Category archives: Humanities & Social Sciences

The notion of ‘cause’ has a bipolar personality within the sciences. On the one hand, it is difficult to resist to the old Aristotelian dictum that real scientific knowledge (episteme) is knowledge of the causes; after all, one of the goals of scientific theories is to give explanations, and most people assume that to have […]

Bat-eating spiders are more common than you think Bat-eating spiders are more common in the world than once believed. These spiders are found on all continents except Antarctica. Almost 90% of the web-building spider and tarantula species live in warmer climates, and can capture bats both with and without a web. LiveScience Nyffeler M, Knörnschild […]

Scientific experiments using animals frequently involve the marking of animals that artificially changes their phenotype. For instance, penguins with flipper bands have been used to study climate change. However, as Saraux et al. show, this banding reduces penguins’ survival rate. Consequently the study may mix up the effects of banding with other changes in penguin […]

This is the ultimatum game: You are provisionally allocated USD10 with the following instructions. You have to decide a way to divide this money with another person. If she or he agrees, the division is carried out. If not, you both get nothing. What would you do? How would you react if you were the […]

3-body problem gets 13 more possible solutions Scientists have come up with 13 new solutions to the “three-body problem,” a situation in which three objects orbit each other in a pattern. The discoveries, which will help astrophysicists further understand planetary systems, brings the total number of solutions to 16. Science now Milovan Šuvakov, V. Dmitrašinović […]

Imagine the following situation: about 100 people have to choose one of them for an important position; they have different preferences about who must be chosen, some may have a stronger or lighter interest in being elected, but, and this is essential, it is very likely that most of them will have to cast their […]

Bunnies implicated in the demise of Neanderthals in Iberia Excavations are shedding light on what might have been a significant factor in the demise of the Neanderthal: the inability to hunt small game. The remains of large animals are prevalent in Neanderthal cave excavations, but the bones of smaller animals such as rabbits were prevalent […]

Zircon grains came from ancient continent Grains of zircon found on the island of Mauritius may have come from the crust of an ancient continent beneath the Indian Ocean. The grains formed almost 2 billion years ago, but the island is only 65 million years old. New Scientist Trond H. Torsvik, Hans Amundsen, Ebbe H […]

Carlos Fuentes, one of the great contemporary Latin American writers, once said that La Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (‘The truthful history of the conquest of New Spain’, first published in 1632) was the true foundation of the Latin American novel. This chronicle narrates the conquest of modern-day Mexico by the […]

“Native” water once existed on the Moon A new analysis of lunar soil samples from NASA’s Apollo missions has found evidence that the moon in its early days may have contained “native” water. The findings, which were published in the journal Nature Geoscience, go against prevailing theories that the moon formed from the debris of […]