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Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
The earliest roots in the history of science can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age.
The recovery and assimilation of Greek works and Islamic inquiries into Western Europe from the 10th to 13th century revived "natural philosophy", which was later transformed by the Scientific Revolution that began in the 16th century as new ideas and discoveries departed from previous Greek conceptions and traditions. The scientific method soon played a greater role in knowledge creation and it was not until the 19th century that many of the institutional and professional features of science began to take shape; along with the changing of "natural philosophy" to "natural science".
Modern science is typically divided into three major branches: natural sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and physics), which study the physical world; the social sciences (e.g., economics, psychology, and sociology), which study individuals and societies; and the formal sciences (e.g., logic, mathematics, and theoretical computer science), which study formal systems, governed by axioms and rules. There is disagreement whether the formal sciences are science disciplines,, because they do not rely on empirical evidence. Applied sciences are disciplines that use scientific knowledge for practical purposes, such as in engineering and medicine.
New knowledge in science is advanced by research from scientists who are motivated by curiosity about the world and a desire to solve problems. Contemporary scientific research is highly collaborative and is usually done by teams in academic and research institutions, government agencies, and companies. The practical impact of their work has led to the emergence of science policies that seek to influence the scientific enterprise by prioritizing the development of commercial products, armaments, health care, public infrastructure, and environmental protection. (Full article...)
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However, much of Galen's understanding is flawed from the modern point of view. For example, he did not recognize blood circulation and thought that venous and arterial systems were separate. This view did not change until William Harvey's work in the 17th century.
More did you know...
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- ...that a successful experimental system must be stable and reproducible enough for scientists to make sense of the system's behavior, but unpredictable enough that it can produce useful results?
- ...that Abbott Lawrence Rotch established the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory in 1885, which maintains the longest-running meteorological record of any observation site in the United States?
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Science News
- 12 May 2022 –
- A team of scientists at the Event Horizon Telescope release the first ever image of [[Sagittarius A;12 May 2022 –
- ]], the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. (BBC News)
- Researchers from the University of Florida announce that plants have been grown on lunar soil, collected by Apollo missions, for the first time ever. (AP)
- 16 April 2022 – Chinese space program
- Chinese astronauts Ye Guangfu, Wang Yaping and Zhai Zhigang of the Shenzhou 13 spacecraft land successfully in Inner Mongolia after spending 183 days in space. During the spaceflight, Wang Yaping became the first Chinese woman to perform a spacewalk. (Al Jazeera)
- 7 April 2022 –
- It is announced that over 5,000 new species of previously undiscovered RNA viruses were found in ocean-living organisms and proposed to group them into five new phyla, according to a paper published in Science. (The Independent)
- 4 April 2022 – Discoveries of exoplanets
- Astronomers announce the discovery of K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, an exoplanet that is said to resemble Jupiter. The discovery was made using the now-retired Kepler space telescope. (ScienceAlert)
- 31 March 2022 –
- Scientists sequence the complete human genome for the first time, more than three decades after the Human Genome Project was first commenced. (CNN)
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