Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

It is widely accepted that low carbon technologies will contribute to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, mostly those coming from carbon dioxide, and thus slow down the global warming. That’s why most of the largest economies in the world have committed to reduce their gas emissions by supporting an unprecedented transition from the current fossil-fuel based […]

Diagram shows newly-found giant magma reservoir underneath Yellowstone A huge reservoir of mostly solid hot rock has been found underneath a magma chamber beneath Yellowstone National Park, part of the vast volcanic plumbing of the area diagrammed in a study published in Science. This system has been there for about 17 million years, and scientists […]

Capitanian event a mass extinction A group of paleontologists would like to add a sixth mass extinction event that occurred at the end of the Capitanian age to the five generally accepted in science. Researchers have linked mass extinctions in China during that time period 260 million years ago with a major die-off in what […]

Intellectual protection via patents and copyright provisions, among other mechanisms, has been defended on the grounds that, without it, intellectual works would not be produced in the first place. Consequently, the monopoly granted by the patents or the copyright was considered a second best. This rational has been challenged in recent times, as it did […]

We, philosophers, tend to be more skeptical than the average person (though, if you know a little bit of the theories of some philosophers, I would understand that you take my claim with a grain of skepticism). In this series of entries, however, I will take you to a short visit to some of the […]

Magnetic bands around sun may help predict solar flares Tracking the movements of traveling magnetic bands in the sun’s atmosphere may help predict solar flares, which can cause damaging power problems on Earth and wreak havoc on satellites, according to a study published in Nature Communications. Solar flares are at their worst when formed by […]

Sensations which seem to come from limbs that had been amputated are called «phantoms». Most limb amputees report awareness of a phantom limb, i.e., the perceived presence of the missing arm or leg. Phantom sensations may also occur after the removal of body parts other than the limbs, e.g. after amputation of the breast, extraction […]

Young galaxy clusters discovered More than 200 young galaxy clusters have been documented by astronomers using data gathered by the Planck and Herschel space telescopes. The researchers have released photos of the clusters, which will be studied further in the hope answers can be found to many cosmic questions like how galaxies grow and the […]

Dark matter detected as it coasts through galaxy collisions Dark matter appears to drift straight through galactic collisions, barely interacting with anything, including other dark matter, according to scientists who detected the mysterious stuff by the way it bends nearby light paths. Researchers used visible light spied by the Hubble Space Telescope and X-rays by […]

As we saw in the previous entry of this series, philosophers of mind usually distinguish between what (after David Chalmers) they called the ‘easy’ and the ‘hard’ problem of consciousness. The ‘easy’ problem refers to how to explain the functioning of the brain: how does it manage to do things that seem to require some […]