Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

Mi weekly selection #163

Mi weekly selection #163

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

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 […]

The Good Bad Robots

The Good Bad Robots

EthicsRobotics

By Inko Elgezua

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 […]

MI weekly selection #162

MI weekly selection #162

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

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 […]

Skepticism, a short uncertain story (8): Do you have a brain or a religion?

Skepticism, a short uncertain story (8): Do you have a brain or a religion?

EpistemologyPhilosophy of science

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

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 […]

Mi weekly selection #160

Mi weekly selection #160

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

Plesiosaurs swam ancient oceans like penguins Plesiosaurs swam much like penguins do, using their front flippers to propel themselves and their back ones to control their direction. How the ancient marine reptiles moved through water was unclear since its fossils were discovered about 200 years ago. Researchers developed a computer model based on a nearly […]

MI weekly selection #159

MI weekly selection #159

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

Unfossilized dinosaur blood vessels discovered Blood vessels from an 80 million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur never fossilized and still hold tissue. The vessels are from the leg bone of a Brachylophosaurus canadensis found in Montana. To determine that the vessels were truly organic matter from the dinosaur and not bacteria, scientists used high-resolution mass spectroscopy and detected […]

Language evolution: The origin

Language evolution: The origin

Linguistics

By Pablo Bernabéu

1 Introduction Evolutionary linguistics encompasses the origins of language, the change within and across different languages, and the acquisition of language and languages by children and adults (Gong, Shuai, & Zhang, 2014). We shall start framing this voyage by looking back two centuries. Then, some theories of language origins seem to have displayed considerable ‘imagination’ […]

MI weekly selection #158

MI weekly selection #158

Humanities & Social SciencesScienceTechnologyWeekly Selection

By César Tomé

Universe isn’t a hologram, experiment determines A controversial experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has found no evidence supporting the theory that the universe is a giant hologram. The Holometer searched for a kind of holographic noise using interferometers, but nothing has been detected. Science Sonic tractor beam developed A tractor beam that lifts […]