Related papers: Between understanding and control: Science as a cu…

The century of complexity has come. The face of science has changed. Surprisingly, when we start asking about the essence of these changes and then critically analyse the answers, the result are mostly discouraging. Most of the answers are…

It is a long-standing question whether human sexual and reproductive cycles are affected predominantly by biology or culture. The literature is mixed with respect to whether biological or cultural factors best explain the reproduction cycle…

As a neuroscientist and a theoretical physicist, both working on time, we have decided to open a direct dialogue to examine if the apparent discrepancies regarding the nature of time can be composed.

What is time? Why does it "flow" and why are we sure that it flows from past towards future? Why is there such a gigantic distinction between the Past of our world, which we believe to be fixed, and the Future, which we consider…

Any search for present or past life beyond Earth should consider the initial processes and related environmental controls that might have led to its start. As on Earth, such an understanding lies well beyond how simple organic molecules…

Since its beginnings in the 1940s, automated reasoning by computers has become a tool of ever growing importance in scientific research. So far, the rules underlying automated reasoning have mainly been formulated by humans, in the form of…

The twenty-first century is the century of encounter of the different races, nations, cultures, religions and customs. In the twenty-first century, man is more and more exposed to various influences that leave a trace on the entire sphere…

Astrobiology is the field of science devoted to searching for life elsewhere in the Universe. It is inherently interdisciplinary, integrating results from multiple fields of science, and in this respect has strong synergies with 'big…

Like all natural systems, great societies and their cultures emerge by a growth process from their environments, developing, organized, and behaving as wholes with their internal designs linked with their external worlds. So the general…

While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…

An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…

Understanding the origin(s) of life (OoL) is a fundamental challenge for science in the 21st century. Research on OoL spans many disciplines, including chemistry, physics, biology, planetary sciences, computer science, mathematics and…

We discuss the extent to which the visibility of the heavens was a necessary condition for the development of science, with particular reference to the measurement of time. Our conclusion is that while astronomy had significant importance,…

The universality of mesoscales, ranging between elemental particles and the universe, is discussed here by reviewing widely disparate fields and presenting four cases, at differing hierarchical levels, from chemistry, chemical engineering,…

Language understanding is a key scientific issue in the fields of cognitive and computer science. However, the two disciplines differ substantially in the specific research questions. Cognitive science focuses on analyzing the specific…

It has long been known that scientific output proceeds on an exponential increase, or more properly, a logistic growth curve. The interplay between effort and discovery is clear, and the nature of the functional form has been thought to be…

The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space, distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are built in…

Data science has emerged from the proliferation of digital data, coupled with advances in algorithms, software and hardware (e.g., GPU computing). Innovations in structural biology have been driven by similar factors, spurring us to ask:…

The field of condensed matter physics had its genesis this century and it has had a remarkable evolution. A closer look at its growth reveals a hidden aim in the collective consciousness of the field - a part of the development this century…

Predicting the social and behavioral impact of future technologies, before they are achieved, would allow us to guide their development and regulation before these impacts get entrenched. Traditionally, this prediction has relied on…