Evolutionary theory predicts that children fare better if they resemble their father. However, if a man is promiscuous then his children tend to be (unwittingly) raised within other families; such children should fare better if they do not resemble their father. This suggests that father-son facial similarity should decrease as a function of male promiscuity. To test this hypothesis, the degree of similarity between each of 37 pairs of father-son photographs was rated by 83 participants. The promiscuity score of a father was defined as the number of sexual relationships he had been involved in. A linear regression of father-son similarity ratings against fathers' promiscuity scores indicated that the slope of the fitted line was significantly less than zero (slope=-0.176, p < 0.001), and that fathers' promiscuity scores account for 75% of the variance father-son facial similarity ratings. Additionally, a significant negative non-parametric correlation (Spearman's rho rho=-0.886, p=0.019) between father-son similarity ratings and fathers' promiscuity scores was found.
Although Large Language Models (LLMs) show exceptional fluency, efforts persist to extract stronger reasoning capabilities from them. Drawing on search-based interpretations of LLM computation, this paper advances a systematic framework for understanding LLM reasoning and optimization. Namely, that enhancing reasoning is best achieved by structuring a multi-agent pipeline to ensure a traversal of the search space in a gradual, incremental, and sequential (GIS) manner. Stated succinctly, high-quality reasoning is a controlled, incremental search. To test this framework, we investigate the efficacy of recursive refinement (RR)--an iterative process of self-criticism, adversarial stress-testing, and integrating critical feedback--as a practical method for implementing GIS search. We designed an experiment comparing a simple, linear pipeline against a complex, explicitly structured pipeline leveraging a recursive refinement layer. The multi-agent models were constructed to reflect the historical personas of three US Founding Fathers (Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison) using RAG-powered corpora and were prompted to generate responses to three contemporary political issues. Model performa
2025 marks the 300th birthday of Father Eliseo della Concezione, professor of Experimental Physics at the Royal Academy of Studies of Palermo. To celebrate this anniversary, the Physics and Chemistry Library of the University Library System and the Department of Physics and Chemistry - Emilio Segre' have organized several cultural activities. In the article, after a brief biographical description of Father Eliseo della Concezione, we will present the activities carried out and discuss the historical and educational aspects of Father Eliseo's work carried out during his stay at the Royal Academy of Palermo at the end of 18th century.
In most factories today the robotic cells are deployed on well enforced bases to avoid any external impact on the accuracy of production. In contrast to that, we evaluate a futuristic concept where the whole robotic cell could work in a moving platform. Imagine a trailer of a truck moving along the motorway while exposed to heavy physical impacts due to maneuvering. The key question here is how the robotic cell behaves and how the productivity is affected. We propose a system architecture (FATHER) and show some solutions including network related information and artificial intelligence to make the proposed futuristic concept feasible to implement.
While major strides have been made towards gender equality in public life, serious inequality remains in the domestic sphere, especially around parenting. The present study analyses discussions about parenting on Reddit to explore audience effects and gender stereotypes. It suggests a novel method to study topical variation in individuals' language when interacting with different audiences. Comments posted in 2020 were collected from three parenting subreddits, described as being for fathers (r/Daddit), mothers (r/Mommit), and all parents (r/Parenting). Users posting on r/Parenting and r/Daddit or on r/Parenting and r/Mommit were assumed to identify as fathers or mothers, respectively, allowing gender comparison. Users' comments on r/Parenting (to a mixed-gender audience) were compared with their comments to single-gender audiences on r/Daddit or r/Mommit using LDA topic modelling. Results showed that the most discussed topic among parents is about education and family advice, a topic mainly discussed in the mixed-gender subreddit and more by fathers than mothers. Regarding the basic needs of children (sleep, food, and medical care), mothers seemed to be more concerned regardless o
Einstein is usually revered as the father of special and general relativity. In this article I demonstrate that he is also the father of Solid State Physics, or even his broader version known as Condensed Matter Physics (including liquids). His 1907 article on the specific heat of solids introduces, for the first time, the effect of lattice vibrations on the thermodynamic properties of crystals, in particular the specific heat. His 1905 article on the photoelectric effect and photoluminescence opened the fields of photoelectron spectroscopy and photoluminescence spectroscopy. Other important achievements include Bose-Einstein condensation and the Einstein relation between the difussion coefficient an mobility. In this article I discuss Einstein's papers relevant to these topics and their relevance to modern day condensed matter physics.
