Though I’m making a break in the brief story of skepticism I have been telling in my past entries, we will not lose contact with our friends the demons; if in that story we were talking about the most philosophical one of them ( Descartes’ Evil Demon ), this time our initial protagonist is another […]
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Unusual nasal dome allowed ancient beast to trumpet like a dinosaur An ancient wildebeest-like creature that lived during the Ice Age had an unusual skull shape that enabled it to bellow like a dinosaur, according to researchers who found the skull fossils on what is now Kenya’s Rusinga Island. Rusingoryx atopocranion, which lived between 75,000 […]
The band theory of metals has been subjected to experimental tests many times and is now the accepted model of the behaviour of conductors and insulators. But it has to be modified when it comes to superconductivity. Electrical resistance is due to collisions of the electrons (whether treated as particles or waves) with impurities, imperfections […]
Complex systems in biology have several levels of organization, establishing a hierarchy of systems and subsystems. An ant colony is a wonderful example with the highest level being the colony itself, formed by hundreds or thousands of insects, each individual ant formed by millions of cells including 10 5 -10 6 neurons, and each cell […]
In our previous post, we have discussed the importance of a loophole-free entanglement experiment. Now, we are going to discuss one of the most important loopholes for this kind of experiments, the locality (or communication) loophole . To understand the locality loophole we need to review the Bell’s inequalities experiments one more time. Alice and […]
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Massive gas cloud boomeranging back to Milky Way A massive gas cloud that was almost ejected from the Milky Way is hurtling back to our galaxy, according to findings gathered from new observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. Dubbed the Smith Cloud, it is expected to smash into the galactic plane in about 30 million […]
In the early days of organic chemistry, the word aromatic was used to describe fragrant substances such as benzene (from coal distillate), benzaldehyde (from cherries, peaches, and almonds), and toluene (from tolu balsam). It was soon realized, however, that substances classed as aromatic differed from most other organic compounds in their chemical behaviour. Today, the […]
A review of the book: The brain electric: The dramatic high-tech rage to merge minds and machines by Malcolm Gay Flying cars, self-tying shoes or a fully functional hoverboard are only a few examples of the inventions which, according to the time-travel adventure sequel Back to the Future Part II, should be available for purchase […]
“We asked for workers. We got people instead.” Max Frisch In a past article, I reviewed the recent literature on the effects of immigration on the labor market. To sum up, it finds no significant negative effects on employment or wages of native workers while it boosts the local economy. From here, one may be […]
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Noodle-, hazelnut-shaped plasma lenses may be hiding in Milky Way Scientists are learning more about the shape of mysterious plasma lenses, which seem to invisibly float around the Milky Way, detected through radio waves. Researchers were able to detect a lengthy lensing event that gave them an idea of the shapes of the lenses. Space.com […]