Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

Massive gas cloud boomeranging back to Milky Way A massive gas cloud that was almost ejected from the Milky Way is hurtling back to our galaxy, according to findings gathered from new observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. Dubbed the Smith Cloud, it is expected to smash into the galactic plane in about 30 million […]

“We asked for workers. We got people instead.” Max Frisch In a past article, I reviewed the recent literature on the effects of immigration on the labor market. To sum up, it finds no significant negative effects on employment or wages of native workers while it boosts the local economy. From here, one may be […]

Noodle-, hazelnut-shaped plasma lenses may be hiding in Milky Way Scientists are learning more about the shape of mysterious plasma lenses, which seem to invisibly float around the Milky Way, detected through radio waves. Researchers were able to detect a lengthy lensing event that gave them an idea of the shapes of the lenses. Space.com […]

The usage of the words “Eskimo” and “Inuit” is one of these cases in which, all of a sudden, we are told we have been saying something wrong all along. Lawrence Kaplan from the Alaska Native Language Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks explained that the words “Eskimo” and “Inuit” do not mean the […]

Fish communicate to stay close to each other Fish use calls to stick together as a group, a new study suggests. Researchers played recordings of bigeye vocalizations for captive wild bigeyes, and noted that their own vocalizations increased and they swam more closely together than they did when no recordings were played. “This study means […]

Ancient grooves may be evidence of dinosaur mating ritual Four sites found in Colorado exhibit fossilized grooves that may have been made by dinosaurs doing a bird-like mating dance more than 100 million years ago. Scientists say the gouges could have been made by theropods performing a mating ritual common to modern birds. The Washington […]

Robots will be ubiquitous in the near future, few people would argue against that, with some authors even talking of a “ Cambrian Explosion of robotics ” . This bigger presence of robots in our daily life has accelerated the subfield of roboethics , which is trying to establish how we must design, use and […]

Mystery of disappearing electrons may be solved A band of invisible meteor dust drifting to Earth may be behind the disappearance of electrons in the high atmosphere that’s had scientists baffled since the 1960s Electrons are produced high above Earth when the sun’s ultraviolet rays interact with atmospheric nitric oxide, but a big drop has […]

As you can imagine from the reading of the previous entries, it was by no means an easy task to transform skepticism into a weapon against religious belief. This does not entail that criticisms of religion tout court had failed to exist before, say, the late Modern Age. Not to mention again our adorable Greeks […]

How information might be retrieved from a black hole There may be a way to retrieve a bit of information from inside a black hole. A team of physicists from the California Institute of Technology theorizes that the information can be gleaned by using Hawking radiation exiting the black hole and quantum teleportation. Science Crows […]