“… so I’m saying that what happened to the news more than 100 yr ago, is happening now to ‘facts’, bits of knowledge. They too are being co-mo… comoti…, what’s the word? When something becomes tradable, a product, when something becomes a commodity… commoditized, that’s the word. …

The following is an entirely fictional story. Any resemblance with reality is mere coincidence. There was a time when bicycles, cars, motorcycles and other inventions of the devil had not yet been invented. Way before the time of Melon Usk, the famous entrepreneur who would go on and solve the…

Why is it that forgotten gloves are mistaken as part of museum exhibitions, artworks are mistaken by trash and thrown away and signed urinals and duct-taped bananas make it to art galleries? Contemplating Frank Gehry’s magnificent building and Guggenheim museum’s collection, I came across the piece below, which left…

An existential risk is a term coined by futurologist and philosopher Nick Bostrom, defined as an adverse outcome which would annihilate life on Earth permanently, or drastically curtail its potential. Existential risks can be non-anthropocentric or natural, such as asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions or the Sun swallowing the Earth when…

It is pretty obvious that the things you think are humans, are indeed humans. But what will happen when the conviction to be interacting with another human is lost? What will happen when you cannot trust the person you are interacting with to be a genuine human? When you cannot…

A common scene in developing countries is the near-constant presence of trash permeating cities and choking rivers. As usual, a picture is worth a thousand words. At first sight, this may seem due to a lack of environmental consciousness. Indeed, westerners, used to their clean and well-maintained cities and rivers…

You may be one of those people wondering why on Earth should we care about the study of black holes, neutron stars, gamma-ray bursts or galaxies. This is indeed a question I get often times after explaining I study the interaction of black holes and neutron stars with their environment…

The animation below shows how an extremely energetic neutron star has blown up a hole in the interstellar medium around 400 times our Solar System in size. …

The other day an acquaintance was asking whether we had spotted some green parrots in the city he had never seen before. As he was enthusiastically describing the little birds he had seen, I realized I had seen those plenty of times in Barcelona long time ago. These parrots, called…