Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

Coffee genome offers insights on why caffeine is produced Scientists have cracked the genome of Coffea canephora, one source of coffee beans, to gain insights into how caffeine evolved and why plants make it. A study published in Science details the complex evolution of caffeine in coffee and the ways in which that differs from […]

That prediction is one of the main goals of science goes without saying, but how exactly predictive success contributes to the epistemic value of a scientific theory has proven to be an awfully complicated philosophical riddle for centuries. By ‘epistemic value’ I don’t mean something for which we can offer a formal definition (this is […]

One of the most common misconceptions regarding inequality consists of thinking that an unequal distribution of resources is the result of an unequal effort to achieve them. Although this might be the case in certain situations, when it comes to particular individuals, the fact is that there are systemic structural forces governing the result of […]

Spitzer detects proto-planetary collision near new star Evidence of a proto-planetary collision 1,200 light-years away has been seen near a young sun-like star by NASA’s Spitzer infrared space telescope. Scientists detected a significant change in the infrared radiation emissions from dust around the 35-million-year-old star, known as NGC 2547-ID8, in the constellation Vela. Discovery News […]

Author: Shaul Katzir is a Marie Curie senior research fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation (M4HUMAN programme), at the Minerva Centre for Humanities – Tel Aviv University World War One was the first military confrontation to which scientists and engineers were mobilized for research and development in a wide scale. Earlier, science and scientists were […]

In Economics, an efficiency wage is defined as a wage above the equilibrium price paid to obtain a more efficient job from the employee. For this to be the case, there must be some sort of market failure that prevents the equilibrium from being efficient. One such a scenario occurs when there are some forms […]

Ancient star holds evidence of one of its earliest ancestors Traces of one of the universe’s first stars may have been found in the chemical signature of another ancient star that gobbled up material from the earlier star’s supernova. SDS J0018-0939, a star found in the halo around the Milky Way about 1,000 light-years from […]

Is the intelligence test an “objective”, scientific device or just a way to “execute” social discrimination? This article (based on ) presents the latest steps to trace the history of one of the most problematic chapters in psychology’s history: the application of intelligence testing. By informing about the history of the IQ debate I want […]

A switch for internal, external brain processes Researchers have observed how the brain switches between internal and external information processes in mice. Scientists manipulated thalamic reticular nucleus cells to get the mice to switch information systems. Researchers hope the study could lead to treatments for people with autism or schizophrenia, whose brains have difficulty with […]

I am concerned here with the ways science and the future were interpreted during the interwar years. I argue that we need to come to deal not just with “the view of science”, but rather with sharply contrasting and competing narratives vigourously expressed in a new media-rich world after the First World War. Our vision […]