Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

Dog breeds in Americas trace ancestry to Asian dogs A study found that modern breeds of Chihuahuas, Arctic sled dogs and Peruvian hairless dogs trace their ancestry to dogs that humans brought across the ancient land bridge that connected North America to Northeast Asia. The study compared DNA from Asian and European dogs with archaeological […]

Truth has been, and still is, one of the most important topics in the history of philosophical thought. How to get truth from falsity, how to approach the truth, or the connection between truth, wisdom and the sense of life, all that has been the object of never-ending debates which anyone familiar with philosophy will […]

Clouds protect habitable planets from star’s heat According to a recent study that developed a 3D model to explore how clouds affect temperatures on exoplanets, the number of habitable worlds could be double the amount previously thought. The study found that as many as 60 billion exoplanets fall within a habitable zone around their star […]

Poor Math Skills Make a Mortgage Default More Likely Unprecedented numbers of American subprime mortgage holders began defaulting on their loans in 2006, precipitating two years later the most severe global recession since The Great Depression. Pundits have offered numerous theories about what started the mortgage mayhem, but firm evidence has remained elusive. According to […]

Violence against women at epidemic proportions Three in ten women worldwide have been punched, shoved, dragged, threatened with weapons, raped, or subjected to other violence from a current or former partner. Close to one in ten have been sexually assaulted by someone other than a partner. Of women who are murdered, more than one in […]

Decision making in areas such as production planning, distribution and grid management, logistics or financial portfolio management is usually based on mathematical models, mathematical optimization themselves. Let us assume that we have to take a decision of how many units to produce of two products A and B. The production system is common and has […]

We shall close with this entry our series (I, II, III) about the origins of Islam, indicating some further interesting facts about the Qur’an. 4) By Muhammad’s time, the Arabic alphabet contained no marks for vowels; furthermore, some groups of consonants were written with exactly the same character (e.g., the symbols for sounds b, t […]

A complex myriad of factors, many of them related with the global economic crisis, have given rise to a large number of social movements in the latest years. From the Occupy movement to the Arab Spring, or the more recent Turkish protests, most of these phenomena share a notorious fact: having the social networking and […]

A naïve application of simple economic models will predict that, as immigrants enter, the wages or the employment rate of native workers decrease. However, immigrants are not only workers, and they may bring with them entrepreneurship skills, so that they influence not only the supply side of the labor market, but the demand as well […]

The mad hatterpillar These caterpillars are native to Australia and eat eucalyptus trees. Why do they build themselves a hat? No one really seems to know why the caterpillars keep their old heads hanging around. Bug Girl’s Blog When Cleaning fMRI Data is a Nuisance A flaw in data processing could be leading to biases […]