Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

Authors: Guus Kroonen, Associate Professor, Scandinavian, Germanic and Indo-European Comparative Linguistics, Leiden University; University of Copenhagen; Eske Willerslev, Professor, Globe Institute, Section for Geogenetics, University of Copenhagen; University of Cambridge, and Hugh McColl, Assistant Professor, Globe Institute, Section for Geogenetics, University of Copenhagen Why do people speak Germanic languages such as English in England and […]

Isaac Reed, the author we quoted in our previous entry, contrasts his caricature of positivist social science with his own preferred, hermeneutic proposal, one in which the ‘context of investigation’ and the ‘context of explanation’ overlap to a certain extent, in a way that allows the scientist to ‘share’ the meanings that constitute the basic […]

In 1960, Science, one of the world’s leading science journals, published an article with an unambiguous title: Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026. It predicted that on this future date —eleven days from today — the human population would approach infinity and effectively annihilate itself. The outlandishness of the claim landed the article widespread public […]

A gene identifier enters a spreadsheet and emerges as a date. The transformation can look like a clerical nuisance, remote from the serious business of scientific reasoning. Yet a 2021 study of PubMed Central articles from 2014–2020 found gene name errors in the supplementary Excel files of 3,436 of the 11,117 publications containing such gene […]

Once upon a time, in a world very far from ours, there were a group of scientists devoted to the study of bacteria, or prokaryotes, who called themselves ‘biologists’, and a different group of researchers, who studied eukaryote organisms, and who received the name of ‘organismologists’. Organismologists were very proud of the obvious differences between […]

When I taught physics, chemistry and mathematics to secondary-school and sixth-form students, a correct answer was sometimes where the interesting part began. I would ask why they had used a particular equation. A solution that had looked perfectly sound could become much less convincing; occasionally the reverse happened, and a student whose algebra had gone […]

Author: Deven Desai, Professor of Business Law and Ethics; Associate Director for Law, Policy, and Ethics at the Machine Learning Center, Georgia Institute of Technology AI agents don’t go rogue. That’s something only humans do. Nevertheless, a New York Times article – representative of much news coverage of AI – described an OpenAI hacking as […]

Water is H₂O. Few scientific formulas look more familiar, more compact, or more final. Two atoms of hydrogen, one of oxygen: the phrase seems to say what water really is beneath the shifting appearances of ice, vapour, rain, rivers and the liquid in a glass. Yet that little subscript was not easy to earn. By […]

By 1800, water had already changed once. It was no longer one of nature’s simple terms, but a compound of hydrogen and oxygen (see Is Water H₂O? (1) From Element to Compound). The new chemistry had a powerful account of that change. What it still wanted was a more direct experiment: water itself, giving up […]

Take a walk in London’s Trafalgar Square this summer and wilting under the heat will be all sorts of body sizes, some tall, some short: a real mix of sizes. Picking just two from the crowd to represent the whole human species would be a tall order. But that is exactly what we do when […]