Ignacio Amigo

Refoxos, Spain—When the researcher arrives, Herminia is already waiting for him, calmly seated on a chair in her courtyard, a leafy shelter providing protection from the unseasonably hot Sun. She wears a simple dark blue dress and her hands rest on her lap. She smiles at the visitors but doesn’t stand up—she fell a few days ago and has a sore leg....

Nineteenth-century psychiatrists believed a patient’s condition could be diagnosed by analysing their face. Théodore Géricault, master of French romanticism, was commissioned to paint 10 portraits but five went missing …

On a hot summer night in 2018, Javier Burgos stayed up late on his computer. His wife and daughters were already asleep when he decided to do another round of Google searches. This time the biologist’s quest to solve a century-old art riddle took him to a 2013 exhibition in R...

Este artículo es el ganador del Concurso de divulgación Ciencia Jot Down con la temática «orden y caos» en la modalidad de ensayo.
Fue en ese momento cuando Lasseter se dio cuenta de que no tenía con él su cámara de vídeo. Durante unos breves instantes buscó inútilmente con la mirada a su alrededor, hasta que de repente, como si se tratara de una epifanía, visualizó nítidamente en su cabeza el lugar en el que la había olvidado: la entrada del aeropuerto. Consultó su reloj. Calculó que si se d...

Until the 1990s, when billboards were banned in Spain, these bulls were painted with the name of Veterano Osborne brandy. The company removed the words and successfully fought to have the enormous bulls considered art. Ken Welsh/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
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Spain
The landscape of the Spanish countryside is distinctive. Roads are surrounded by fields of grain, olive trees, and cork oaks. There are a few sparse villages, and no humans in sight. Ins...

A plan to expand irrigated farming around one of Europe’s most important wetlands has alarmed conservation scientists and European officials. They fear the proposal, advanced earlier this month by conservative legislators in Spain’s autonomous region of Andalusia, will undermine efforts to preserve species-rich marshes in Doñana National Park that are already threatened by drought and extensive water withdrawals.

“This decision goes exactly in the opposite direction to what is needed,” says b...

Launched in 2019, the Ouro Alvo program is creating a gold database with samples obtained from different parts of Brazil.

The information is allowing the Federal Police to create a chemical fingerprint of each sample, which they can then use to cross-reference the origin of seized or suspicious gold.

This strategy could be complemented with other methods, including physically tagging the gold and tracking transactions using blockchain.

While technology can be a great ally to fight the illegal...

The Amazon region produces more than a quarter of the energy in Brazil. Still, hundreds of thousands of families are off the grid and rely on expensive diesel generators to produce electricity.
Solar panels and other renewable energies can greatly improve the lives of people in these regions and help create jobs.
NGOs and governments have implemented renewable energy plans in different communities in the Amazon with positive results.
Experts agree that public policies to provide electricity i...

As Brazil prepares to turn the page on the Bolsonaro government, finding sustainable and economically viable alternatives for the Amazon region remains challenging.
Advocates tout agroforestry as a sustainable farming alternative to soy monocultures and cattle ranching. It can restore degraded pastures and provide a stable income for small farmers.
One such project is RECA, a sustainable farming cooperative and an agroforestry pioneer in Brazil’s Amazon, with more than 30 years of experience....

Un recorrido, con paros en medio, por el Estado brasileño de Rondonia, donde siete de cada diez votantes apoyaron a Bolsonaro.

In 1939, a young psychology student from Iowa named Mary Tudor began the research project, “Monster Study.” Tudor's supervisor, Wendell Johnson, had a theory that the reason why some people stutter is that at some point in their childhood, someone had made them too self-aware of their own speech, causing them distress and impairing their fluency.
If Johnson was right, stuttering would be an acquired trait. To test his hypothesis, Tudor ran an experiment with a group of children from a nearby ...

When Guillermo Mejias was 7 years old, his parents sent him out to buy bread during a family holiday in southern Spain. Mejias still remembers his growing anxiety as he walked to the bakery, repeating what he would say over and over in his head. But when the moment arrived, he was unable to produce a single word. He recalls returning empty-handed, ashamed, and wondering what to tell his parents. “I was so tense that I had been inadvertently biting my cheeks and tongue and my mouth was bleedin...

Este artículo ha sido finalista del Concurso de divulgación Ciencia Jot Down en la modalidad de ensayo.

El único viaje real del descubrimiento consiste no en buscar nuevos paisajes, sino en mirar con nuevos ojos. (Marcel Proust, «La prisionera»)

«En cuanto vi aquella foto me quedé boquiabierto y mi corazón se aceleró», cuenta Watson en su libro La doble hélice. La imagen hizo que desde aquel día y durante las siguientes semanas, Watson y Crick empezaran a considerar modelos tridimensionales q...

El péndulo de Richer
La fuerza de la gravedad no es igual en todas partes. El primero en observarlo fue el astrónomo francés Jean Richer cuando se encontraba en Sudamérica realizando unas medidas para estimar la distancia entre la Tierra y Marte. Allí Richer se dio cuenta de que su reloj de péndulo se retrasaba sistemáticamente respecto a los relojes de París. Isaac Newton lo cuenta en su Principia Mathematica:
Y, en primer lugar, en el año 1672, Mr. Richer lo notó en la isla de Cayena; porqu...

Louis Armstrong tardó casi cuarenta años en encontrar al amor de su vida. Corría el año 1939 y ya llevaba a sus espaldas tres matrimonios fracasados. Entonces, una noche de invierno en el Cotton Club de Nueva York, conoció a Lucille Wilson...

Galicia, Spain – Joam Evans and his family live in Froxan, a small village in the mountains of Galicia, an autonomous region in Spain’s northwest.
To get there, one has to drive uphill through a maze of empty rural roads flanked by oaks, chestnuts, pines and a large number of eucalyptus trees.
Recent weeks have been extremely hot as a heatwave gripped southern Europe, but when this reporter travelled to the region, there was drizzle and a thin layer of mist covered the landscape.
Evans, weari...