Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

Agriculture may have had many roots, DNA study suggests The skeletons of four ancient farmers have been found in Iran, and DNA tests indicate they have no genetic links to Aegeans, long thought to be the first farmers in Europe, which suggests that agriculture may have been developed more than once. DNA analysis of the […]

Cannabis use spread throughout Eurasia as Bronze Age dawned Ancient humans in both Asia and Europe started using cannabis as early as the end of the last ice age. Researchers say the use of cannabis intensified in East Asia around the beginning of the Bronze Age, then spread throughout Eurasia. New Scientist AI technique developed […]

Studies shed new light on Zika virus brain damage in infants Nearly 20% of babies infected with the Zika virus had normal head circumferences, which researchers said indicates a focus on microcephaly screening alone is too narrow, according to a study of about 1,500 newborns. Another study showed that brain tissues of infants with Zika […]

Imaging technique gives scientists a look inside cat mummies The atomic number imaging technique is helping researchers see inside the mummies of cats from ancient Egypt without having to remove the wrappings. Scientists hope they can use the new imaging technique to learn more about human mummies. National Geographic Chunks of land along Calif.’s San […]

In the first entry of this series I introduced the new research field of ‘plant neurobiology’, one of whose main sites is the Murcia University ‘Minimal Intelligence Lab’ under the direction of cognitive scientist and philosopher Paco Calvo. In that entry, I offered a brief sketch of the topics covered by the field, topics that […]

Unlike in perfectly competitive markets, there are many instances of economic situations in which selfish rational behavior does not imply an efficient allocation of resources. One example is the financing of a public good. Say some neighbors are asked to contribute to the construction of a park of one hectare (10,000 m 2 ) in […]

Birds’ small brains pack big neuron punch Birds’ brains may be small, but they pack more neurons related to intelligence than many mammals with larger brains Researchers used an isotropic fractionator to measure the number of neurons in regions of birds’ brains and found that many songbirds and parrots packed more neurons in their brains […]

A 1 million-year-old fire lit by human ancestors was discovered in 2012 in the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa. The soil of the cave yielded several dozen stone tools, microscopic plant ashes and burned bone bits. It is supposed that a member of the Homo genus, perhaps Homo erectus , made a fire that produced […]

The success of Bohr’s model of the atom in accounting for the spectrum of hydrogen left this question: Could experiments show directly that atoms do have only certain, separate energy states? In other words, are there really gaps between the energies that an atom can have? A famous experiment in 1914, by the German physicists […]

For a great part of the past century bilingualism was believed to affect intelligence negatively . Jespersen, in 1922, claimed that “the brain effort required to master the two languages instead of one certainly diminishes the child’s power of learning other things.” Still, some people (wrongly) believe that children might get confused by exposure to […]