The most notorious argument presented in favour of the theory that asserts that living beings are necessarily the result of a conscious and deliberate act of intelligent creation, is William Dembski’s ‘explanatory filter’ (EF). According to this argument, when explaining anything, we have three alternatives: first, we shall try to explain it as the result […]
Is it possible to have an asymmetric magnetic field when all boundary conditions are known to be symmetric? The question seems awkward but the counter-intuitive reality is always there to make Science far more interesting, as revealed recently by Hao Cao and collaborators . Today’s story is a good combination of intriguing observations and amazing […]
Science news with bad titles usually attract a lot of attention. A recent example is “The sound of an atom has been captured” ]. Laypeople must know that atoms do not emit sound. Quantum acoustics study the propagation and the interaction of phonons, the analogues in sound to photons in light. An atom cannot emit […]
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Antarctic ice growing at record-setting pace Antarctic sea ice is on track to reach a record high this month while Arctic ice has decreased to its sixth-lowest level, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Antarctic ice usually reaches its maximum level each September, about the same time as the Arctic reaches its […]
In the last decades, the most popular philosophical defence of scientific realism has been what is known as the ‘no miracle argument’ (NMA; Putnam 1981). Though there is a range of different interpretations of NMA, it typically asserts that scientific realism is ‘the best explanation’ (or perhaps, the only reasonable one) of the ‘success of […]
This is the English version of a section in Ferreira (2014) , a paper dedicated to overview the experiments in Industrial Organization, to appear in Revista de Economía Industrial, and is reproduced here with the permission of the journal. In 1994, the American FCC (Federal Communications Commission) decided to conduct an auction to allocate the […]
Author: Jaume Navarro received his PhD in history of science from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (1998). He has been a researcher at the universities of Cambridge, Imperial College (London) and the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Berlin). Currently he is an Ikerbasque Research Professor and a member of the Praxis Group at the Faculty […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Long extinct squirrel-like creatures hold clues to earlier mammal evolution Mammals may have evolved much earlier than previously thought, according to researchers who’ve been studying the fossils of squirrel-like creatures that date back about 160 million years to the Triassic Period. The creatures have mammalian features and are from previously unknown species of haramiyid, which […]
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 […]