnitude. It has been a golden opportunity to explain the movements of the stars in the sky, the cosmic coincidence that makes total solar eclipses possible, the demonstration of general relativity predictions, or what solar prominences are. There was even a sociological experiment conducted on how watching an eclipse affects us.

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We live in a global context marked by emotional fragility: more than one billion people live with a mental health diagnosis, according to the World Health Organization. The situation is especially critical in classrooms: one in seven adolescents between 10 and 19 years old suffers from a mental disorder, and suicide is already the third leading cause of death among young people. Faced with this emergency scenario, preventive psychiatry focuses its attention on accessible, zero-cost interventions with an unexpected biological impact. The most powerful of all comes in the form of a book.

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At the last movie of Spider-Man, absolute success this summer, we are presented with a downcast superhero, Peter Parker (thealter ego of Spiderman), with unbearable physical pain and unexpected changes in the body. As often happens in stories of dystopian worlds and superpowered heroes, we can ask ourselves if the plot has sparks of reality, that is to say, if it is based on scientific evidence even if exaggerated, or if it is totally implausible. As a researcher, I often regret that screenwriters do not consult scientists to make their plots more plausible and prefer to invent them. Precisely the difference between fantasy and science fiction is this: whether there is any scientific evidence that supports the plot. In the case of Spider-Man: brand new day, in the script there is a little bit of everything.

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John Cryan, a neuroscientist, is one of the most globally recognized voices in the study of the communication between the gut and the brain. His work has helped to demonstrate that the gut microbiota not only plays a role in digestive health, but can also modulate the response to stress, behavior, and mental health. A professor and chair of the Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience at University College Cork (Ireland), he has investigated the effects of a beverage that is part of the daily life of millions of people: coffee. Cryan visited Barcelona to participate in a biomedical research symposium at Pompeu Fabra University.

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She looks at the camera, half-smiling, from her office at the University of California, Irvine. Elizabeth Loftus, 81, has spent half a century studying memory, and she speaks about her own recollections with scepticism: as she has been repeating for decades, memory is like a Wikipedia page —other people can go in and change it, and so can time.

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In our daily life there are elements that, without knowing it, may be making us slowly ill. Some we are getting to know better, such as the microplastics that sneak into the food we have on our table, but others are more invisible and we find it difficult to identify them.

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The alarm clock rings. You go through the shower and smear yourself, at the very least, with about seven cosmetic and personal hygiene products, including creams, soaps, deodorants –if you are a woman, the number rises to nine–, according to data from Cosmetics Europe. You wear a polyester shirt for the first time, nice and cool. You leave the house and grab a coffee to go and a tray of cut fruit. You walk to work along a street with heavy traffic and quite a bit of noise.

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For nearly four decades, physician and researcher Nicolás Olea (Granada, 1954) has studied how thousands of chemical compounds present in plastics, cosmetics, or packaging interfere with the hormonal system and may contribute to the development of various diseases. He was one of the pioneer researchers to study the effects of bisphenol A on human health and today he is an international reference in the field of endocrine disruptors. With humor, vehemence, and a contagious passion, Olea, author of 80 recomendaciones para evitar los tóxicos (Integral, 2025), maintains that regulation lags decades behind scientific evidence and offers a series of practical recommendations to reduce daily exposure to these substances, which he considers, for the most part, avoidable.

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When we think of pollution, images of exhaust pipes, factory chimneys spewing smoke into the sky, or beaches overflowing with plastic waste most likely come to mind. It does not occur to us that there is part of the pollution caused by human beings that ends up traveling to our table. And yet, we eat it every day and, in the long run, it can end up undermining our health.

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Although distorted in the Catalan case, the PISA results we have just learned about will likely put back on the table the low level of our students in mathematics, reading comprehension, and science. We already knew this for some time and it has been discussed a lot. But until now, the attention has focused only on the first two topics, while science has been incomprehensibly ignored by public debate. Will we now see the discussion once again focus on mathematics and reading comprehension while science is left aside again?

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The remains of the first Diplodocus in Europe have been found in Teruel. They were discovered by a team from the Teruel-Dinópolis Paleontological Joint Foundation at the La Tejería site, according to research published this Tuesday in the journal Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The specimen, which dates back about 150 million years, is the first intercontinental evidence of the species, as these are the first remains of this prehistoric giant found outside of North America. In total, the archaeologists have found fourteen exceptionally well-preserved tail vertebrae and several tail bones.

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Who crossed out and why some passages of the letters that Queen Marie Antoinette sent to her favorite, Count Axel von Fersen? And what did these paragraphs say? While she was imprisoned at the Tuileries, the wife of Louis XVI wrote, between June 1791 and August 1792, nearly 50 letters to the Swede Von Fersen, a military man and ambassador, who a year earlier had helped organize the frustrated flight to Varennes of the members of the royal family.The French National Archives, owners of the letters, tried for years to figure out what those parts hidden under black ink said. They even resorted to police forensic units. But it was all in vain until they requested the services of Anne Michelin, a chemist at the Centre for Research and Conservation in Paris. In October 2021, she and her team published the results in the journal Science Advances.The hidden paragraphs seem to support the theory that Von Fersen, in addition to being Marie Antoinette's favorite, was her lover. This is implied by fragments such as “not without you”, “you, whom I love and will continue to love”, “you make my heart happy” or “tender friend”, with adverbs such as “madly”, which denote romantic passion. It is not surprising, then, that someone wanted to prevent these paragraphs from being read. It was believed to have been a relative of the queen, but Michelin's team also found the answer: it had been Axel von Fersen himself.

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So that everyone understands her when she talks about her work, the Catalan astrophysicist Clàudia Soriano (Esplugues, 1997) says that she is a weather woman for distant worlds. The point is that she investigates the atmosphere of exoplanets –those that are outside our Solar System and orbit a star other than the Sun– through simulations that allow her to understand what happens in the gaseous layer that surrounds these planets that are thousands of light-years away from her laboratory. Since she was very young, she has had a great fascination for space and distant galaxies, and now she has become one of the young voices with the most projection in Europe in the field of space research. She currently works there from the University of Southampton, where she is doing her postdoctoral fellowship, but she does not hide the fact that she is looking forward to being able to do research from Catalonia when she finishes her stage in the United Kingdom.

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The brain, despite the years and resources dedicated to studying it, still holds many mysteries. And this is due, in large part, to its extreme complexity, with tens of trillions of neurons and synaptic connections that control everything that happens in the human body. Among the scientific voices that have set out to build an easier relationship with the nervous system, that of the Catalan Eduard Masvidal (Tarragona, 1992) stands out. This postdoctoral researcher at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) has focused his research on how new materials and microelectronic technology can help treat neurological disorders as widespread as Parkinson's or epilepsy.

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There are mathematical problems that persist for decades after being formulated and challenge generations of brilliant minds around the world. The Yano conjecture was one of them. Proposed in 1982, it suggested how to classify and compare singularities of curves, that is, points where a curve stops behaving in the usual way, as happens with black holes, places where the rules we know from physics stop working the way they do in the rest of space.

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