By Antonino Puglisi Close your eyes and try to picture a scientist in your mind. What were they like? Were they male or female? What was the color of the skin? Were they heterosexual or homosexual? What was their hairstyle like? Did she or he have disabilities? Science is a very successful collective endeavor that…
Sensors for perceiving the world
By Ornella Valenti It’s that time of the year again! I don’t know about you, but I am always filled with deep curiosity ahead of the Nobel Prize announcements. This curiosity almost turns into excitement for my favorite one: the prize for Physiology and Medicine. And this year was no different! The ‘winners’ for the…
The sounds exchanged between honeyguides and honey-hunters
By Micaela Gliozzi As can be seen from the many posts on this blog, in nature there is reciprocity and mutual cooperation among its many parts and also among humans themselves. We have also highlighted how humans can learn from the rest of nature and how they are not two separate entities. Indeed, they are…
Cooperation among crops: from the Maya to modern agriculture
By Catherine Belzung The discovery that plants can cooperate through the complementarity of their properties is not new: it has been observed for millenia, and even exploited in agriculture. For example, the ancient Maya developed a culture that included maize (Zea mays), beans (Phaseolus) and squash (Cucurbita pepo), a combination known as “milpa”. The maize and…
What came first, the chicken or the egg? And when can you tell them apart?
By Peter Morovič How we build an understanding of the space around us and how we develop it has been a subject of study in various disciplines, including psychology and mathematics. In the case of psychology, of particular interest is how we start developing such notions as location, distance, shapes, etc. from an early age….
The will to (not) see
By Ján Morovič As we look at the world around us it may seem as if our senses simply represented our environment, as if our experiences were simply a “given”. We have already looked at a number of ways on this blog in which the relationship between visual experiences and the physical properties of our…
Hidden relations that embed us
By Francesca Ceroni William Gilbert once said that “we are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us”. This is very true especially if we think about the many bacteria and microorganisms that co-exist within our body and that we do not always notice, except when their presence leads to an…
Transformed by Time
By Miguel Oliveira Panão Humans have a peculiar relationship with time. We all experience it but feel unable to define it. The sequence of events in our life is like traveling with time. But the aging we see in the mirror is like having time traveling through us. How elusive the understanding of time seems…
Nothing like the Sun
By Gabriel Ferrero It is widely known that the sun, our closest star, is the main source of energy for our planet. We receive around 1017 watts from it, which is approximately the power that 10 thousand billion electric irons would consume. However, this is only a tiny fraction of the energy that the sun…
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos in Nature
By Wiesław M. Macek Causality is the basic principle underlying relations in nature, as coined from the Latin noun causa (in Greek αἰτία). Aristotle (384–322 BC) developed the theory of four different concepts of efficient, final, material, and formal causes, but only the efficient cause was adopted in natural sciences. Namely, from the 17th century onwards, when Isaac Newton…
Wonderverse 