Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

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 […]

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 […]