T here are two major impossibility theorems in social choice: Arrow’s theorem (1951) : the only system to aggregate individual preferences into social preferences (e.g., a voting mechanism) that satisfies the properties of transitivity, monotonicity and independence of irrelevant alternatives for all possible individual preferences is the dictatorial system. Gibbard–Satterthwaite’ theorem (1973) : any voting […]
3rd fungus found in lichen Researchers have discovered a third fungus in lichen. In addition to an ascomycete and basidiomycete yeast, scientists have detected another basidiomycete, but they aren’t yet sure if this fungus has a symbiotic relationship with the lichen. The Scientist Microbes found hidden in deep-sea dolomite crystals near Japan Microbes have been […]
I remember very well my physics professor during my first year at university. She stressed the importance of having clear intuitions of what physical terms mean before any mathematics was invoked. ‘Imagine someone drops an 100-gram apple 1 metre above your head’, she would say; ‘the pain you feel is the equivalent of a joule […]
In the second entry of this series, I discussed one of the two big problems of Karl Popper’s ‘Proto-constitution of science’, namely, whether following in the strictest possible way Popper’s falsificationism would necessarily be the most efficient means to attain what he considers in The Logic of Scientific Discovery to be the major goal of […]
According to the results of the article The spread of true and false news online , which analyzed the posts on Twitter of 3 million people between 2006 and 2017, false news spread on the network faster than the true ones and they have a greater impact. Although many of us know how Twitter works […]
Astronomers may have observed black hole’s birth A strange blast approximately 200 million light-years away may have been the birth of a black hole. Astronomers first thought the blast, dubbed “The Cow” because its official name is AT2018cow, was from a black hole consuming a white dwarf, but “further observations of other wavelengths across the […]
In physics there are some well-known fictional characters: the experimenters Alice & Bob, Maxwell’s and Laplace’s demons, or some astronauts travelling at incredible speeds, to name a few. But the queen of them all is a cat. Yes, you guess right, that is Schrödinger’s cat. This cat first appeared in a thought experiment designed by […]
By the end of the first part of this series I listed the most important norms included in what Ian Jarvie calls Karl Popper’s ‘Proto-constitution of science’. Now I will start discussing several important problems of this Popperian rules. One first problem we can identify is whether Popper proposes these norms as just a suggestion […]
An allele is each of the alternative forms that the same gene can have. The alleles differ in their DNA sequence and can manifest in different results after expressing that gene, such as differences in the color of the eyes or in the blood group. Human beings are diploid, we have two sets of chromosomes […]
Photosynthesis fix may enhance food production Researchers are trying to replicate in food crops a change they made to tobacco plants that repaired a defect in photosynthesis in which plants inadvertently took hold of oxygen molecules instead of carbon dioxide, forcing the plant to use valuable energy clearing up that mistake. Researchers have tried to […]