The 5 Most Popular UA Magazine Articles of 2019

In Editorial Column, General
December 27, 2019
Guest Editor

Civil Disobedience in Democracies: Why Citizens May Break the Law

In UA Magazine’s most-read essay of 2019, Tine Madsen dissects the moral questions raised by civil disobedience and its role in liberal democracies. She proposes a new approach to frame civil disobedience in protests of political decisions and the majority’s authority.

With civil disobedience, an interesting philosophical question arises: how are we to reconcile the idea that civil disobedience is sometimes morally justified with the idea that citizens of liberal democracies ought to respect the opinion of their fellow citizens and follow democratically enacted laws, even when these laws are unjust or wrong?

Civil Disobedience in Democracies: Why Citizens May Break the Law

Ageing Is a Wicked Problem: Bodies Fail and So Do Societies

Rudi Westendorp discusses the challenges of providing people with better end-of-life care, the way societies look after their elderly, and what can we learn about old age by looking at big data.

Under nowadays conditions, we have the means to invest in all generations without direct costs at our fitness. But the hard wiring of our brains is not different from the generations before us.

Ageing Is a Wicked Problem: Bodies Fail and So Do Societies | Interview with Dr Westendorp

The Other Side of the Universe

Ovidiu Racorean writes about the second side of the universe, black holes and entanglement.

To sum up, our universe must have a second side where time runs in reverse, from the future to the past, which can be accessed throughout the eternal black hole.

The Other Side of the Universe

Artificial Intelligence to the Rescue: Smart Robots are Coming to your Garden

The new generation of gardening robots may be based on real-time algorithms, artificial intelligence and artificial neural networks. Anil Baslamisli works in collaboration with the TrimBot2020 project to build the perfect trimming machine.

Robotics technology is expected to be dominant in the coming decade. According to a report from the International Federation of Robotics, the number of household domestic robots will hit 31 million by the end of 2019

Artificial Intelligence to the Rescue: Smart Robots are Coming to your Garden

Digging for Dark Matter

Paleo-detectors, rocks as old as one billion years, may help us understand the nature of dark matter, explains the physicist Thomas Edwards in this article.

Unlike normal detectors, paleo-detectors have been exposed to an onslaught of dark matter particles for their entire life. This barrage of particle collisions could leave observable deformations in the otherwise crystalline structure of the mineral.