Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Portion of rat brain reconstructed in computer A group of 82 neuroscientists have built a portion of a rat’s brain in a computer. The reconstruction is the work of the controversial Blue Brain Project, which hopes to complete a rat brain and move on to a human brain one day. The computerized brain section, culled […]
Descartes’ opening of the Pandora’s box of skepticism, and the liberation of the Evil Demon it triggered, started a terrible shock in the tectonic plates of Western thought, a shock whose waves still reach us with more or less strength, and that mainly contributed to configure our contemporary intellectual landscape. I shall devote the next […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Volcanoes, asteroid may have killed dinosaurs Researchers studying ancient lava flows in India say volcanic eruptions, combined with an asteroid strike, caused the mass extinction of dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. Los Angeles Times New Zealand fish jumps out of water to hunt prey Researchers in New Zealand have discovered that the banded kokopu […]
Biology • Biotechnology • Ethics • Evolution • Genetics
Ever since the 1993 film based on Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park was released, the thought of reviving extinct species using molecular biology techniques has been on the forefront of the collective imaginary. The idea seemed pretty simple: reading the genetic code of fossilized animals would provide the instruction manual to bring them back to […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Gravitational waves from binary black holes milder than thought Black holes rotating around each other on a collision course create milder gravitational waves than previously thought, a study published online in Science suggests. Scientists studying pulsars with super-sensitive equipment for 11 years looking for evidence of gravitational waves coming from binary black holes haven’t found […]
A lot has been said and written about what makes women physically attractive, from having full lips and/or breasts to being shorter than a man, to having a symmetrical face to having a low waist-hip ratio (WHR), all being indicators, at least in theory, of potential reproductive fitness . For instance, a low WHR has […]
Researchers seem to be reassured and perhaps compete in remarking the complexity of their own topics of study. We language scientists, however, can sit back and let our topic do the talking. Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics are, broadly, the super-cogs in the language machinery, each recruiting a set of brain systems in […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
A predicted collision between pair of black holes The prediction late last year of a collision between a pair of supermassive black holes in a galaxy about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth has gotten support from a new study by scientists at Columbia University. Last year, scientists noticed a flickering pulse from the galaxy’s quasar […]
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 […]