Category: A priori knowledge
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New force…
Everything in our Universe is held together or pushed apart by four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and two nuclear interactions. Physicists now think they’ve spotted the actions of a fifth physical force emerging from a helium atom. It’s not the first time researchers claim to have caught a glimpse of it, either. A few years […]
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Learning the foundations…
Contrary to widely-held opinion, taking high school calculus isn’t necessary for success later in college calculus – what’s more important is mastering the prerequisites, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry – that lead to calculus. That’s according to a study of more than 6,000 college freshmen at 133 colleges. (1) Great line of reasoning. Except that we […]
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Intuition. (not intuition at all…)
What is intuition? Pearson and his colleagues wanted to take a more rigorous look at this hard-to-pin-down phenomenon. To begin with, they agreed that there are two qualities present in any instance of intuition: It has to involve a piece of information that you’re not exactly conscious of, and it has to have an emotional […]
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Speaking infants…
Ιnfants can tell the difference between sounds of all languages until about 8 months of age when their brains start to focus only on the sounds they hear around them. It’s been unclear how this transition occurs, but social interactions and caregivers’ use of exaggerated “parentese” style of speech seem to help. University of Washington […]
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Chickens. Chaos. Order.
The unusual arrangement of cells in a chicken’s eye constitutes the first known biological occurrence of a potentially new state of matter known as “disordered hyperuniformity,” according to researchers from Princeton University and Washington University in St. Louis. Research in the past decade has shown that disordered hyperuniform materials have unique properties when it comes […]
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