Alternative medicine has a high social prevalence, being promoted by well organized groups that have developed an intricate rhetoric in order to self-justify in the absence of evidence. This article will analyse some of these arguments, some of their fallacies, other styles of reasoning, and other misconceptions of scientific concepts.

Both the scientific and philosophical problems with classic pseudosciences such as astrology and creationism are well known. Most fields of inquiry have controversial areas that inspire suspicions of systematic intellectual malpractice.

This paper develops an epidemiological approach to account for the typical features and popularity of pseudoscience and discuss several factors that promote the dissemination of pseudoscientific beliefs.

Science is a fact-finding practice, but there are many other fact-finding practices that apply largely the same patterns of reasoning in order to achieve as reliable information as possible in empirical issues.

Pseudosciences are by-products of the prestige of science as a social enterprise and as a means of obtaining knowledge. Their character is inherently negative, given that, by definition, a pseudoscience

Literature constitutes an important educational element that can improve the doctor-patient relationship because it facilitates better understanding of illnesses.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal was also the author of some very important scientific and biographical work as well as his Vacation stories. Five science fiction tales, a collection of five short stories with an educational purpose.

Long before the first successful transplants were performed on humans, some writers had already written about them in fiction. Literature can contribute to the ethical and social debate surrounding transplants.

We can identify two periods in the history of AIDS patient narratives: before and after the discovery of triple therapies. We analyse the changes this paradigm shift produced on literature.

Literature and medicine are closely connected. Many works that portray experiences of disease have been set in health care facilities, including sanatoriums. Anti-tuberculosis sanatoriums, seen as spaces of isolation and as «death row» have inspired many authors. Twentieth-century novels devoted significant attention to these institutions which, kept far from the rest of society, conditioned both the life and the identity of the sick.

Literature has had a range of ways to approach the concept of death, from expressions of personal grief, through to the ways they are represented in a culture.

A critical review of Woolf's literary legacy allows us to get closer to what might be one of the most intense literary portrayals of illness and its metaphors and, at the same time, to the representations, euphemisms, silences, and monsters depicted in the chapters of her life and in the unique voice of this essential author.

La literatura ha estat, és i serà un element nuclear en l’estudi de les distintes formes de representació semiòtica de la salut i de la malaltia. Hi ha dos elements essencials perquè això siga així; en primer lloc, el fet que l’activitat relacionada amb la salut i la malaltia, també en entorns professionals, està travessada contínuament per narracions (a vegades, en forma d’informes o apunts presos en escoltar el relat del pacient); el segon és que, certament, el fet d’emmalaltir i el de curar va associat a circumstàncies de vegades excepcionals i suggeridores per a la creació.

Anatomically modern humans represent an evolutionary, biological, and cultural synthesis of our genus. Genetics has helped us to discover and compare a multitude of hybridisations among the populations that lived and coexisted with Homo sapiens out of Africa.

This work reviews the main questions surrounding the evolution of the genus Homo, such as its origin, the problem of variability in Homo erectus and the impact of palaeogenomics.

This article looks briefly at how our current supremely woolly concept of the genus Homo has come about, as background for urging a more rational approach to defining it.

The palaeogenomics (ancient DNA) field can be defined as the recovery and analysis of genetic material from the biological remains of the past and has become a powerful scientific field that provides direct information about the evolutionary process through space and time.

Recent paleoanthropological evidence from the early Pleistocene site of Dmanisi in Georgia has revealed that the first hominins out of Africa were more archaic than the coeval African and Asian Homo erectus.

Despite the bewilderment caused the almost continuous bombardment of news about the discovery of a new fossil that revolutionizes everything we knew until now about human evolution, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is a broad consensus regarding certain key moments in our evolution.

The Riemann hypothesis is an unproven statement referring to the zeros of the Riemann zeta function.

Mathematically, the motion of a fluid is described by the so-called Navier-Stokes equations. In the spirit of Newtonian mechanics, these equations should determine the future motion of the fluid out of its initial state.

The aim of this article is to highlight some previous challenges that were also a stimulus to finding proof for some interesting results. With this pretext, we present three moments in the history of mathematics that were important for the development of new lines of research.

The Hodge conjecture, proposed in 1950, is one of the seven millennium problems, and is framed within differential geometry and algebraic geometry.

The Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman did not accept the Fields Medal in 2006 and refused the million dollar prize for solving Poincaré's conjecture, one of the millennium problems, in 2010.