The World Wide Web does not increase polymathy instrumentally. The Internet rather discourages it. Actually, the Internet generation and the library generation have more than a generational conflict. They stage a cultural rupture.

Condorcet was a very remarkable man, who led the French revolutionary thought while it actually lasted, that is, while it subverted outdated ideas and the prevailing reactionary status quo.

At least in villages,our great-grandparents lived almost as the Romans. To reach their standard of living, it took the whole history of civilized humanity.

One fine day I found I had a Mediterranean diet. Just as Molière’s character, who was happy to learn he was speaking in prose, I experienced the satisfaction of right and proper eating. It turns out humankind feeds wrong.

Between 1716 and 1717, Joan Salvador i Riera, an apothecary from Barcelona and Antoine de Jussieu, a professor of botany at Le Jardin du Roi in Paris, travelled the roads of Spain and Portugal, sometime by calash, sometimes on mule back, to make «botanical observations». This article provides a brief overview of the Salvador family and a glimpse of the journey made by these two naturalists.

My thingy (a smartphone) is not smart. Versatile and fast, yes; intelligent, not at all. It controls a lot of routines and no reasoning. That is not intelligence.

In education, urban planning, sustainability, in any domain, we tend to slide down the anecdotal slope of casuistry. Everything becomes a specific case.

In the vernacular, theory amounts to opinion. Everyone has theories. But in science, a theory is a verified body of knowledge.

In a group of islets in the North of Madagascar, a hitherto unknown chameleon species has been found whose adults barely reach 3 cm in length. This minuscule chameleon has the same bone arrangement as any gigantic crocodile.

Our economic system has learned to put a price to production and commerce. But it has not assessed the cost of the outsourcing of cumulative residual materials