Blog

Miles below the ocean’s surface, should the old rules still apply?

The post The Challenge of Deep-Sea Taxonomy appeared first on Nautilus.

In the age of self-experiment, scientists took mind-altering drugs to test the limits of subjectivity.

The post The 19th-Century Trippers Who Probed the Mind appeared first on Nautilus.

One question for Julie Castillo-Rogez, a planetary geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The post Why Do So Many Moons Have Oceans? appeared first on Nautilus.

Our minds haven’t evolved to deal with machines we believe have consciousness.

The post Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea appeared first on Nautilus.

In 1976, Robert Gilpin distinguished three contrasting political economy perspectives: liberalism, Marxism, and mercantilism. Gilpin introduced these International Relations-derived categories as theories and ideologies of political economy, sometimes conceived either as explanatory models or future scenarios. He recognises that the three ideologies ‘define the conflicting perspectives’ that actors have, but he does not go as far as to theorise how the perspectives may be part of the dynamics of the world economy and generative of its history and future. Gilpin’s models, scenarios, and theories are thus mainly cognitive attempts to understand reality from the outside. Since Gilpin’s main works, a large number of critical and constructivist International Political Economy (IPE) and Global Political Economy (GPE) approaches have arisen, stressing the constitutive role of ideas and performativity of theories. Many of these studies, however, tend to focus on aspects of contemporary matters or specific issues and fall short of analysing broad historical developments and, most markedly, causation.

What future missions to Saturn's moon Titan will reveal about the universe.

The post Searching for Life Under a Methane Rain appeared first on Nautilus.

A new analysis argues that ubiquitous eruptions in the sun’s corona explain the vast flow of charged particles seen streaming out through the solar system.

The post Tiny Jets on the Sun Power the Colossal Solar Wind appeared first on Nautilus.

For billions of years, rivers connected continents to the sea. Then we came along.

The post The Oceans Are Missing Their Rivers appeared first on Nautilus.

Political economists often place the state at the centre of explanations of change in capitalism. The emergence of a ‘welfare’ or ‘nation building’ state during the twentieth century reflects the advance of democratic movements and Keynesian inspired macroeconomic management. More recently neoliberalism is associated with fiscal austerity enforced through the rise of corporate and financial power. Shifts in state finances, and how states finances are accounted for, were central to these broader political-economic shifts.

In a recent open access article published in the journal Critical Perspectives on Accounting, as part of a forthcoming special issue on ‘the future of the state’, we bring state theory into conversation with critical accounting literature to explore the relationship between fiscal accounting and capitalist change. Drawing on Joseph Schumpeter’s fiscal sociology and his concept of the ‘tax state’, we connect changes in fiscal practice to turning points in the reorganisation of the state’s role within capitalism [...]

Forgetting and misremembering are the building blocks of creativity and imagination.

The post Faulty Memory Is a Feature, Not a Bug appeared first on Nautilus.