You have probably heard this sentence: “the brain is the most complex organ in the universe”. Let´s dive inside such assertion to get a deeper feeling. The human brain contains around 86.000 million of neurons distributed across a bunch of brain areas ( roughly 190 ). That´s one thing, not everything. Even more complex is […]
If you have a bike, most surely you will own a helmet too. If you fall off the bike your helmet might avoid some nasty head injuries, right? That looks pretty obvious… except that it isn’t. Lets start with a little bit of skepticism, and as straightforward as it seems, we would like some proof […]
Author: Katy Price is a lecturer in modern and contemporary literature at Queen Mary University of London. ‘ We must live before we can attain to either intelligence or control at all. We must sleep if we are not to find ourselves, at death, helplessly strange to the new conditions. And we must die before […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Coffee genome offers insights on why caffeine is produced Scientists have cracked the genome of Coffea canephora, one source of coffee beans, to gain insights into how caffeine evolved and why plants make it. A study published in Science details the complex evolution of caffeine in coffee and the ways in which that differs from […]
Every single day, the scientific knowledge of the biodiversity of the planet is increased with the description of new species. All of them are, in their own terms, valuable: a new piece in the puzzle of the history of Life on Earth. Most of the times, the new species can be easily classified together with […]
That prediction is one of the main goals of science goes without saying, but how exactly predictive success contributes to the epistemic value of a scientific theory has proven to be an awfully complicated philosophical riddle for centuries. By ‘epistemic value’ I don’t mean something for which we can offer a formal definition (this is […]
One of the most common misconceptions regarding inequality consists of thinking that an unequal distribution of resources is the result of an unequal effort to achieve them. Although this might be the case in certain situations, when it comes to particular individuals, the fact is that there are systemic structural forces governing the result of […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Spitzer detects proto-planetary collision near new star Evidence of a proto-planetary collision 1,200 light-years away has been seen near a young sun-like star by NASA’s Spitzer infrared space telescope. Scientists detected a significant change in the infrared radiation emissions from dust around the 35-million-year-old star, known as NGC 2547-ID8, in the constellation Vela. Discovery News […]
Author: Shaul Katzir is a Marie Curie senior research fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation (M4HUMAN programme), at the Minerva Centre for Humanities – Tel Aviv University World War One was the first military confrontation to which scientists and engineers were mobilized for research and development in a wide scale. Earlier, science and scientists were […]
Bottles, bags, toys, clothes, prostheses… plastic is everywhere. Its global production has reached the quantity of 288,000,000 tonnes in 2012 . Day to day and year after year we only manage to get rid of a fraction of it by recycling, reusing or storing it in dumps but, sadly, some of that plastic ends up […]