Article archives

Music and preterm babies

Music and preterm babies

Neurobiology

By José Ramón Alonso

A preterm baby is one that is born prematurely, a minimum of three weeks before the expected date of delivery or, in other words, before the 37th week of pregnancy. Premature babies, especially extreme premature babies, have a high risk of suffering from nervous system problems, especially cerebral palsy, neurodevelopmental delays, and hearing and vision […]

MI weekly selection #337

MI weekly selection #337

Weekly Selection

By César Tomé

Fungus induces nonstop mating in cicadas Substances made by a fungus infecting cicadas, Massospora, are causing the insects to mate incessantly. The study discovered several firsts, including the first psilocybin to be produced by a fungus that was not a mushroom and the first nonplant organism to generate an amphetamine, cathinone. Science News New EEG […]

Finding collision-free tangential cutting directions when machining

Finding collision-free tangential cutting directions when machining

Computer scienceMathematicsMechanical EngineeringRobotics

By BCAM

One thing is designing an object in a computer, and another, quite different, is producing it as a real 3D object. All other things being equal, in general the more curves the designed object has, the more difficult it is to produce. Mathematics can be very helpful in this task. The geometric modeling of a […]

The Italian coffee pot, a dialog on values in science (3): Science doesn’t do it itself, it has to be done

The Italian coffee pot, a dialog on values in science (3): Science doesn’t do it itself, it has to be done

Philosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

[Read Part 1 & Part 2] VIOLETA: You know the shape of the classical Italian coffee-pot, like the one Faustino has just braught. It consists of two truncated cones or pyramids, joined by their narrowest parts. I claim that the structure of the maps of values of a scientific discipline has a structure similar to […]

MI weekly selection #336

MI weekly selection #336

Weekly Selection

By César Tomé

New crater spotted on Mars ranks among largest seen to date The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has observed a fresh crater on the Red Planet, NASA officials say. The space agency released an image that shows a hole gouged on the planet’s surface, made sometime between September 2016 and February of this year. Space.com Artificial islands […]

First nondestructive enantioselective detection technique

First nondestructive enantioselective detection technique

ChemistryCondensed matterMaterialsNanotechnology

By DIPC

If a nucleus has a nonzero spin, it behaves as a small magnet. Therefore, in an external magnetic field, the nuclear magnetic moment vector precesses about the field direction but only certain otientations are allowed by quantum rules. Thus, for hydrogen (spin 1/2) there are two possible states in the presence of a field, each […]

Is boost the new nudge?

Is boost the new nudge?

Economics

By José Luis Ferreira

Here, I summarize the discussion on the normative differences between nudges and boosts presented in Sims and Müller, 2019 . Behavioral Economics studies the systematic biases in economic decisions that occur because our cognitive processes are constrained and, thus, context-neutral optimization is impracticable. This area of research started with Tversky and Kahneman (1974) , and […]

The Italian coffee pot, a dialog on values in science (2): From value pluralism to the unity of scientific values

The Italian coffee pot, a dialog on values in science (2): From value pluralism to the unity of scientific values

Philosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

[Read the first part here] LORENZO: Alright, Violeta, we may admit that the members of a scientific discipline may agree to assess the conjectures and models each of them is proposing according to some consensual rule, and we may also admit that this rule may be impartial , in the sense that it will often […]