Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

Archaeologists work by destroying their object of study. An archaeological excavation is a process of deliberate destruction of the site being dug, during which relevant information is recorded. Since the original site is destroyed in the process, information must be recorded with special care, because archaeologists cannot revisit the site to check dubious information or […]

Researchers do not know what influences have the stereotypical images of scientists, if any, on children’s perception of science. The most common technique for assessing children’s perceptions of scientists is the Draw-a-Scientist Test (DAST). David Wade Chambers firstly proposed it in 1983 , and its main aim was to identify at what age the stereotypic […]

Here is an oversimplified vision of immigration: a substantial number of foreign unskilled workers enter the job market, causing a shift of the labor supply curve to the right (workers are suppliers of work), and changing the current equilibrium to another one with lower wages. This is does not need to be the case. Immigrants […]

As we saw in the previous entries (1,2), the representational theory of measurement (RTM), mainly developed around the mid of the 20 th century, was one of the main warhorses of the by then vigorous positivist ideal of scientific knowledge. According to that theory, the application (and the applicability) of numbers and other mathematical concepts […]

Los Angeles quakes in 1920s likely tied to oil drilling The oil industry may have caused earthquakes in the Los Angeles area in the 1920s. US Geological Survey researchers looked at 18 significant quakes that occurred near active oil fields and determined that 13 of them likely were connected with oil drilling. Ars Technica Huge […]

Different electoral rules have consequences on the strategic behavior of voters, political selection and policy outcomes. There is ample literature on the links between electoral rules and policy outcomes (see, for instance, Cox, 1997 ; Persson and Tabellini, 2000 , 2005 , and Norris, 2004 ). However, the extent to which the quality of the […]

Many moons may be waiting to be discovered in our solar system There are likely more moons to be found in our galaxy, according to re-evaluation of data from the Voyager space probes and searches by the Hubble Space Telescope and with future searches by the more powerful James Webb Space Telescope set to be […]

Technique adds color to electron microscope images Researchers at the University of California at San Diego have developed a technique that adds color to black-and-white electron microscope images. The scientists create a black-and-white base layer by adding a heavy metal to the specimen, then create another layer by adding a rare earth metal that clings […]

Common swift can fly for 10 months straight The common swift can fly for 10 months without landing. The birds capture food in the air and drink by skimming water, and if they stop at all, it’s only for one or two hours before they resume their long migration between Northern Europe and Central Africa […]

Strange objects near neighboring galaxies brighten, then dim A pair of unknown objects near neighboring galaxies appear to produce extremely bright X-ray flares, then dim after about an hour. Astronomers aren’t sure what these objects are, noting that nothing like them has ever been spotted in the Milky Way. New Scientist Landslides appear to have […]