Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
For too long, presentations of science for the general public, and education in schools, has suggested that science wields a sort of hegemonic power, as if its terms and methods gradually replace and make redundant all other discourse; the only reason it has not yet completed its conquest is that the world is complicated—but it is only a matter of time…
Social isolation and loneliness are gaining increasing attention as risks to health and well-being among older adults worldwide. In the United States, about one-third of Americans aged 60 and over are estimated to feel lonely, and one-quarter of Americans aged 65 and over live alone.
Bridging the gap between health problems of the heart and kidneys continues to be a talking point amongst specialists. Across both fields, there is clear evidence and recognition that kidney function can affect cardiac health. Kidney patients are vulnerable to a higher level of cardiovascular events as a risk factor and vice versa.
“Environmental law ensures that collective action in relation to environmental problems is authoritative and consistent with the rule of law and other principles of legitimate action.” – Elizabeth Fisher, Environmental Law: A Very Short Introduction
As students head back to university to start their fall semester, the conversation of consent will no doubt surround them on campus. But what can actually be defined as consent? Where do students learn what consent actually means? From the time of adolescence, students are taught the notion of consent, which impacts how they view the term in their later life.
In 1969, half a century ago, astronauts first landed on Earth’s sole moon. The first successful robotic landers touched down on the much more distant Venus and Mars in 1970 and 1976, respectively, and in the same decade spacecraft flybys provided the first, fleeting close-ups of Jupiter and Saturn. It was not until two decades […]
Earlier this month, we explored the world of rabbits and facts to enhance our knowledge of the ubiquitous mammal. Now on international rabbit day, we are focusing on the eastern cottontail rabbit, the most common species in North America. What makes it different from other rabbit species? What commonalities can be found across species?
Tycho Brahe lived with a hand-crafted nose made of brass after his real one was sliced off in a duel. Mr. Brahe was a renowned 16th-century Danish astronomer and a great empirical scientist whose data were used to formulate Johannes Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion. But for our purposes, Tycho Brahe is especially interesting for something other than his prosthetic schnoz or his contributions to astronomy, but for a notable mistake. Confronted with his own irrefutable evidence that the known planets of his day (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) revolved around the Sun, Brahe was nonetheless committed to the prevailing biblical view of a geocentric universe. So he devised an ingenious model in which those planets indeed revolved around the Sun … but with the resulting conglomeration obediently circling a central and immobile Earth!
With over 10 million active researchers, more than 2 million scientific articles published each year, and an uncontrolled spread of bibliometric indicators, contemporary science is undergoing a profound change that is modifying consolidated procedures, ethical principles that were deemed inalienable and traditional mechanisms for the validation of scientific outputs that have worked successfully for the last century.
Less than 50 days after this year’s World Space Week (4-10 October)—a global network of over 1,000 space-related organizations celebrating the role space plays in bringing the world together for peaceful purposes—NASA’s InSight spacecraft is scheduled to land near the Red Planet’s equator to take the planet’s pulse.
When we think about stepfamilies, images of the perennially popular TV show The Brady Bunch likely spring to mind. Young single parents unite in marriage, bringing together their children from prior unions to form a stepfamily.
“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.” ― George Orwell, 1984 In 2004, the World Health Organization in cooperation with the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and the […]
The central regions of galaxies are extremely crowded places, containing up to a few hundreds of millions of stars. They are generally extremely dense environments, where a variety of phenomena occur frequently.
We sat down with Dr. Bryna Siegel and asked about the effectiveness of the modern special education system. In the video below, Dr. Siegel discusses how the push for academic inclusion may actually be putting children with autism at a disadvantage, and offers advice to help parents and educators build better futures for these students as they enter adulthood.
Popular as pets, considered lucky by some, and widely recognised as agricultural nuisances, rabbits are commonplace all over the world. Their cute, fluffy exterior hides the more ingenious characteristics of this burrowing herbivore, including specially-adapted hind legs, extra incisors, and prolific breeding capabilities. Whilst rabbits thrive in most areas, certain species face the common struggle of their specialist habitats being destroyed, and myxomatosis has devastated rabbit populations in the past, at one point destroying 99% of the rabbit population of the United Kingdom.
Human communication takes many forms, but picturing humans using chemical mechanisms to send messages leaves us skeptical. However, this concept becomes more plausible when we think of communication mediated via pheromones in animals.