Among the Old Believers

Belief bias during reasoning among religious believers and skeptics.

We provide evidence that religious skeptics, as compared to believers, are both more reflective and effective in logical reasoning tasks. While recent studies have reported a negative association between an analytic cognitive style and religiosity, they focused exclusively on accuracy, making it difficult to specify potential underlying cognitive mechanisms. The present study extends the previo...

The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia: Bibikov's System for the Old Believers, 1841-1855

Russian Old Believers: genetic consequences of their persecution and exile, as shown by mitochondrial DNA evidence.

In 1653, the Patriarch Nikon modified liturgical practices to bring the Russian Orthodox Church in line with those of the Eastern (Greek) Orthodox Church, from which it had split 200 years earlier. The Old Believers (staroveri) rejected these changes and continued to worship using the earlier practices. These actions resulted in their persecution by the Russian Orthodox Church, which forced the...

Diffraction for Non-believers *

Diffractive reactions involving a hard scale can be understood in terms of quarks and gluons. These reactions have become a valuable tool for investigating the low-x structure of the proton and the behavior of QCD in the high-density regime, and they may provide a clean environment to study or even discover the Higgs boson at the LHC. In this paper we give a brief introduction to the descriptio...

Nobelium non-believers.

In 1956, a research team in Moscow led by Georgy Flerov bombarded 241Pu with 16O using recently developed heavy-ion beam techniques. The Moscow team may have produced element 102, and contemplated the name joliotium (Jo) to honour 1935 Chemistry Nobelist Irène Joliot-Curie, who had died earlier that year. As Flerov noted later, the early data was inconclusive, and not widely disseminated. Cold ...