Radiocápsulas CienciaPR

Diana Guzmán Colón studied mongoose populations in different ecosystems within el Yunque National Forest.

This article is available in Spanish.

Dr. Ángel Torres Valcárcel and other climatologists studied rain patterns over the last 100 years.

This story is available in Spanish.

A group of researchers from University of Puerto Rico, including Karla Claudio, Dr. Jorge Duconge and Dr. Carmen Cadilla, advance the field of pharmacogenetics by researching how different genetic mutations help or hinder the metabolization of warfarin.

This article is available in Spanish.

Two recent issues of “Physics Today”, a physics journal published by the American Institute of Physics, highlights the work of three local scientists, Drs. Daniel Altschuler, Sixto González and Víctor Blanco.

The text is available in Spanish.

Archaeological starch grains consistent with those produced and stored in modern cojoba (Anadenanthera peregrina) seeds were identified, for the first time in the West Indies, in a coral milling base recovered in a small precolonial habitation site of Eastern Puerto Rico, in a context dated to A.D. 115–1250. Ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and previous archaeological data on cojoba from the West Indies and South America were surveyed in order to form plausible sociocultural interpretations of the findings.

Three articles in this issue address the role of vitamin and mineral supplements for preventing the occurrence or progression of chronic diseases. First, Fortmann and colleagues systematically reviewed trial evidence to update the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation on the efficacy of vitamin supplements for primary prevention in community-dwelling adults with no nutritional deficiencies.

The scaly-naped pigeon (Patagioenas squamosa) is threatened by hunting in the Caribbean. At present, the pigeon is abundant in Puerto Rico, but overharvesting is a major concern; therefore, the development of a sustainable harvest strategy is a management priority. The management objective of the harvest strategy is to maximize hunting opportunity while keeping the population above an abundance threshold (NT) of 260,000 pigeons.

The undisputed position of English as the “international language of science” has resulted in a push for its use in college science classrooms in non-English dominant contexts worldwide. This study uses classroom observation and interviews to examine the use of Spanish and English in college science classrooms at a land-grant university in Puerto Rico.

Frequently, science teachers ask their students to draw a scientist so that they can get a sense of what students think and imagine about scientists. Thousands and thousands of drawings show the same stereotypical characteristics: a male scientist, white, dressed in a lab coat, usually a chemist mixing liquids and generating explosions, and a person that does not have any physical limitations.