Isaac Reed, the author we quoted in our previous entry, contrasts his caricature of positivist social science with his own preferred, hermeneutic proposal, one in which the ‘context of investigation’ and the ‘context of explanation’ overlap to a certain extent […]
A collaboration between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering and the University of Notre Dame has broken the world record for optical switching speed in quantum well LEDs. The gallium nitride micro-LED device has an optical modulation […]
In 1960, Science, one of the world’s leading science journals, published an article with an unambiguous title: Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026. It predicted that on this future date —eleven days from today — the human population would approach […]
Biochemistry • Chemistry • DIPC Biochemistry • Pharmacy • Quantum chemistry
Fats do far more than store energy. They form the membranes that enclose every cell and act as chemical signals. Cells build and reshape them with enzymes, and one of these, ELOVL6, lengthens fatty acids by two carbon atoms. Embedded […]
Authors: Chloe Noteboom, student of the European Master’s in Clinical Linguistics, EMCL and Adrià Rofes, associate professor of neurolinguistics, University of Groningen. A hypnotist and a neurosurgeon walk into an O.R…. no, there’s not a punchline coming. Hypnosis is a […]
As we saw in our last entry, we must grant Gabriel that he does not conceive of the spirit and spiritual as an “immortal soul” or any similar ghostlike entity, but rather as something grounded in human thought—more specifically, in […]
Condensed matter • DIPC Advanced materials • Materials • Quantum physics
When we study solid-state physics, we usually begin with crystals. In a crystal, atoms repeat in a strict and regular pattern, much like tiles on a bathroom floor. Because every small region looks the same as every other, electrons move […]
The main ontological thesis of the German philosopher Markus Gabriel could be summed up in the phrase: “the Whole does not exist, but everything exists.” If we replace “the Whole” with a more familiar word (“the world”), the first part […]
Author: Gabriela Radulescu, Guggenheim Postdoctoral Fellow, Smithsonian Institution As humans began to explore outer space in the latter half of the 20th century, radio waves proved a powerful tool. Scientists could send out radio waves to communicate with satellites, rockets […]
Imagine a sheet of material so incredibly thin it’s just one atom thick, yet it can capture and guide light in ways that defy our everyday intuition. This isn’t science fiction—it’s graphene, a wonder material made from carbon atoms arranged […]
A gene identifier enters a spreadsheet and emerges as a date. The transformation can look like a clerical nuisance, remote from the serious business of scientific reasoning. Yet a 2021 study of PubMed Central articles from 2014–2020 found gene name […]
Lithium and sodium are neighbours in the periodic table. Both are alkali metals, both have a single electron in their outer shell, and both can be used to shuttle ions between two electrodes to store and release electrical energy. At […]
When I taught physics, chemistry and mathematics to secondary-school and sixth-form students, a correct answer was sometimes where the interesting part began. I would ask why they had used a particular equation. A solution that had looked perfectly sound could […]
One of the ideas most of us learn early in biology is that only a few specialized cells can communicate through electrical signals. Neurons do it. Muscle cells do it. Epithelial cells, the cells that form our skin and line […]
Authors: Mary M. Hausfeld, Assistant Professor in Management, University of Limerick and Jochen Menges, Director of the Center for Leadership in the Future of Work, University of Zurich Who comes to mind when you think of someone emotionally intelligent? Someone […]