There is often a bond between two great men of a society at the time when one is at the peak of his life and the other at its beginning. The great Serbian 19th century poet, clergyman and educator father Vasa Zivkovic, interceding in favour of his student Mihajlo Pupin, significantly influenced the conditions necessary for Pupin`s development into the person he later became. Mihajlo Pupin was certainly not the only student to benefit from father Vasa Zivkovic advice and material support. However their relationship is a perfect example of an acclaimed person successfully influencing a person yet to win acclaim.
Mixing maternal and paternal genomes is the base of plant sexual reproduction, but some so-called 'haploid inducer lines' lead to the formation of seeds bearing well-developed embryos with solely the maternal genome. A recent study adds a new piece to the puzzle of this enigmatic in planta haploid embryo induction process.
Recently the media broadcast the news, together with illustrative videos, of a so-called Japanese method to perform multiplication by hand without using the multiplication tables. "Goodbye multiplication tables" was the headline of several websites, including important ones, where news are however too often `re-posted' uncritically. The easy numerical examples could induce naive internauts to believe that, in a short future, multiplications could be really done without the knowledge of multiplication tables. This is what a girl expresses, with great enthusiasm, to her father. The dialogues described here, although not real, are likely and have been inspired by this episode, being Maddalena the daughter of the author. Obviously the revolutionary value of the new method is easily disassembled, while its educational utility is highlighted to show (or remember) the reasoning on which the method learned in elementary school is based, although mostly applied mechanically.
We review the work and life of Otto Stern who developed the molecular beam technique and with its aid laid the foundations of experimental atomic physics. Among the key results of his research are: the experimental determination of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of molecular velocities (1920), experimental demonstration of space quantization of angular momentum (1922), diffraction of matter waves comprised of atoms and molecules by crystals (1931) and the determination of the magnetic dipole moments of the proton and deuteron (1933).
The existence of a non-thermodynamic arrow of time was demonstrated in a recent paper (Mod.Phys.Lett. A13, 1265 (1998)), in which a model of non-local Quantum Electrodynamics was formulated through the principle of gauge invariance. In this paper we show that the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is capable of making every particle of the universe (except those which are not acted upon by an electromagnetic field) follow this arrow of time.
This text revisits the origins of econophysics through the figure of Benoît Mandelbrot, not as the father of fractals, but as the instigator of a distinctive scientific posture. The guiding thread is methodological: accept the stubborn features of the data and use models as instruments for intuition rather than as axiomatic certificates of truth. In this perspective, scaling, intermittency and extremes are not peripheral imperfections around a well-behaved equilibrium; they are the very texture of economic and financial fluctuations. This naturally shifts attention from exogenous narratives to endogenous dynamics: interactions, feedback loops, and collective amplification mechanisms that can make systems intrinsically {\it fragile}. We argue that the importation of concepts from statistical physics -- criticality, disorder, emergence, multiplicative cascades -- should be read not as an artificial transposition but as a candid attempt to look for generic mechanisms compatible with empirical regularities observed across scales, from markets to macroeconomic aggregates.
Aristotle is generally accepted as the father of logic. The ideas that he raised in his study of logical reasoning carried the development of science over the centuries. Today, in the era of AI, this title of the fatherhood of logic has a renewed significance. Behind it lies his original idea that human reasoning could be studied as a process and that perhaps there exist universal systems of reasoning that underly all human reasoning irrespective of the content of what we are reasoning about. In this article, we look into Aristotle's work on human thought, his work on reasoning itself but also on how it relates to science and human endeavor more generally, from a modern perspective of Artificial Intelligence and ask if this can help enlighten our understanding of AI and Science more generally.
This paper introduces the art project The Dream Within Huang Long Cave, an AI-driven interactive and immersive narrative experience. The project offers new insights into AI technology, artistic practice, and psychoanalysis. Inspired by actual geographical landscapes and familial archetypes, the work combines psychoanalytic theory and computational technology, providing an artistic response to the concept of the non-existence of the Big Other. The narrative is driven by a combination of a large language model (LLM) and a realistic digital character, forming a virtual agent named YELL. Through dialogue and exploration within a cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE), the audience is invited to unravel the language puzzles presented by YELL and help him overcome his life challenges. YELL is a fictional embodiment of the Big Other, modeled after the artist's real father. Through a cross-temporal interaction with this digital father, the project seeks to deconstruct complex familial relationships. By demonstrating the non-existence of the Big Other, we aim to underscore the authenticity of interpersonal emotions, positioning art as a bridge for emotional connection and understanding w
One evening, a father tells his three daughters, Lucía, Inés, and Ana, a bedtime story unlike any other. It is a tale of four silent architects ($c$, $\hbar$, $G$, and $Λ$) whose presence or absence shapes the very fabric of reality. By imagining worlds where each constant is removed, they explore realms from the quantum gravity of the Planck scale to the stretching cosmos of de Sitter space, from the mass of the observable Universe to the surprising link with the proton's whisper. Woven with the insights of great scientists, this narrative reveals how these fundamental constants write the story of everything, from the smallest particle to the vast cosmic horizon, suggesting a beautiful and hidden unity in the architecture of our world.
