Camilo Araya Bernales

One of the main challenges in cancer treatment is ensuring that therapies specifically target tumor cells while minimizing damage to healthy tissue. Added to this are other limitations, such as the difficulty of monitoring treatment response in real time and the side effects associated with some conventional therapies.

To address this challenge, Dr. Daniel Zúñiga is leading a Fondecyt Iniciación project to design and develop novel theranostic probes. These specialized agents are engineered to target cancer cells and eliminate them using photodynamic therapy selectively.

Everyday life is full of processes that happen simultaneously, often unnoticed. A cup of coffee slowly cools down, a car gradually accelerates, and the room dims as evening falls. This fluid evolution of physical reality is what we call the continuous world.

Today, however, more processes rely on digital systems that gather data and make decisions at specific intervals. Take modern vehicles: onboard sensors constantly evaluate metrics like speed and distance to determine precisely when to accelerate, brake, or adjust course.

Driven by a rapid demographic shift toward an aging population, healthcare systems across Chile face growing demand for specialized rehabilitation and independence-focused care. With the National Institute of Statistics (INE) projecting life expectancy to exceed 85 years by 2050, developing modern, scalable public health strategies has become vital to supporting long-term functional autonomy for older citizens.

Mental health challenges like anxiety, stress, and depression are rising rapidly among children and teens. These struggles directly affect a student’s emotional well-being, academic performance, school relationships, and long-term development—creating an urgent challenge for educational communities and authorities.

In Chile, during the dictatorship, photographs taken in domestic and intimate settings documented ways of life that the regime sought to render invisible. Many of these images, preserved in family albums or personal collections, became over time testimonies to experiences that remained outside official narratives, even after the return to democracy.

Just a few meters from the chaotic flow of students coming and going at the Universidad de Santiago metro station, there is a corner of the campus that seems to move at a different pace.

Vitamin D is an essential nutrient for the body’s proper functioning, obtained through sun exposure, diet, and supplements. Its main function is to facilitate calcium absorption, which is key to maintaining strong bones and preventing diseases such as osteoporosis. It also plays an important role in muscle function and in the transmission of signals between the brain and the rest of the body.

“A drop of water wears away a stone” is a saying we’ve probably heard more than once. Attributed to the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu more than 5,000 years ago, it is often interpreted as a metaphor for perseverance and consistency; however, behind this popular phrase lies a scientific question that, to this day, remains without a definitive answer.

Although the phenomenon seems obvious, physics has yet to explain how a drop of water—incapable of breaking a rock with a single impact—can eventually erode it by falling repeatedly on the same spot.

Whether predicting weather patterns, mapping neural behavior, or tracking disease transmission, mathematical models allow researchers to decode how the physical world operates and anticipate future scenarios.

For a long time, these models were built on the assumption that certain phenomena unfold gradually—that is, in a more or less predictable way—and that each event depends primarily on what is happening in its immediate surroundings. However, reality often behaves in more complex ways.

One hundred and thirty thousand years ago, Earth entered a warming transition period, from an ice age to the beginning of the Eemian Interglacial Period. While Neanderthals were recolonizing northern Europe and Homo sapiens were exploring routes beyond the African continent, the planet was home to an impressive megafauna, including mammoths, mastodons, and saber-toothed tigers, during a period when global temperatures were higher than they are today and sea levels were several meters higher than they are now.