In 1601, the British ship captain James Lancaster tested what was then a little known innovation in naval dietary practice when he set sail for India with a fleet of four ships. While the crew of three of his ships followed their usual diets, all of the men on the fourth were required to consume a teaspoon of lemon juice three times a day. The utility of this innovation was irrefutable. By half...

During animal gastrulation, the specification of the embryonic axes is accompanied by epithelio-mesenchymal transition (EMT), the first major change in cell shape after fertilization. EMT takes place in disparate topographical arrangements, such as the circular blastopore of amphibians, the straight primitive streak of birds and mammals or in intermediate gastrulation forms of other amniotes su...

This book is a timely read, coinciding as it does with the moving of the renowned Exploratorium from the Palace of Fine Arts at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, where it was established in 1969, to its new and larger location at Pier 15 on the Embarcadero. This institution continues to embody the vision of its founder, Frank Oppenheimer, the subject of this highly personal y...

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is knowledge’s voyage of self-discovery. It begins with the mere appearance of knowledge – that is, what knowledge at first seems to be. But what knowledge at first seems to be is not congruent with its reality, even in its first appearance. The incongruence creates an instability that pushes knowledge on to other ways to take itself, stopping only when a concept...

This paper will describe a voyage of discovery — the discovery of Algorithmic Probability. But before I describe that voyage —a few words about motivation. Motivation in science is roughly of two kinds: In one, the motivation is discovery itself — the joy of “going where no one has gone before” — the excitement of creating new universes and exploring them. Another kind of motivation is the achi...

The Portuguese sailed yearly on the India Route during over two centuries, between the early XVI century and the XVIII century. Most ships employed in this route belonged to the Nau type and were among the largest and strongest ships of their time. Although extremely interesting, there is presently very little knowledge about the technical characteristics of these ships. The reason is that they...

E in scope and inductive in method, Sir Lawrence Freedman’s grand volume: Strategy: A History, presents the fruits of a life-long exploration into the meaning and utility of the concept of strategy. In many respects an intellectual voyage of discovery, Freedman begins by describing the evolution of strategy through its pre-Napoleonic history and then, in turns, explores its development and use ...