Arguments use more brain space Disagreements take up more real estate in the brain than agreements. After measuring brain activity in pairs of people either agreeing or disagreeing during discussions, researchers found that agreements activated sensory brain regions, while arguments […]
The Javalambre-Photometric Local Universe Survey, J-PLUS, is an unprecedented photometric sky survey of 8500 deg2 visible from Javalambre (Aragón, Spain), using a set of 12 broad, intermediate and narrow-band filters. The J-PLUS photometric system is well suited to study the […]
Authors: Ceridwen Fraser, Associate professor, University of Otago; Christina Hulbe, Professor and Dean of the School of Surveying (glaciology specialisation), University of Otago; Craig Stevens, Associate Professor in Ocean Physics, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, and Huw Griffiths […]
During the time Aristotle spent far from Athens after the death of Plato, he lived for a few years on the island of Lesbos and in some Asia Minor cities that surrounded it, an area where a kind of ‘franchise’ […]
Liquid glass, a new state of matter identified A state of matter called liquid glass has been observed behaving in a way physicists say they’ve never seen before. Liquid glass, something between colloid and a solid, is created by a […]
Twelve years have passed since the world record for rail speed was set. “Operation V150”, which got its name from the target speed for its testbed trainset, 150 metres per second (540 km/h), occupied from January 2007 to April of […]
In the previous entry, I presented some critical thesis by historian Ylva Hasselberg regarding the applicability of economic theoretic tools to the study of the social construction of scientific knowledge. To those claims, I think we can respond with the […]
Many people think of their brain as a computer full of microchips and wires, as a storehouse full of memories and learned things, as a clock with millions of mechanisms intimately intertwined with each other, so it is incredible to […]
Environmental problems and energy resources make it vitally important for the chemical industry to develop more sustainable and less polluting processes. Therefore, using solar energy is one of the most promising alternatives. If we take a look at Nature’s energetic […]
As readers of this blog will surely know, the economics of scientific knowledge is a topic on which I have worked extensively, and also written here not a few entries. Now I want to tackle a common objection to that […]
Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the year 2020 has been dominated by data. But with great amounts of data comes great responsibility to communicate it properly. Unfortunately, the accurate and clear communication of complex information has been an area where […]
Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand and Charne Lavery, University of Pretoria On many beaches around the Indian Ocean, keen observers may spot bits of broken pottery. Washed smooth by the ocean, these shards are in all likelihood hundreds of […]
How much are you conscious of right now? Are you conscious of just the words in the centre of your visual field or all the words surrounding it? We tend to assume that our visual consciousness gives us a rich […]
An ancient legend from the Indonesian island of Flores speaks of a mysterious, wild grandmother of the forest who eats everything: the ‘ebu gogo’. According to folklore, such tiny, hairy people as her once roamed the tropical forests alongside modern […]
The Pacific Ocean is the deepest, largest ocean on Earth, covering about a third of the globe’s surface. An ocean that vast may seem invincible. Yet across its reach – from Antarctica in the south to the Arctic in the […]
