Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

…at least not on their own. So, it´s already been over half a century since the humble proposition of Watson & Crick on the structure of DNA, (one of) the molecule(s) of life: a seminal discovery for the development of molecular biology that was to become arguably the most relevant discipline in last century´s life […]

[You can read the first part here] (3) Positivism is the (philosophico-political) thesis that real knowledge reduces to the domain of established positive facts, and that all the other claims someone may make must not be taken as knowledge, but, at best, as more or less reasonable opinion . Positivism in this sense is a […]

Looks like a mouse but is genetically related to elephants A tiny, long-nosed creature found in western Africa looks like a mouse, but is genetically closer to an elephant, according research published in the Journal of Mammalogy. Biologists who discovered the new species of elephant shrew call it Macroscelides micus. It lives in an ancient […]

Hidden portrait lies behind Picasso’s “Blue Room” Scientists using infrared technology have revealed a portrait of a bearded man resting his head on his hand underneath Pablo Picasso’s 1901 painting “The Blue Room.” Picasso often reused canvasses because he couldn’t afford new ones, according to art experts. Two years ago, another portrait was found underneath […]

(1) Imagine you are watching on the TV your favourite football match, Real Madrid vs. Barcelona, and that you can choose on your remote two digital channels in which the game is being broadcast, Telemadrid and TV3 (the Catalan public station). The experience of watching the match in one or other of these two channels […]

You play rock-paper-scissors against someone. What is the best strategy? Of course, it depends of what your opponent does. If he is someone who always plays “rock”, then you better play “paper”. But if your opponent is not that naïve and searches for his best play, what would you do? The first thing to notice […]

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 […]