Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

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 […]

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 […]