Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

In the last entries of our series on the origins of Islam we shall explore some of the information contained in or directly connected to the Qur’an itself. As I explained in the previous article, the Holy Qur’an is the only important Arabic written document from the VIIth century. Even stone inscriptions in Arabic are […]

Hope springs eternal: “Pandora’s Promise” and the truth about nuclear energy So why would environmentalists of all people support nuclear power? What changed these people’s minds? Two things, primarily. The Curious Wavefuntion Making and Breaking Compulsive Behaviour When scientists have scanned the brains of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, they’ve seen more neural activity in areas […]

Graphene shown to produce ultrashort laser pulses Researchers have discovered that graphene can absorb light over a broad range of wavelengths, allowing it to be used to create ultrashort laser pulses of color. The discovery could mean that graphene, a thin, strong conductive material, could be used to create small, economical ultrashort-pulse lasers used in […]

In the first article of this series, we saw what Middle-East Christian texts from the 7th century told about the Arabian invaders that abruptly took those wealthy territories that during the previous centuries had been disputed between the Romans and the Persians (first, Palestina, Syria and Mesopotamia; a little later Egypt and Persia itself). In […]

Competing gravity of galactic clouds probably caused band of gas A gravitational tug-of-war between the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud may be responsible for the huge ribbon of gas at the halo of the Milky Way. Astronomers in the U.S. and Germany measured how much oxygen and sulphur there is in the […]

On the eve of the First World War, British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey is reported to have said: ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time’. 2014 will mark the one-hundred-year anniversary of the war that provoked that ominous statement. The conflict that tore […]

To avoid any confusion regarding the object of study a disclaimer is in order. A statistical life is not a human life. The value of a human life is a concept that cannot be easily defined, if it can at all. I may value my life in such a way that I am willing to […]

“Junk” DNA in plants not needed to remain healthy So-called junk DNA is just that — junk, according to a study by researchers at the University of Buffalo in New York. In a study of the carnivorous bladderwort plant, they found that the part of the genome not responsible for coding proteins in plants is […]

Power has always been an issue of particular importance for the social sciences, in general, and for Political Economy in particular. Many studies in this field, from different approaches, have wondered about the nature, structure and sources of power. Particularly noteworthy are those authors –such us Susan Strange, Stephen Gill of Ulrich Beck– who have […]

Since the first half of the 19th century, philologists and historians have been examining the extant evidence about the origins of Christianism and Judaism, particularly studying the books of the Bible with the methods applied to any other old document. Though this research faced strong opposition both from most Christian denominations and from some of […]