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One of the world’s most iconic astronomy sites, Puerto Rico’s giant Arecibo Observatory, may be facing the end of its era. The National Science Foundation (NSF), the primary funder of Arecibo—which is the largest existing radio telescope and was featured in the movies Contact and GoldenEye, among others—is holding public meetings on June 7 to “evaluate potential environmental effects of proposed changes to operations at Arecibo Observatory,” according to an NSF announcement....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Bloody Tenent of Persecution (original title, The Bloody Tenenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience) is a 1644 CE book by the Puritan separatist Roger Williams (l. 1603-1683 CE) which is best known for its arguments supporting the separation of church and state. Williams believed that sincere religious devotion was poisoned by political policy and any governmental influence on religion could only be detrimental....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Leisure activities in the Elizabethan era (1558-1603 CE) became more varied than in any previous period of English history and more professional with what might be called the first genuine entertainment industry providing the public with regular events such as theatre performances and animal baiting. Outdoor activities included tennis, bowls, archery, fencing, and team sports like football and hockey which were more violent and less rule-bound than their modern versions....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Elam, located in the region of the modern-day provinces of Ilam and Khuzestan in Iran, was one of the most impressive civilizations of the ancient world. It was never a cohesive ethnic kingdom or polity but rather a federation of different tribes governed at various times by cities such as Susa, Anshan, and Shimashki until it was united during the Middle Elamite Period, briefly, as an empire....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Ancient Roman culture affected vast numbers of people across the known world of its time, beginning with the rise of the Roman Republic (509-27 BCE) and throughout the duration of the Roman Empire (27 BCE - c. 476 CE in the West and 1453 CE in the East)....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In the second year of the Peloponnesian War, 430 BCE, an outbreak of plague erupted in Athens. The illness would persist throughout scattered parts of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean until finally dying out in 426 BCE. The origin of the epidemic occurred in sub-Saharan Africa just south of Ethiopia....

It’s generally accepted both inside and outside psychological circles that the details surrounding emotional events—like scoring the winning touchdown in a football game or a traumatic car accident—are easier to recall than those associated with mundane occurrences. A new study, appearing in this week’s issue of Nature Neuroscience, reports that those who carry a common variant of a gene called ADRA2B may have better recall of emotionally charged moments than those who lack the gene....

The U.S. military’s hush-hush robotic X-37B space plane is slated to blast off again next month, Air Force officials say. The mission will test the robotic spacecraft’s reusability and may eventually land on the Florida runway once used for NASA space shuttles. The X-37B space plane’s next mission — called Orbital Test Vehicle-3, or OTV-3, because it is the program’s third-ever spaceflight — is scheduled to launch aboard an Atlas 5 rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) sometime in October....

A wearable, graphene-based patch could one day maintain healthy blood glucose levels in people by measuring the sugar in sweat and then delivering the necessary dose of a diabetes drug through the skin (Nat. Nanotech. 2016, DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2016.38). The device takes scientists a step closer to the “coveted prize” in diabetes care: a noninvasive method to monitor and control blood glucose levels, writes Richard Guy of the University of Bath in a commentary about the new work....

The high-pitched squeals of the humble bat may be as complex as the calls of dolphins and monkeys, researchers have found. A study published on 22 December in Scientific Reports1 reveals that the fruit bat is one of only a few animals known to direct its calls at specific individuals in a colony, and suggests that information in the calls of many social animals may be more detailed than was previously thought....

The uproar over claims that the People’s Republic of China launched a series of network-based cyber attacks earlier this month against the U.K., France, Germany, and the U.S. has died down. But few expect China to back off efforts to gain the upper hand in the battle of bits and bytes. China’s own stated military goals include improving the country’s ability to wage information warfare. The cyber attacks against the U....

By Andrew M. Seaman (Reuters Health) - Cognition, social interactions and quality of life may improve for older people with hearing loss when hearing is restored with a cochlear implant, according to a study from France. One year after getting an implant, participants between the ages of 65 and 85 were able to hear words more clearly. Also, most had improved cognitive abilities and fewer of them reported symptoms of depression....

Five years ago panicked postmenopausal women threw away their hormone pills after the federal government revealed that the drugs raised the risk of breast cancer and coronary disease. In 2006 only six million U.S. women got hormone prescriptions, a dramatic drop from 16 million in 2001. It seemed like the end for hormone therapy, especially for the previously fashionable notion that hormones protected older women from cardiovascular disease and other ills caused by aging....

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy on Friday finalized a determination that the landmark fuel efficiency rules instituted by President Barack Obama should be locked in through 2025, a bid to maintain a key part of his administration’s climate legacy. Major U.S. and foreign automakers have appealed to President-elect Donald Trump, who has been critical of Obama’s climate policies, to review the rules requiring them to nearly double fleet-wide fuel efficiency by 2025, saying they impose significant costs and are out of step with consumer preferences....

A growing number of the world’s people are being hit with drought, environmental disasters and rising food costs. What does that have to do with energy? Everything. Energy, water and food are the world’s three most critical resources, but their interdependence is significantly underappreciated. Strains on one can cripple the others. The challenges need to be solved in an integrated manner. Clean, affordable energy, for example, enables an abundance of clean water, which enables greater food production....

KAILUA-KONA, Hawaii (Reuters) - Hawaii residents were urged on Wednesday to stay clear of beaches and avoid swimming in the ocean after a tsunami advisory was issued for the state following an 8.2 magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of Chile. The advisory from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center cautioned that possible sea level changes and strong currents could pose a danger to swimmers and boaters, although experts said they did not expect evacuations to be ordered....

Human activities are pushing Earth toward a “tipping point” that could cause sudden, irreversible changes in relatively stable conditions that have allowed civilization to flourish, a new study warns. There are signs that a toxic brew of climate change, habitat loss and population growth is dramatically reshaping life on Earth, an international team of researchers reported yesterday in the journal Nature. Those pressures are greater than the natural forces that caused the end of the last ice age roughly 11,700 years ago, a time when half the planet’s large mammal species went extinct and humans migrated out of Africa....

Lyme disease is a truly intractable puzzle. Scientists used to consider the tick-borne infection easy to conquer: patients, diagnosed by their bull’s-eye rash, could be cured with a weeks-long course of antibiotics. But in recent decades the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has realized that up to one in five Lyme patients exhibits persistent debilitating symptoms such as fatigue and pain, known as post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and no one understands why....

Researchers may have cracked the code for the perfect head on a glass of beer, and perhaps much more in the process. The key lies in a long sought equation for the growth and shrinkage of individual bubbles in foam and crystalline grains in metals, semiconductors and other materials. The finding extends a formula that specifies how the area of two-dimensional shapes will change, discovered in part by famed mathematician John von Neumann in 1952....

It was a sunny California afternoon in January 2015 when Dennis Wall received an unexpected gift: ‘smart glasses’ made by Google that had failed to live up to their hype in the press. An employee from the company pulled up to Wall’s lab at Stanford University in a sleek gray Tesla, popped open the sedan’s trunk and unloaded a brown cardboard box with long, dangling cords. It was a scene straight out of the television comedy “Silicon Valley,” which satirizes the absurdity of the tech world....