Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

Strawberry poison frogs pass on chemical defense to offspring Strawberry poison frogs provide chemical defenses to their tadpoles by feeding them eggs spiked with alkaloids. Researchers measured alkaloid content in the frogs during different stages of development, separating them into two groups — one in which tadpoles were reared and fed by their mothers and […]

Researchers try to figure out sea worm’s blue glow Researchers are a step closer to figuring out why a common sea worm glows blue on the shallow seafloors it calls home, thanks to a pair of experiments conducted by biologists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. First, they found that the worm, unlike other light-emitting organisms […]

The term ‘economics of scientific knowledge’ (ESK) was coined as a reaction to the field known from the seventies as ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’. The latter had been defined by the members of the so called ‘Strong Programme’ in contraposition to the classical notion of a ‘sociology of science’, having in mind a distinction between […]

China’s Forbidden City had rocks transported via ice sheets. The massive stones used to build parts of China’s Forbidden City in the 15th century were pulled by several hundred workers more than 40 miles on sledges across artificial ice, researchers say. China had discovered the wheel, but a sign at the Forbidden City hinted that […]

Tax data are an important source of information for a wide range of statistical series. Their use, however, has been mainly confined to the analysis of the impact of fiscal policies on different socio-economic groups. Nevertheless, a recent group of researchers has started using personal income tax data to construct top income shares series, i.e […]

Brains wired to be wary of snakes The brain is wired to detect the threat of snakes, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers studied a pair of macaque monkeys born in captivity who had not encountered snakes before the experiment. When shown an image of a […]

There is only one concept more important in (traditional) metaphysics than the concept of truth: the concept of being, existence, or reality. If we can interpret Aristotle as being the first deflationist philosopher about truth (when he asserts in his Metaphysics , IX, that “it is true to say of what is that is, and […]

Cassini images add clues to Titan’s weather cycle New photos from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft are giving researchers clues to the weather cycle of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. By studying previous images, scientists think Titan has a hydrologic cycle, in which hydrocarbons rain onto the surface filling the lakes and then evaporating back into the […]

One of the aspects in which modern economics has departed further away from the neoclassical paradigm is the treatment of information after the seminal works of Akerlof, Spence and Stiglitz, who rightly won the Nobel prize for their contributions. Some theoretical models were introduced to explain economic phenomena that did not fit well in the […]

How science goes wrong Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself The Economist Astronomers find a “tilted” solar system Scientists have discovered a “tilted” solar system, according to a report in Science. While looking at Kepler-56, a star about 2,800 light-years away, they were surprised to find that the plane […]