Santiago Camacho - México, Méjico
· 1. The effect placebo
Let us put a fictitious case, that of the patient X. Several times a day, during several days, is caused pain that is controlled with dose of morphine. Until the last day of the experiment. Those 24 hours, without Mr. X knows it, the morphine is substituted absolutely by a saline solution inócua. It seems incredible, but this solution has the same effect that the morphine and the pain desaparece.
It is what is known as the effect placebo. Before the arrival of the fármacos in the XX century, it was the most potent weapon in the Medicine against the illness. Crocodile excrement, worm oil, lizard blood and until being played by the King they were medicines used between the XVI century and the XIX one.
From the publication, in 1955, of the book The Powerful Placebo of H. K. Beecher, was recognized that 35% of the patients with a wide variety of illnesses could only be treated with placebo. In later studies, one has seen that it can work in 70% and, even, of 100% of the cases.
Nobody still knows what mechanisms they intervene in the effect placebo. Some studies on the pain suggest that it reduces the anxiety and it facilitates the liberation of endorphins (similar natural chemical substances to the narcotics) in the brain, although they are still not hypothesis confirmed.
· 2. The problem of the horizon
Our Universe was extraordinarily homogeneous, and the temperature of the bottom radiation is the same one in any address that we observe. The fact that the temperature is homogeneous non serí to surprising of not being because among the two ends of the Universe there is a distance of almost 2.800 million year-light, while the age of the Universe is 'only' of about 1.400 million years.
Keeping in mind that anything can travel quicker than the speed of the light and the hypothesis that there were an initial instant or big bang, the query it is: how is it possible that physically disconnected regions from the "do I begin" of the Universe is in physical states so similar? This is what is known as the 'problem of the horizon', one of the biggest quebraderos in the cosmologists' head that continue without giving with the solution.
3. ultra-energy cosmic rays
The cosmic rays are particles that arrive from the space and they constantly bombard to the Earth from all addresses. Most of these particles are nuclei of atoms or electrons. Some s of them is energy than any other particle observed in the nature.
The mystery is in its high energy. The special theory of Einstein's relativity says that any cosmic ray that arrives to the Earth from outside of our galaxy it will have suffered so many collisions that the maximum possible of energy that can have it is 5 × 1019 eV.
The rays detected for one decade by the Japanese observatory of Akeno are very above that limit, with that which or the data - taken in different occasions and always resemblances - they are bad, or Einstein made a mistake.
· 4. The results of homeopathy of Belfast
In 1810 the German doctor Christian Friederich Samuel Hahnemann published the "Organon, the art of curing", angular stone of the homeopathy. The main foundation of the theory is defined in the law of the similar ones (homeo - it is the Greek prefix that designates equality) for the one that an illness is treated with the same toxic substance that produces it - with the result that calls himself law of the similar ones -, but to infinitesimal dose.
The homoeopaths dissolve those poisons in ethanol - what you/they call dye mother - and they dilute it in water successive times, it doesn't care how many, according to them the remedy you "it prints" in the molecules of water. Such breakups are the controversial part of the discipline, position is possible that to those concentrations there is not neither a sóla molecule of the principle to ctivo in the solution homeopática.
However their effect has been demonstrated in numerous studies and he/she is considered that 15% of the western doctors follows this line.
Madeleine Ennis, pharmacologist of the Queen's University of Belfast, it has always been the lash of the homoeopaths. It assures that, to those concentrations, in the remedies homeopáticos there is not more than it dilutes, for that that chemically doesn't have sense that you/they work.
However in their more recent study Ennis and their team were taken a "small" joke: They discovered that you solve ultra diluted of histamine they worked in an experiment with basófilos, some sanguine cells that act in the inflammation.
The solution homeopática in which there probably was not neither a single histamine molecule really worked as the histamine. Although Ennis has been unable to explain the reason of the effective operation and it continues being shown sceptical, it has assured that if the results are real and the homeopathy doesn't act as a placebo, it would have that reescribir leaves of the foundations of the physics and of the chemistry.
· 5. The dark matter
Not all that exists in the universe is visible. The astronomers can detect objects that emit or to bsorber light or any other type of radiation electroma gnétic to or that inter gravitatoriamente they act with other objects that we can detect. The term "dark matter" mentions to that matter whose existence cannot be detected by means of processes associated to the light, that is to say, they don't emit neither they absorb radiations electromagnéticas.
To determine which the nature of the dark matter is and in what quantity it exists it is the call '' problem of the dark matter '' or '' problem of the missing mass '', and it is one of the most important problems in the modern cosmology. The question of the existence of the dark matter can seem irrelevant for our existence in the earth, but the fact that it exists or not the dark matter, affects the final destination of the universe.
· 6. Methane in Mars
July of 1976 Gilbert 20 Levin, one of the engineers in charge of the missions of the NASA to the planet Mars, saw that the Viking that the red planet orbited had found emissions of carbon-14 that contained methane in the floor of the planet, for what the conclusion should be obvious and very outstanding: there is life in Mars.
