Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

When I buy in a market I only deal with myself regardless of whether the market is competitive or in the hands of a monopoly. Given the price, I choose how much to buy. In an auction to get a Government project a firm has to anticipate what the other firms are bidding, but and […]

Mars’ magnetic field shaken by close comet flyby A comet streaking by Mars in 2014 wreaked havoc on the Red Planet’s fragile magnetic field, according to data collected by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft, according to NASA. Discovery Bacteria found in Japanese recycling center evolves to consume plastic A bacteria that […]

Farthest galaxy ever seen spotted by Hubble The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the farthest galaxy found so far, 13.4 billion light-years away, according to findings published in the Astrophysical Journal. Astronomers say the galaxy, GN-z11, dates back to just 400 million years after the Big Bang. The Christian Science Monitor Mars’ outer layers shifted […]

The number of people who speak one language (monolinguals) is rather small today , with many of us growing up with more than one language or learning another one during our lifetime. Language experts argue that what counts as speaking two languages (bilingualism) is not only a matter of the number of languages we speak […]

Scientists find clues to suggest new type of neutrino Hints of the existence of an elusive sterile neutrino have been detected in the Daya Bay nuclear reactor facility near Hong Kong. This would be the first discovery of a particle which cannot be accommodated in the framework of the so-called standard model. Science News Quantum […]

Disks can store information for billions of years A new five-dimensional data storage method has been developed that researchers say can last up to 13.8 billion years, withstand extreme heat and hold all sorts of information. The data are encoded into minuscule nanostructures in small glass discs. The Verge New carbon structure can hold liquids […]

Energy sources in the modern world are mostly based on fossil fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal. They all share two main characteristics of the utmost importance for their economic analysis. First, they are depletable resources. The amount of reserves for these resources may be small or large, but definitely not large enough to […]

Gravitational waves predicted by Einstein heard by LIGO Gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes about 1.3 billion years ago have been detected by Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, confirming a prediction Albert Einstein made a century ago in his general theory of relativity. The sound came through as a chirp first […]

Though I’m making a break in the brief story of skepticism I have been telling in my past entries, we will not lose contact with our friends the demons; if in that story we were talking about the most philosophical one of them ( Descartes’ Evil Demon ), this time our initial protagonist is another […]

Unusual nasal dome allowed ancient beast to trumpet like a dinosaur An ancient wildebeest-like creature that lived during the Ice Age had an unusual skull shape that enabled it to bellow like a dinosaur, according to researchers who found the skull fossils on what is now Kenya’s Rusinga Island. Rusingoryx atopocranion, which lived between 75,000 […]