Category: Nothingness

  • Draw… you.

    Draw… you.

    It’s the archetypal child’s drawing – family, pet, maybe a house and garden, and the child themselves. Yet, how do children represent themselves in their drawings, and does this representation alter according to who will look at the picture? A research found that children’s expressive drawings of themselves vary according to the authority of and […]

  • Row by row…

    Row by row…

    Just as children follow a rule to line up single file after recess, some materials use an underlying rule to assemble on surfaces one row at a time, according to the study done at PNNL, the University of Washington, UCLA, and elsewhere. Nucleation – that first formation step – is pervasive in ordered structures across […]

  • Irregularities…

    A study exploring the coupling between heat and particle currents in a gas of strongly interacting atoms highlights the fundamental role of quantum correlations in transport phenomena, breaks the revered Wiedemann-Franz law, and should open up an experimental route to testing novel ideas for thermoelectric devices. (1) Irregularities between thermal and electrical conductivity. Just an […]

  • Ethics in numbers = No ethics.

    It’s easy to understand why natural selection favors people who help close kin at their own expense: It can increase the odds the family’s genes are passed to future generations. But why assist distant relatives? Mathematical simulations by a University of Utah anthropologist suggest “socially enforced nepotism” encourages helping far-flung kin. The classic theory of […]

  • Zero. Unknown. And yet, so familiar…

    When seeing a number of dots, a weird process takes place in our brain. According to a new research, the parietal lobe registers the lack of any dots as a missing visual stimulus, without quantitative significance and therefore fundamentally different from numbers. But at the next level at which processing takes place, the frontal lobe, […]