Recently Mapped

Psychologists and neurologists have been interested in the problem of free will since the beginning of their specialities, though the first clearly devised and relevant […]

Advances in the knowledge of the molecular basis of life have provided some of the most impressive and certain proofs to the notion that all […]

Slow shaking under Tokyo could mean a giant earthquake. Slow-motion earthquakes beneath Tokyo are becoming more common, raising concerns of another megaquake like the […]

Economic models of perfect competition and of monopoly only need to include individual behavior that takes the environment as given. In the case of […]

Let’s try a little game. If I’d show you only parts of a famous building: a column, part of a wall, the ceiling…Would you be […]

Most Read

Nelson Mandela was an extraordinary man with an extraordinary talent for negotiation. He was also an outstanding public speaker. Among the many words of […]

Supernovae are one of the most fascinating events in stellar astrophysics. Most stars suffer explosions at some point of their last days but the most […]

…and the vision that was planted in my brain still remains, . within the sound of silence. . (Simon and Garfunkel, The sound of silence 1964) […]

Tuberculosis (TB) represents a serious public health problem. The latest reports estimate an incidence of 8.7 million cases in 2001 and over 1.4 million deaths […]

Curiosity has been studying the surface of Mars since its landing on August 6, 2012, at Gale Crater. One of its primary goals was to […]

Invited Researcher

Author: Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo, Permanent Researcher, University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU). . . The effort of mapping ignorance in biology is especially frustrating –or, if the […]

Authors: José Carlos R. Alcantud and Annick Laruelle . José Carlos R. Alcantud is a professor of Economics at the department of economics and economic history […]

Decision making in areas such as production planning, distribution and grid management, logistics or financial portfolio management is usually based on mathematical models, mathematical optimization […]

One of the multiple tasks of quantum chemistry is the rationalization of the bonding between atoms to form molecules. In this vein, two main aspects […]

Scientific experiments using animals frequently involve the marking of animals that artificially changes their phenotype. For instance, penguins with flipper bands have been used to […]

About Us

Sir Humphy Davy, in a discourse delivered at the Royal Society in 1825 said:

Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply, — there are always new worlds to conquer.

Every time we make a new scientific discovery we sense where the limit of knowledge is, we feel where ignorance begins. Science is, for certain, what we think we know, but more precisely, it is being aware of the boundaries of the unknown.

In this blog we try to translate cutting edge scientific research into an educated lay-person language; consequently, as we do this, we will be Mapping Ignorance. Our goal is very simple: to spread both the latest developments in science and technology and a scientific worldview facilitating the access to it. To achieve this Mapping Ignorance is written by specialists in each field of expertise coordinated by a dedicated editor; the aim of them all is to make sometimes abstruse but otherwise wonderful scientific and technical information enjoyable by the interested general reader.

Mapping Ignorance is an initiative of the Chair of Scientific Culture of the University of the Basque Country under the Project Campus of International Excellence – Euskampus.