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In three years, two tailings dam failures have profoundly changed the vision on mining in Brazil. More than three hundred deaths and one thousand kilometers of destroyed rivers are nowadays study objects of almost all scientific fields. Although, many gaps still exist. To comprehend the actual scenario of the academic production on these technological disasters, we did a systematic review of the literature by analytical procedures that are rigorous, explicit, and reproducible. A set of 326 scientific documents was identified, interpreted, and classified by their socio-academic relevance. The results show a greater participation of Geosciences and Science of Law, but there is little dialogue between publications, which can be seen for the low number of citations in most documents.

Philosophical interests of Joseph Życiński (1948-2011) in the domain of the philosophy of science were focused on the debate concerning the nature of science and philosophy of science that followed the Einstein-Planck revolution in science. The unexpected discovery of the philosophical, extra-scientific presuppositions in science, as well as of the extra-rational factors determining the way these presuppositions are accepted in science were to be explained within the meta-scientific framework. It is the aim of this paper to present ˙ Życiński’s diagnosis of this post-revolutionary situation in the philosophy of science as well as his critique of the metascientific answers to this challenge. The reasons will be given why all those answers are put under two dichotomous rubrics of internalism and externalism. It will be also explained how Życiński intends to supersede this false in his opinion opposition with a new concept of the doxatic rationality. However, the details of the metascientific proposal of Życiński will be given only in the subsequent paper. In order to perform the aim of the paper the metatheoretic tools set out by Popper (1979) will be used.

Research in primate cognition improves our understanding of the evolutionary history of these mental abilities. Large samples from a wide diversity of species are essential to achieve such objectives. However, research on primate cognition usually suffers from very small samples limited to a handful of species, which prevents reliable evolutionary inferences. The ManyPrimates project offers to overcome some of these problems by providing a large-scale collaborative framework for comparative studies on primate cognition. Building on similar initiatives in other areas of psychology, this consortium has already produced a pilot study on short-term memory gathering one of the largest, i.e. 176 individuals, and most diverse, i.e. twelve species from eleven different sites, primate samples to date. Other projects on short-term memory, inhibitory abilities and on inference by exclusion are in progress on large and diverse data sets and represent exciting opportunities to answer still open questions on the origin of the extraordinary cognitive abilities of primates. This paper describes these projects but also the coordination and communication of this collaborative infrastructure and the different ways to contribute to it.