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Quake lights likely caused by grinding rocks in rift zones The mysterious lights sometimes reported before or during earthquakes occur most frequently in geological rift zones. Researchers say the glow emanates from electricity generated as rocks grind together along vertical faults during temblors. Nature News Sea anemones living underneath Antarctica ice shelf A large number […]

Another route that has been followed to apply economic thinking to scientific methodology has consisted into trying to define a specific (‘cognitive’, or ‘epistemic’) utility function which rational scientific research should maximise. This has been the strategy of what is usually called cognitive decision theory , which is basically an adaptation of the Bayesian theory […]

Time scales for astrophysical phenomena are sometimes thought to be overwhelmingly large and to exceed by far human life. While this is true for many cases, there are others which take the blink of an eye. Halfway between them, some interesting facts seem to happen in historical time scales and therefore have been analyzed by […]

Vaccine to protect against staph infections in rabbits Researchers have created a vaccine that has the potential to prevent pneumonia caused by Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, including Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in an animal model. The vaccine targets toxins secreted by the staph bacteria, preventing it from causing serious infections. Results may explain why human trials have […]

For any animal, the real world is an ever-changing environment. Continuously, even then they are just remaining in a peaceful, awake state, animals receive multiple sensory signals encoding different features of their surroundings, or even carrying information about their own internal state (orientation, body movement, or internal temperature, for example). Some of these signals might […]

Since the emergence of the microscope in the early seventeenth century, many claimed its invention, but many more have tried to improve it. Many problems have been resolved on the way, allowing us to poke directly with our own eyes about the heart of the living or inert matter as far as optical physics allows […]

Unique shrub provides insights into flowering plants’ evolution The genome of the shrub Amborella trichopoda has provided researchers with clues about how flowering plants have evolved, according to a study published in Science. The shrub is known to grow natively on the island of Grande Terre in the South Pacific and nowhere else, and is […]

This article summarizes a review of the literature presented in Sacerdote (2011) . I thank Ricardo Mora for bringing it to my attention. The simplest model of behavioral genetics assumes that child outcomes (Y) are produced by a linear and additive combination of genetic inputs (G), shared environment (F) and unexplained factors (S). For instance […]

Much attention has been payed lately to the novice comet C/2012 S1, more widely known as comet ISON. At the crest of the wave, it was even said that the integrated brightness of the comet after the perihelion could exceed that of the full moon. It was nicknamed “the comet of the century” and everybody […]

Proportional symbol maps (also known as graduated symbol maps) are used in Cartography to visualize quantitative data associated with specific locations. For a given point on a geographic map, a symbol (usually a disk or a square) is scaled such that its area is proportional to the numerical value associated to the point. This scaled […]