Architecture
History
More than thirty new tombs were discovered in Egypt at the end of June 2024
Philosophy
Wittgenstein. Thinking is inseparable from language. Limits to Human Knowledge
Music
Religion
The last notes
LUCA – the new universally recognized ancestor of all life on Earth
New research suggests that all life today descended from a cell that lived 4.2 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Earth formed. This last universal common ancestor, affectionately nicknamed LUCA by biologists, wasn’t all that different from the fairly complex bacteria that exist today — and it lived in an ecosystem teeming with other life and viruses.
Ediacaran animals are still considered the earliest multicellular animals on Earth
And paleontologists and geneticists are finding more and more evidence to support this fact. Using fossils and genetic dating, scientists have put forward very different candidates for the role of the world’s first animal. Today, animals of all shapes and sizes roam the Earth, from nearly microscopic creatures like tardigrades to 80-foot (25-meter) blue whales. These organisms emerged and developed over millions of years of evolution. But which animal was the first on the planet?
Cambrian animals add new mysteries to researchers
Jaws found in 500-million-year-old fossils. A new study by scientists at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) has concluded that O. alata was likely one of the first arthropods with lower jaws, a departure from previous research that suggested the animal may have been a filter feeder.
Matching dinosaur footprints found in Africa and South America
Tens of millions of years ago, South America and Africa were part of the same landmass, an ancient supercontinent called Gondwana. At some point, the two continents began to drift apart until only a thin strip of land remained above, holding them together. A team of scientists in a new study argues that matching dinosaur tracks found in what are now Brazil and Cameroon were left along this narrow passage 120 million years ago, before the continents…
Dinosaurs could live underground
A newly discovered dinosaur may have spent part of its life underground. Paleontologists have recently uncovered a new fossilized animal — and this time, it’s a burrower. Fona herzogae, discovered in Utah by researchers and paleontologists from North Carolina State University, was a small, herbivorous dinosaur that lived during the Cenomanian period — about 100 to 66 million years ago.
New archaeological discoveries have shown that humans are capable of surviving in the most extreme conditions
The fossilized bones of a giant, extinct armored mammal provide the latest clue about when humans arrived in South America. At the time, in the late Pleistocene, numerous large animals inhabited the harsh, cold landscape, including giant sloths, mastodons, and saber-toothed cats. Humans were well-adapted to drought and resource scarcity, able to move along dry riverbeds in search of pools and the prey that grazed around them. The authors call this a “blue highway” that operated during…
The oldest human remains, 850 thousand years old, have been found
Archaeologists in Spain have made an unexpected discovery. The oldest human remains have been found in the Gran Dolina mountain range. Archaeologists from Spain have discovered the bones of some of the oldest archaic humans in Europe, who lived in the Sierra de Atapuerca mountain range, Gran Dolina, 850 thousand years ago, according to a press release from the Catalan University of Human Paleoecology and Social Revolution.
Our ancestors’ numbers dwindled to 1,280 breeding individuals 930,000 years ago
Humanity owes its existence to just 1,280 people who nearly died out, study finds. A new method for estimating ancient populations has revealed a potential way in which humanity could have nearly disappeared. Researchers believe our ancestors dwindled to just 1,280 breeding individuals during the Pleistocene.
Evolution and Involution – Humanity at a Crossroads
The Ulas family in Turkey has attracted intense scientific attention for years. Because five members of the family walk on all fours, one scientist concluded more than a decade ago that the condition was a sign of reverse evolution. Self-proclaimed health futurist Jeffrey Charles Hardy argues that after millions of years, human evolution has stopped.
The Gunung Padang archaeological site in western Java was built by a civilization 25,000 years ago
Researchers from Indonesia claim that the archaeological site of Gunung Padang in western Java was built by a powerful civilization 25,000 years ago. The scientific community is arguing fiercely about the hypothesis because of a fundamental error. The authors of the sensational article insist that they are right. And the publisher’s withdrawal of the research results is called censorship that contradicts the principles of science.
$1 million to anyone who solves one of the 7 hardest math problems in the world – The Riemann Hypothesis
Major breakthroughs in mathematics and science are usually the result of many people working over many years. In 2000, seven mathematical problems were awarded $1 million each, and only one has been solved to date.
Woven City is a smart city built by Toyota based on hydrogen energy technology
Toyota’s Woven City is described as a “living laboratory” where the company will use green energy and AI technologies to build the city of the future. The 175-acre experimental complex has been under construction for three years and is now ready to welcome its first residents, although the first “demonstration tests” won’t begin until 2025. Projects like Woven City have been criticized for their reliance on hydrogen at the expense of investment in other green energy technologies.
More than thirty new tombs were discovered in Egypt at the end of June 2024
30 new Egyptian tombs have stunned archaeologists, revealing new secrets and raising new questions about ancient Egyptian civilization.
Lebanon’s ‘Amber Man’ Digs Up Dinosaur-Age Treasures
Azar, who holds a joint appointment at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China and the Lebanese University, looks at the dirt and rocks in front of him. It doesn’t look like much – but he knows what he’s looking for. In the dirt and rocks at his feet, he spots a piece of amber no bigger than a grain of rice. Then he spots another, and another – shiny gold shards glittering in the…
Five Revolutions in Modern Music
Jazz can be safely considered the progenitor of all modern music. Over these long years, the style has changed and improved. Many great performers are inscribed in history in gold letters for turning a popular dance melody into intellectual music that is not accessible to everyone. How history developed in stages.
Russian philosophy. Ancient Rus’. Romanticism. Slavophilism and Westernism. Philosophy and power
Ancient Russia and philosophy. Any philosophy is a special type of rationality. It combines the functions of scientific knowledge of the world and a worldview that cannot be reduced to just reproducing a certain picture of the world, but includes religious, axiological, ideological attitudes in people’s behavior. But philosophy cannot be reduced to moral didactics, the function of which can be performed by both religion and folk wisdom. In philosophical knowledge, a rational attitude to reality prevails. In…
Steven Pinker. Destruction of myths about man. Pseudo-evolutionary reverse engineering
The discussions about the relationship between the mental and the physical, discussed in the previous chapters, can be classified as a metaphysical part of the modern philosophy of consciousness. Despite the undoubted productivity of such discussions, some philosophers express doubts about the possibility of achieving positive results in this area and provide arguments in favor of their point of view. For example, K. McGinn believes that the human mind, which arose through the process of natural selection,…
John Searle. The representational aspect of the concept of intentionality. Mental states
John Searle was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1932. He studied at the University of Wisconsin from 1949 to 1952 and then went to Oxford, where he remained until 1959. That year, he defended his doctorate, returned to the United States, and settled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has worked for more than four decades. In 1967, Searle became a professor at the university and two years later published his first book, Speech Acts:…
Daniel Dennett. The functionalist part of the theory of mind. Intentional attitude
Philosophy in the 20th century was dominated by language studies. Gradually, this bias became increasingly pronounced. Being and consciousness dissolved in language, and the world turned out to be a huge text without an Author or a semantic center. Western thought was threatened by relativism and the “deconstruction” of rationality. However, in the last decades of the 20th century, radical changes took place in the philosophical climate. Philosophy was again in demand for its positive function. This…
Richard Rorty. Language of neurophysiology. Eliminative materialism. People are the same animals
Richard Rorty was born in 1931 in New York. He studied first at the University of Chicago and then completed graduate school at Yale University. He taught at various universities and colleges in the United States: from 1961 at Princeton University, from 1982 at the University of Virginia, and from 1998 at Stanford University.