Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

A Spanish folk saying goes “ mujer que sabe latín no tiene marido ni tiene buen fin ,” which may be translated as “a women who knows Latin can expect neither a husband nor a good ending”. The saying implies how difficult is has been traditionally for an educated woman to be accepted as a […]

Together with the discovery of America, the Protestant Reformation was probably the main historical factor in the (European) Modern Age. As we saw in the previous entry, the debate between different Christian denominations was a perfect breeding ground to put into use the recently rediscovered arguments of the ancient Greek Skeptics (though in practice the […]

Could we instantly I.D. pathogens by their glow? It can take days to identify pathogens by swabs and cultures. A new technique uses spectroscopy to see immediately the light bacteria emit. Futurity Old, distant galaxy baffles scientists A galaxy described as the oldest and most distant to be observed has perplexed scientists, and may cause […]

Some decades ago, the American social scientist Donald T. Campbell imagined interdisciplinary research as a fish-scale structure according to which scholars should make an effort to create links between disciplines, spanning areas ignored by others, in an overlapping pattern aiming to cover the entire web of knowledge. He suggested that scholars should overcome the “ […]

Carbon dating suggests Quran fragments could be older than once thought Fragments of what’s believed to be the world’s oldest Quran may be older than previously thought, even possibly predating the prophet Muhammad, according to researchers at Oxford University. The text was initially tested by Birmingham University, which used radiocarbon dating to suggest the fragments […]

As we saw in the previous entry of this series, skepticism had a relatively minor role during the development of medieval philosophy, with the main exception of the interesting possibility of interpreting the Pseudo-Dionysius as a skeptic about our knowledge of the nature of God (not, of course, of its being… save for ‘being’ being […]

New mathematical definition may help identify chaos A new mathematical definition looks to describe the potential for chaos. The theory is roughly based on something akin to entropy, the degree of randomness within a system. “You could say you have chaos if you have exponential growth of uncertainty. That could happen in relatively simple systems […]

Scientists in Antarctica find evidence of neutrinos’ existence The existence of cosmic neutrinos has been confirmed by scientists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. Researchers combed through years of data collected by sensors buried in the ice and pinpointed 21 ultra high-energy muons created by rare neutrino interactions with other particles. They say the […]

¨The chemical bond¨ is one of the most often used concepts in chemistry. It is also one of the eldest terms since the first definition of chemical bond comes from the studies of G.N. Lewis who published his classical paper on interactions between atoms in 1916 . Lewis stated that ¨ we shall say that […]

Small Jupiter-like exoplanet viewed directly by Earth-based telescope An exoplanet resembling a young Jupiter has been found by astronomers using an Earth-based telescope, the Gemini Planet Imager in Chile, according to findings published online in Science. The gas giant has been dubbed 51 Eridani b and is about 96 light-years from Earth. “To detect planets […]