Reference Terms
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Belief
Belief is usually defined as a conviction of the truth of a proposition without its verification; therefore a belief is a subjective mental interpretation derived from perceptions, contemplation(reasoning), or communication. In the religious sense, "belief" refers to a part of a wider spiritual or moral foundation -- generally called faith. Knowledge is often defined as justified true belief, in that the belief must be considered to correspond to reality and must be derived from valid evidence and arguments.
In the religious sense, "belief" refers to a part of a wider spiritual or moral foundation -- generally called faith. Historically, faiths were generated by groups seeking a functionally valid foundation to sustain them. The generally accepted faiths usually note that, when the exercise of faith leads to oppression, clarification or further revelation is called for.
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October 16, 2026
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Aug. 24, 2026 More screen time during infancy and around the start of school was linked to poorer academic performance and weaker working memory years later. The findings suggest that early childhood may contain particularly sensitive windows when screen habits ...
Aug. 18, 2026 Kratom use and serious health problems linked to it have risen dramatically across the United States over the past decade. Poison center reports jumped from just 19 cases in 2010 to more than 1,200 in 2023, while severe outcomes—including ...
Aug. 12, 2026 Ordinary WiFi networks could quietly become powerful surveillance tools, allowing people to be identified without cameras, special sensors, or even carrying a connected device. Researchers showed that unencrypted signals routinely exchanged between ...
Aug. 2, 2026 Coastal communities are facing a hidden threat that is making rising seas far more dangerous: the land beneath them is sinking. New research shows that people in densely populated coastal regions experience an average relative sea-level rise of ...
July 30, 2026 Astronomers may have been listening for alien civilizations in only a small slice of the radio spectrum while overlooking a largely unexplored range of higher frequencies. Using archived data from the ALMA telescope in Chile, researchers conducted ...
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Oct. 16, 2026 Scientists investigating Nazi Germany's secret nuclear program have uncovered evidence that its final experimental reactor was nowhere near as close to working as previously claimed. Analysis of ...
Oct. 14, 2026 A groundbreaking study suggests that 2.22 million Indigenous Australians lived on the continent before European colonization, far more than ...
Oct. 6, 2026 A study comparing 100 primate species, including humans, suggests that everyday aggression and lethal violence did not evolve as part of the same simple behavioral spectrum. Species that frequently ...
Oct. 6, 2026 Ancient pottery from Tampa Bay appears to have been made by migrant craftspeople who brought specialized Mississippian pottery-making knowledge hundreds of miles south. Remarkably, they even ...
Sep. 30, 2026 Mount Vesuvius’ famous 79 CE eruption has given scientists a remarkably precise benchmark for dating events deep in Earth’s past. The improved ...
Sep. 26, 2026 Ancient DNA shows that adults and children buried together in medieval Sweden were often not members of the same immediate family, suggesting that ...
Sep. 26, 2026 Scientists discovered that tiny amounts of lead in ancient ink can make writing inside burned papyrus scrolls stand out dramatically in X-ray scans. The technique could help unlock lost Greek and ...
Sep. 23, 2026 Scandinavian museums are trying to move beyond the familiar image of Vikings as sword-wielding male warriors, highlighting women, farmers, traders, and a far more complicated society. But the ...
Sep. 23, 2026 Stonehenge’s six-ton Altar Stone may have been carried from Scotland to Dogger Bank by glaciers before prehistoric people transported it hundreds of kilometers to Salisbury Plain. The possible ...
Sep. 20, 2026 Researchers may have solved a long-running mystery surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls by proposing that the Qumran sect really did use its distinctive 364-day calendar. Its perfectly ordered 52-week ...