James Burkett Hartle was a theoretical physicist who made major contributions to our understanding of relativistic stars, black holes, and cosmology. Most of his career, however, was devoted to studying the universe as a quantum system. As a result, he was known as the father of quantum cosmology. He is best known for two seminal papers with Stephen Hawking that introduced two quantum states of fundamental importance: the "Hartle-Hawking vacuum" for matter fields outside a black hole, and the "no-boundary wave function of the universe" for cosmology. Jim (as everyone called him) was a warm and caring person who was genuinely concerned with the success of his students, postdocs, and colleagues. He was generous with his time and helped to foster a culture of a welcoming family among gravitational physicists.
Simone Weil is one of the most prominent 20th century French philosophers. She is the sister of Andr{é} Weil, the renowned mathematician, the father of modern algebraic geometry and the initiator of the Bourbaki group. Simone and Andr{é} Weil shared a love for literature, mathematics, science and philosophy. My aim in this article is to convey, based on their writings and their correspondence, the idea that Pythagoreanism was a central element of their thought. I will put this into context, talking first about the life and work of each of them, showing how much they were linked by essential common ideas, even though their life paths were very different, and how, ultimately, Pythagorean mathematics and philosophy became naturally part of their respective intellectual worlds. The article is the written version of a lecture I gave in October 2025, at the conference ``The Life and Contribution of Pythagoras to Mathematics, Sciences, and Philosophy'' that took place on October 3-4, 2025 at the Cyprus University of Technology in Limassol.
This paper presents VoxelMap++: a voxel mapping method with plane merging which can effectively improve the accuracy and efficiency of LiDAR(-inertial) based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). This map is a collection of voxels that contains one plane feature with 3DOF representation and corresponding covariance estimation. Considering total map will contain a large number of coplanar features (kid planes), these kid planes' 3DOF estimation can be regarded as the measurements with covariance of a larger plane (father plane). Thus, we design a plane merging module based on union-find which can save resources and further improve the accuracy of plane fitting. This module can distinguish the kid planes in different voxels and merge these kid planes to estimate the father plane. After merging, the father plane 3DOF representation will be more accurate than the kids plane and the uncertainty will decrease significantly which can further improve the performance of LiDAR(-inertial) odometry. Experiments on challenging environments such as corridors and forests demonstrate the high accuracy and efficiency of our method compared to other state-of-the-art methods (see our attached
We examine the gender gap in income in Poland in relation to parenthood status, employing the placebo event history method adapted to low-resolution data (Polish Generations and Gender Survey). Our analysis reveals anticipatory behavior in both women and men who expect to become parents. We observe a decrease of approximately 20 percent in mothers' income post-birth. In contrast, the income of fathers surpasses that of non-fathers both pre- and post-birth, suggesting that the fatherhood child premium may be primarily driven by selection. We note an increase (decrease) in hours worked for fathers (mothers). Finally, we compare the gender gaps in income and wages between women and men in the sample with those in a counterfactual scenario where the entire population is childless. Our findings indicate no statistically significant gender gaps in the counterfactual scenario, leading us to conclude that parenthood drives the gender gaps in income and wages in Poland.
The dynamics of two vertically coalescing drops and a pool of the same liquid have been investigated using a Coupled Level Set and Volume of Fluid (CLSVOF) method. Such a configuration enables us to study the dynamic interaction of an arbitrary-shaped liquid conglomerate, formed owing to drop-drop coalescence, with a pool. Similar to drop-pool and drop-drop interactions, partial coalescence is observed when a conglomerate interacts with a pool. The presence of the pool below the father drop is found to influence the coalescence characteristic of the two drops. At the same time, the movement of the capillary waves resulting from the interaction of two drops governs the coalescence dynamics of the conglomerate with the pool. As liquid interfaces interact and generate capillary waves at multiple locations, complex trajectories of capillary waves are observed, which play a crucial role in determining the pinch-off characteristics of the satellite during conglomerate-pool interaction. We examine the effect of the ratio of the diameters of the lower/father drop to the upper/mother drop (D_r) on the coalescence dynamics while maintaining the size of the mother drop constant. The variation