From fabricated research to paid authorships and citations, organized scientific fraud is on the rise. By combining large-scale data analysis of scientific literature with case studies, researchers led a deep investigation into scientific fraud. Although concerns around scientific misconduct typically focus on lone individuals, the Northwestern study instead uncovered sophisticated global networks of individuals and […]
In 2023, over 310 million tons of plastics were produced globally, and this volume is projected to reach 710 million tons by 2040 . This extensive use, at the domestic, tourism, industrial, and fishing levels, combined with inadequate waste management, has led to the rapid accumulation of plastics in our environment, making them a widespread […]
I finished my last entry expressing my perplexity by the ‘solution’ mathematicians offered six decades ago to the problem of the continuum : Cohen’s theorem according to which both the assumption that there is some set (say, C) larger than the set of natural numbers but smaller than the set of real numbers, and the […]
Author: Sergi Basco, Adjunct Professor of Economics, Universitat de Barcelona A global reserve currency is one that is extensively held by foreign Central Banks. Since the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement this position has been occupied by the US dollar and it still holds true – according to IMF data from late 2024, the dollar represented […]
Infinity has always been one of the most fascinating and perplexing concepts in mathematics. For ancient Greek mathematicians, it was (in a similar way to the notion of zero) something like a non-concept, i.e., something that one was not allowed to think, and only might express and use by means of circumloquia at the best […]
Author: Karen K. Christensen-Dalsgaard, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, MacEwan University In the 11th century in Cairo, the foundations for modern science were laid through the detention of an innocent man. The mathematician Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham had been tasked with regulating the flow of the Nile, but when he saw the river […]
Author: Jonathan Simone, Adjunct Professor of Biological Sciences, Brock University On May 20, 1875, delegates from a group of 17 countries gathered in Paris to sign what may be the most overlooked yet globally influential treaty in history: the Metre Convention. At a time when different countries (and even different cities defined weights and lengths […]
Authors: Ralph Hertwig, Director, Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 paved the way for the democratisation of many eastern European countries and triumphantly ushered in the era of global liberal democracy that some […]
I shall end this series on the problem of verisimilitude by sketching the main methodological norms that can be derived from our favorite definition of “empirical truthlikeness” –remember: the verisimilitude of a hypothesis H on the light of the empirical data E, or Vs(H,E ), would be equivalent to p(H,E)/p(HvE). Remember as well that by […]
Author: María Martinón-Torres, CENIEH Director, Atapuerca Research Team and author of “Homo imperfectus” (Ed. Destino), Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) The research team at the Atapuerca archaeological sites in Burgos, Spain, has just broken its own record by discovering, for the third time, the oldest human in Western Europe. The team […]