Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

Identified a new type of stone formed by plastic Discarded plastic has created a new type of stone, mixed with other materials, both natural and manufactured. The strange plastiglomerate formations were first discovered in 2006 on a polluted beach area in a remote part of Hawaii’s Big Island, but the significance of the find wasn’t […]

What is a radiation dosimeter? Why do we need one? To give you an interesting and short response I will remind you what the Japanese government officials offered to Fukushima evacuees after the 2011 nuclear disaster. Having failed to reach their original radiation decontamination target, the government proposed that evacuees could return to their homes […]

Handwriting is key for educational development Handwriting is starting to fade from the curriculum of many schools, but experts say the practice is important for educational development. The New York Times Superbugs use genetic material as cloak to avoid detection A deadly class of antibiotic-resistant bacteria called carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, carries genetic material that serves as […]

In this last article of the series about free will, I am going to defend what we can call ‘the regret hypotheses’, which basically asserts that the feeling of regret is the basic, and best, explanation of why we think we are free, in the sense (as we saw in the first article of the […]

Orb-web spiders craft a unique disguise An orb-web spider hides itself from predators by disguising itself as bird droppings, according to researchers. The spiders have a silver colored body that, when combined with their white disc-shaped webs, gives the illusion of bird excrement that may deter predatory wasps. LiveScience Ants are organized searchers who gain […]

Study of extinct elephant bird leads researchers to surprising conclusion DNA studies of the massive, extinct elephant bird of Madagascar show that its closest modern relative is New Zealand’s tiny kiwi, rather than the ostrich, which it more closely resembles, leading researchers to speculate about how the flightless birds migrated, according to a study published […]

The mysteries of quantum physics have been breeding ground for thousands of attempts to connect any kind of weird hypotheses to ‘science’. The underlying inferential schema in all these attempts seems to be something like the following: X is difficult to understand, and some common-sense intuitions and arguments seem to count against X Quantum physics […]

Author: Alvaro Arrizabalaga received a BA in History (Vitoria, 1988) and a Master in CRM -Archaeology option- (Vitoria, 1992) at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). He finished his PhD in Prehistory ( La industria lítica del Paleolítico superior inicial en el oriente cantábrico ) in 1995. He has been a lecturer of Prehistory […]

This month I present the winner article of the Royal Economic Society Prize 2013 to the best non-solicited paper published in the Economic Journal. The authors are Pau Olivella and Marcos Vera-Hernández. One of the first predictions in the study of Economics of Information is the presence of the “adverse selection” phenomenon. The seminal paper […]

Plant that consumes nickel found in the Philippines A plant that thrives in nickel-rich dirt has been discovered in the Philippines. Rinorea niccolifera can absorb large amounts of nickel through its leaves. UPI Regrown bone in monkeys using pluripotent stem cells It could be possible to grow new bone in humans using induced pluripotent stem […]