The transformation of a bundle of more or less deep insights on a few voting procedures, as we saw in a preceding entry, into something like a general logico-mathematical theory about the aggregation of individual preferences into a collective choice was the work of a single man, Kenneth Arrow, in his 1951 book Social choice […]
The American evolutionary psychologist David Buss contends in his 2005 book The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill that the evolutionary process humans acquired psychological adaptations to facilitate homicide. Natural selection, it is hypothesized, winnowed and perfected psychological mechanisms that solved certain problems by facilitating homicidal behavior. Of course, to solve […]
Carbon generated by sea-dwelling microbes Microbes living deep in the ocean have been found to produce amorphous carbon, according to findings detailed in Science Advances. Scientists collected and cultured microbes over a number of years, noticing the production of black specks that turned out to be pure carbon. The Scientist Black hole’s plasma jets revealed […]
An exciton can be described as an electron-hole pair in a crystal that is bound in a manner analogous to the electron and proton in a hydrogen atom. Thus, the exciton behaves like an atomic excitation that passes from one atom to another. Exciton energy states involve a band with a particular dispersion law that […]
In 2000 and 2001, the use of child slaves on cocoa farms in West Africa was exposed in a series of documentaries and pieces of investigative journalism, sparking an international outcry . This series of events was far from unprecedented. As discussed in my paper, since the 19th century, when cocoa was first introduced to […]
It is said that music can appease the beasts, and every parent in the world has heard of the –unproven– Mozart effect for producing smarter babies, however, what not everyone knows is that one of his compositions, the Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448, can actually decrease the epileptic activity in the […]
Organic molecules detected in Curiosity collection A soil sample collected by the Curiosity rover at Bagnold Dune contained organic molecules, the first ever detected on Mars. Instead of dropping the sample into an empty cup, scientists decided to put the sample into a cup prepped with a chemical reagent, which revealed organic molecules not detected […]
Topological materials have special universal properties, which are protected against perturbations. The name comes from the fact that such properties are theoretically described by topology, a branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of geometrical objects that are unchanged by continuous deformations. Topological materials behave like an ordinary insulator in the bulk but have conducting […]
That collective decisions made through voting may lead to some weird consequences is something probably well known since the first time one tribe started to use some kind of voting in order to reach an agreement. Contrarily to what happens in many other areas of human wisdom, we don’t have any deep reflections on the […]
New look at fossils puts bryozoans in Cambrian Explosion Researchers reexamined ancient fossils with new technology to find that bryozoans, filter-feeding creatures that live in water like corals, were present during the Cambrian Explosion and describe their findings in Nature. The fossil, which is shaped like a honeycomb, was revealed in finer detail using micro-computed […]