Article archives

MI weekly selection #48

MI weekly selection #48

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

China’s Forbidden City had rocks transported via ice sheets. The massive stones used to build parts of China’s Forbidden City in the 15th century were pulled by several hundred workers more than 40 miles on sledges across artificial ice, researchers say. China had discovered the wheel, but a sign at the Forbidden City hinted that […]

Tax data and top incomes

Tax data and top incomes

Economics

By Ricardo Molero-Simarro

Tax data are an important source of information for a wide range of statistical series. Their use, however, has been mainly confined to the analysis of the impact of fiscal policies on different socio-economic groups. Nevertheless, a recent group of researchers has started using personal income tax data to construct top income shares series, i.e […]

Towards the generation of tubers in non-tuberizing plants: Can a tomato plant make potatoes?

Towards the generation of tubers in non-tuberizing plants: Can a tomato plant make potatoes?

Plant biology

By Daniel Marino

Some plants have the capacity to develop tubers. Tubers are storage organs that serve as a survival strategy to better cope with adverse environmental conditions such as dry periods and cold. Tubers are sometimes also a means of asexual reproduction. In fact, tubers can persist in the soil during unfavorable conditions and generate a new […]

MI weekly selection #46

MI weekly selection #46

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

Cassini images add clues to Titan’s weather cycle New photos from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft are giving researchers clues to the weather cycle of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. By studying previous images, scientists think Titan has a hydrologic cycle, in which hydrocarbons rain onto the surface filling the lakes and then evaporating back into the […]

Evidence of education as a signal

Evidence of education as a signal

Economics

By José Luis Ferreira

One of the aspects in which modern economics has departed further away from the neoclassical paradigm is the treatment of information after the seminal works of Akerlof, Spence and Stiglitz, who rightly won the Nobel prize for their contributions. Some theoretical models were introduced to explain economic phenomena that did not fit well in the […]