Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

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 […]

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’ […]

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 […]

We recently explored the concepts that Faraday introduced regarding the relationship between electricity and magnetism. In this article we focus on their treatment by Maxwell. The work of Oersted, Ampere, Henry, and finally Faraday had established two basic principles of electromagnetism: 1. An electric current in a conductor produces magnetic lines of force that circle […]

Strands of dark matter may create “beard” around Eart Earth may have a “beard” of dark matter shooting out from it, and the roots may hold a wealth of information about the elusive stuff and Earth itself. The model shows how dark matter streams may interact with a planet’s gravity, passing straight through and producing […]

If you have been following this series, I guess you will by now have learned a few surprising details about the history of western thought. For example, the fact that Ancient skeptics considered that it was suspension of belief , rather than the search for certainty , what most plausibly could lead us to happiness […]

Lots of dark matter may lurk inside dwarf galaxy Triangulum II, a dwarf galaxy that doesn’t have any star-forming regions, may harbor a vast amount of dark matter. The discovery was made while attempting to measure Triangulum II’s mass. “The total mass I measured was much, much greater than the mass of the total number […]

We now refer to light as the form electromagnetic radiation to which the human eye is sensitive and on which our visual awareness of the universe and its contents relies. If we want to go a step forward we could say that its macroscopic behaviour is best explained by a set of differential equations proposed […]

Standard supply and demand analysis shows that competitive markets will deliver a given commodity up to the point where costs (as perceived by producers) equal benefits (as perceiver by consumers). When both producers and consumers internalize all costs and benefits, the result is efficient in the sense that the market does not dilapidate resources. An […]

Stability improved by allowing plasma closer to fusion reactor walls Researchers studying magnetic confinement fusion have found that allowing plasma to get closer to reactor walls may make the system more stable. It was a scary proposition because if their experiment didn’t work, it would have melted the reactor. Teams from China and the US […]