Could Isidore’s Chronicle Have Delighted Cicero? A Response

Could Morality Have

Could plants have cognitive abilities?

Vegetation is traditionally regarded as passive, doing nothing but what is essential to grow and survive. Evidence is accumulating, however, in support of formerly esoteric notions that plants can communicate, remember, even count--features that one would call cognitive if they were observed in animals. Michael Gross reports.

How Could Language Have Evolved?

The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language "phenotype." According to the "Strong Minimalist Thesis," the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary th...

Could a nearby supernova explosion have caused a mass extinction?

We examine the possibility that a nearby supernova explosion could have caused one or more of the mass extinctions identified by paleontologists. We discuss the possible rate of such events in the light of the recent suggested identification of Geminga as a supernova remnant less than 100 parsec (pc) away and the discovery of a millisecond pulsar about 150 pc away and observations of SN 1987A. ...

Could René Descartes Have Known This?

Below we discuss the partition of the space of real univariate polynomials according to the number of positive and negative roots and signs of the coefficients. We present several series of non-realizable combinations of signs together with the numbers of positive and negative roots. We provide a detailed information about possible non-realizable combinations up to degree 8 as well as a general...