Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

Wet sand may have helped ancient Egyptians move massive stones Ancient Egyptians dampened the sand to move the 2.5-ton stones used to build the pyramids to prevent berming and halve the amount of force needed to drag the sled, researchers say. The wet sand reduced the friction, making the sledge easier to move. Scientists at […]

Coral can change physiology to survive warming seas When oceans become warmer or acidic, coral reef apparently have the ability to change their physiology to survive, researchers have discovered. Studying coral off Ofu Island in American Samoa, researchers found that the coral can use their genes to turn on heat-resistant proteins. Nature News Y chromosome […]

Psychologists and neurologists have been interested in the problem of free will since the beginning of their specialities, though the first clearly devised and relevant experiments on the topic were those of Libet and colleagues, in the early eighties. In this famous experiment, subjects who were before a clock, and whose brain electrical waves were […]

Slow shaking under Tokyo could mean a giant earthquake Slow-motion earthquakes beneath Tokyo are becoming more common, raising concerns of another megaquake like the one in 2011. GPS sensors are being used to track the slow shifts, which are unreadable by seismographs, and scientists have found that the shifts are coming more frequently but seismologists […]

Economic models of perfect competition and of monopoly only need to include individual behavior that takes the environment as given. In the case of perfect competition, individual firms and consumers only need to know the prevailing market prices to decide their purchasing and production plans, whereas the monopolist needs to know the demand it faces […]

Fruit flies can make sudden turns similar to fighter jets Fruit flies are capable of sharp turns, like those of fighter pilots, according to researchers studying the ways the insects evade predators. When sensing a threat, the Drosophila hydei flies can execute banked turns at speeds five times faster than when turning normally. Los Angeles […]

Every year, as the International Women’s Day approaches, a classic topic for the media is to summarize statistics related to the gender wage gap . The empirical evidence is overwhelming: differences between men and women in the labor market are persistent in all countries. If we look at Europe and US data in recent years […]

Irradiated scrap metal helps researchers recreate a supernova Scientists have simulated a supernova with the help of some radioactive waste and a particle accelerator at CERN. Researchers took leftover irradiated scraps of metal containing titanium-44, which is made naturally by supernovae, to produce a beam and sent it into a chamber filled with helium to […]

One of the most classical problems in philosophy is the existence and nature of free will. Though the growth of our scientific knowledge about the brain, and about the universe in general, is making the notion of ‘free will’ less and less tenable, it seems that the major difficulty becomes to reconcile this idea with […]

Salamanders may be getting shorter due to climate change Appalachian salamanders have gotten shorter in the past 50 years, possibly adapting to warmer, drier weather conditions. Researchers compared specimens they collected with those collected by museums from the same areas since 1957. They found that each generation of salamanders in several species grew 1% smaller […]