In the office ofEva Miranda (Reus, 1973), you're welcomed by a sea of ​​rubber duckies of different sizes and outfits; a very curious orange plush toy; and a suspiciously Newtonian plastic apple. In the background, blackboards are covered in mathematical formulas, indecipherable to those outside the field. A professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and a member of the Center for Mathematical Research, she has been distinguished as an ICREA Academia member and has received the most prestigious international awards. Her research focuses on the areas of geometry and topology, the study of shapes, and their interactions with mathematical physics.

With an insatiable curiosity, Ricard Solé (Barcelona, ​​1962) devoured every secondhand book that arrived at the family library. Those readings further spurred his imagination, and questions piled up in his mind. Perhaps that's why the questions he now tries to answer move between disciplines, between science and the humanities, between physics and neuroscience, chemistry and philosophy, and science fiction.

When we talk about research in Catalonia, we sometimes refer to the research ecosystem and other times to the research system. It's important to distinguish between these. The ecosystem is all-encompassing and lacks precise boundaries. You are part of the ecosystem if de facto You are. Being one doesn't depend on credentials. An ecosystem is always something chaotic and disordered. At its best, it's creative and dynamic. When something new ceases to be new and becomes orderly, new initiatives have already emerged that maintain the creative disorder. Catalonia has generated a research ecosystem that has gained considerable weight in Europe. We are relevant in all the arenas where it's necessary to be. But we can't be entirely proud because the ship on which we've gained ground is losing ground globally. Our ambition today should be to participate in European scientific leadership that corrects this situation.

It's a little after 6:30 in the morning. The American paleoanthropologist Ashley Hammond She woke up a while ago, breastfeeding her two-month-old son. She has everything planned to catch the train in Terrassa, where she has lived since autumn, and arrive in the center of Barcelona on time. Today, Hammond is attending a very special celebration: the 25th anniversary of ICREA, Catalonia's 100% public strategy to attract and retain top scientific talent. This researcher is one of the latest to join this league of excellence, a pioneering initiative worldwide that has proven highly successful for the country's research system.

An injection of nanoparticles can reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's in mice genetically engineered to suffer cognitive decline similar to that caused by this dementia, which affects some 33 million people worldwide.

The Spanish and Portuguese governments, the National Court, the European Commission, the Competition Authority and the European network of electric transport managers They have already launched investigations to clarify what happened on Monday, when the entire Iberian Peninsula suddenly lost power. For now, everyone agrees that time will be needed to gather data, analyze the events, and understand why the Spanish electricity system went down so massively and unexpectedly. The blackout has once again brought the ideological debate between nuclear and renewable energy to the forefront, but—beyond lobbying interests and political discourse—there are technical reasons that point to the possible causes of such a collapse.

"Mathematics is very creative, it contains great beauty," says Xavier Ros-Oton (Barcelona, ​​​​1988) with a frank smile. Nothing to do, he insists, with what we learn as children at school: calculus, calculus, calculus, equations, formulas, algorithms that you don't know what they're for... That's why, although he did very well as a child and had a mother who taught precisely this subject, the truth is that it didn't appeal to him too much.