L’envelliment és una disminució de l’eficiència de les nostres funcions fisiològiques que, en cas de no morir abans per causes externes, conduirà finalment a la mort.

In our territory garrofons (butter beans) are highly appreciated in the kitchen because it is a basic ingredient in our national dish par excellence –our dearest paella.

The social and behavioral sciences share many characteristics with the «hard» or «natural» sciences, including a commitment to the systematic analysis of empirical data, whether quantitative or qualitative. Yet the subject matter of social science is sometimes elusive, involving many abstract entities like values and cultures, and its methods do not always involve measurement or experimentation.

Many philosophers and historians of science deny that there is a single scientific method that applies across all scientific disciplines. Here I distinguish normative from descriptive versions of this thesis. I defend the thesis that there are general normative principles that govern every science.

Science is a cultural product, and so can have no single meaning.

This article briefly reviews and criticizes various strategies that have been proposed by philosophers of science in order to establish a distinction between science and non-science.

James Clerk Maxwell proved that electricity and magnetism are only different manifestations of the same physical substrate, electromagnetism.

Snow pits and climate evolution Ever since 1970, in the first Spanish comprehensive study on this area, when geographer Horacio Capel drew attention to the value of the study of traditional ice

The vast majority of what we know of the universe we have learned it studying the light coming from incredibly distant objects. Light is but an electromagnetic wave (an oscillation in

Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest […] sed naturae especies ratioque.1 Titus Lucretius Carus. De rerum natura, Liber tertius: 91-93 I always found these verses by Lucretius following his praise of Epicurus, «honour

Becoming informed about the relevant scientific findings can help us make the most plausible interpretation of what philosophers have said, for example, ruling out literal readings.

There was a time when Homo Sapiens coexisted with other species of the same genus such as Homo neanderthalensis or Homo denisova. However all the groups were very small. Today

«Even being born results in a loud cry», Raimon sings. There are two crucial moments that demarcate human existence: birth and death. Death comes in many forms, agonising or peaceful,

I vividly remember a conversation about the importance of basic science at Harvard University with chemistry Nobel laureate Walter Gilbert. Dr. Gilbert stressed the importance of doing research in order to

The last song in Pink Floyd’s LP The Dark Side of the Moon, published in 1973, mentioned it: «There’s no dark side of the Moon really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark. »

If anything makes space travel particular is its roughness: fuel bursting in a controlled explosion, which, more than once, end up being uncontrolled. But space exploration based on chemical rockets is well established, it

Oxytocin promotes both positive and negative social emotions depending on context, sex, previous experience of the subject and personality.

Promoter of an International Epidemiology Service and World Documentation Centre for Public Health, Rajchman’s indefatigable activism for global health deserves the recognition he never received.

Lucretian inductions, Galilean evidence or Darwinian deductions were attacks against mental laziness, which is more powerful than any dogma can be. Ideological reasons do not explain human resistance to change. Basically, they tend to sloth.

Scientific research is validated by reproduction of the results, but efforts to reproduce spurious claims drain resources. We focus on one cause of such failure: false positive statistical test results caused by random variability.

The history of particle physics has witnessed many experiments that could illustrate the role of statistics, but few can boast a discovery of such scientific impact and dimensions as the Higgs boson, resulting from a colossal collective and technological endeavour.