During the time Aristotle spent far from Athens after the death of Plato, he lived for a few years on the island of Lesbos and in some Asia Minor cities that surrounded it, an area where a kind of ‘franchise’ of the Academy had been founded a few years ago under the patronage of the […]
Liquid glass, a new state of matter identified A state of matter called liquid glass has been observed behaving in a way physicists say they’ve never seen before. Liquid glass, something between colloid and a solid, is created by a pair of interacting liquid-to-solid transitions. ScienceAlert Mars’ wobbly rotation keeps poles on the move Mars’ […]
Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the year 2020 has been dominated by data. But with great amounts of data comes great responsibility to communicate it properly. Unfortunately, the accurate and clear communication of complex information has been an area where many have fallen short this year. The UK government in particular has been criticised for […]
Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand and Charne Lavery, University of Pretoria On many beaches around the Indian Ocean, keen observers may spot bits of broken pottery. Washed smooth by the ocean, these shards are in all likelihood hundreds of years old, from centres of ceramic production like the Middle Eastern Abbasid caliphate and the […]
2020 has been all about Covid-19. Almost. Nature produced an excellent piece to review an extraordinary year: A review of 2020 through Nature’s editorials Quanta Magazine has produced a set of articles to remind us that science, in general, has not stopped: 2020 Biology: While the study of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was the most urgent […]
How much are you conscious of right now? Are you conscious of just the words in the centre of your visual field or all the words surrounding it? We tend to assume that our visual consciousness gives us a rich and detailed picture of the entire scene in front of us. The truth is very […]
Wearable devices are attracting increasing attention. The most familiar today are smartwatches and smart bands. The sensors in these devices monitor vital signs such as our temperature, heart rate, and even blood oxygen, but are unable to address biochemical parameters. One of the main reasons is the relatively short life of chemical sensors and biosensors […]
Levant may have experienced tsunami 10K years ago Archaeologists examining sediment cores have found clues that a massive tsunami may have once hit the coast of the Levant about 10,000 years ago. The clues consisted of seashells within sediment cores they are collecting along a beach in Israel, which was much farther inland at the […]
An ancient legend from the Indonesian island of Flores speaks of a mysterious, wild grandmother of the forest who eats everything: the ‘ebu gogo’. According to folklore, such tiny, hairy people as her once roamed the tropical forests alongside modern humans, eating crops and sometimes even human flesh. For decades, ethnographers documented the tale, recording […]
The Pacific Ocean is the deepest, largest ocean on Earth, covering about a third of the globe’s surface. An ocean that vast may seem invincible. Yet across its reach – from Antarctica in the south to the Arctic in the north, and from Asia to Australia to the Americas – the Pacific Ocean’s delicate ecology […]