Since the world learned of the cloning of Dolly, commentators have been more concerned with speculating about its use by dictators or athletes, while overlooking the genuine importance of this finding. The implications and practical applications of this discovery still remain unknown. To help us take a closer look at the case of Dolly from the correct approach, the researchers Alexander Kind and Angelika Schnieke outline a painstaking path from Aristotle to the beginnings of biology, and help us to understand the importance of this achievement in its context. […]
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The history of science and engineering as an important social force is relatively short. Most would date it to the Copernican revolution of the sixteenth century, i.e. for less than a quarter percent of the time we have existed on this planet. With the advent of the scientific process—using abstract agnostic tools of mathematics, questioning, […]
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«Here and there, intellectuals are waking up to the fact that increasingly such concepts as the “end of the modern era” are making an unquestioned place for themselves in the public mind» […]
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The United Nations has declared 2009 the International Year of Biodiversity, in homage to the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), whose book, On the Origin of the Species by Natural Selection (1859) marks the beginning of the science of biodiversity. At last, everything seemed to make sense: the subtle differences among similar […]
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Introduction The year 2008 marks the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Its creation grew out of an agreement between the World Meteorological Organization (a part of the United Nations) and the United Nations Programme. Its goal was to supply independent scientific information—in principle, to politicians—about questions concerning […]
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“Music is just as essential to the human being as food, sex or survival. This is one of the ideas contained in the article “Frontiers and knowledge in music? A few notes”, written by the composer Luis de Pablo. Professor of composition in
Buffalo (New York), Ottawa, Montreal, Madrid, Milan and Strasbourg, and a member of the Academies of Fine Arts of Madrid and Granada, De Pablo takes a brief tour through key moments in the history of music (from its earliest forms
in Greece in India through to the creation of electronic music) in search of answers to the question of whether music can be a vehicle for knowledge, or at least for wisdom. […]
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