Something is ingesting the nutrients, it is metabolizing them, and later it expels them to the atmosphere in form of blended gas with carbono14. However, the NASA didn't dare to affirm with rotundity the discovery, because another instrument of the Viking, designed to identify molecules organic considered essential symbols of life didn't find anything, so almost all the scientists of the NASA decided to declare the discovery of the Viking a "false positive". But. was it it?
To today's day, the arguments to favor and in against they continue dividing the scientists, although it is certain that the rovers that you/they study the red planet for one year has found tests of the discoveries of the Viking.
· 7. Tetraneutrones
Four years ago, in an accelerator of particles of Franci to they detected six particles that should not exist. They called them 'tetraneutrones': four united neutrons to each other in a way that challenges the laws of the física.
Francisco Miguel Marquise and their colleagues of the accelerator of Ganil, in Caen, they take trying to get the effect another time from then on, but up to now they have not achieved it. If they repeat it, these 'clusters' of atoms n would rot to force the scientists to reconsider the forces that maintain united the nucleus of the atoms.
· 8. The anomaly of the Pioneer
This is the parallel history of two space ships. A, the Pioneer 10, it was thrown in 1972; the Pioneer 11 one year later. Right now, both should be in the deep space, to lejadas of the view of any human genius, although their trajectories are too fascinating as to ignore them.
And it is that there is something that has been 'pushing' to the two ships, causing that they increase their speed. The acceleration is small, less than a nanometro per second, but it is enough to have taken out the Pioneer 400.000 kilometers of its initial trajectory.
The NASA lost contact with the Pioneer 11 in 1995, but everything makes indicate that it could be 'suffering' the same process that its twin sister, and it would be very outside of its direction in some place of the space. And what does it cause this deviation? At the moment, nobody knows it.
· 9. The dark energy
This is one of the m ayores problems of the physics. In 1998, a group of astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding to more speed than never.
This siginifica that the speed to which a distant galaxy moves away from us increases with the time. Of being correct this theory, the last result of this tendency would be the impossibility of continuing seeing any other galaxy. This new theory of the end of the Universe has received the name of Great Desgarramiento or, in English, Big Rip.
It is an effect for which the causes are still investigated, although one of the suggestions can be that it is motivated by the 'dark energy ', a hypothetical form of energy that permea the whole space and that it produces a to negative pressure, being in a force gravitation to the repellent one. The dark energy can give bill of the universe in quick expansion, as well as of a significant fraction of its mass.
· 10 The cliff of Kuipper
If somebody traveled to the area from the external solar system to the orbits of Neptune and Pluto, would be something very strange. Suddenly, after crossing the belt of Kuiper - full with small objects as icy asteroids and comets - there is not anything. The astronomers call it the 'cliff of Kuiper', because the density of objects falls espectacularmente.
The question is what it has caused this abrupt change, and the only possible answer seems to be the existence of a tenth planet of the Solar System, the sufficiently big thing as to have attracted to all those bodies toward its orbit.
At the moment, nobody has been able however, to contribute any test of the existence of that planet X.
· 11. The sign 'wow'
The sign had a duration of 37 seconds, and came from the external space. August 15 1977 the astronomer Jerry Ehman, of the University of Ohio State (USA), received a sign of the radiotelescope of Delaware. When seeing the transcripcción of the sign, Ehman wrote to the side the word 'wow'. 28 years later, nobody has been able to give an explanation to what or who emitted this sign. The radiation came from the address of Sagittarius, and of an environment of frequencies of unos1420 megahertzes. These frequencies are part of the radio spectrum in which all transmission type is forbidden, for an international agreement.
The nearest estella in that address is to about 220 years light, so if the sign came of there, had to cause it or an astronomical event of enormous power. Or was a civilization alienígena maybe with a transmitter of great power?
· 12. Constant not so constant
In 1997 the astronomer John Webb and their team of the University of Sidney analyzed the light that arrived to the earth coming from very distant quasars. In their trip of 1.200 millions of years light, the light had crossed interstellar clouds of materials as iron, nickel or chromium, and the investigators discovered that the atoms had absorbed part of the photons of the light coming from the quasars, but not those that they had esperado.
If the observations are correct, the only vaguely reasonable explanation is that a constant of l to physics, call the 'fine constant structure' or ' alpha ' it changes value when it passes through these interstellar clouds. The scientists continue investigating.
· 13. The cold coalition
In 1989 two investigators of the University of Utah (United States), Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, unchained the nuclear coalition in a test tube.
They sustained that it was possible to carry out processes of "cold coalition using as catalyst a metallic block of paladio. In the following 10 years, they were thousands the scientists that tried achieve the same results again, although without success.
Today it still follows the polemic, although they are many those that sustain that the results of Fleischmann and Pons were fruit of an experimental error.
