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The first microscopes, in the 1500s and 1600s, transformed glass panes that looked completely transparent into a universe teeming with bacteria, cells, pollen and intricate crystals. These visionary aids were the first devices to show people that there were cells within a drop of blood. Since then, microscopes have opened up other invisible worlds for scientists, going within cells or down to the scale of atoms. We believe a new kind of microscope is about to unveil another fascinating new world: a world of motion and color change too minute for the eye to catch....

At the latest COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, young people from around the world were loudly protesting from the sidelines to hold their elders to task for the catastrophic climate mess Generation Z stands to inherit. Government leaders made pledges that would not only not limit global warming to 1.5 degrees but would instead mean 2.7 degrees of warming by the end of the century. As activist Greta Thunberg put it, these pledges that nations hammer out are lip service—“blah blah blah,” she said—to a serious problem that we are still struggling to measure....

Social cells: The slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum spends much of its time as an apparently typical microscopic single-celled amoeba, oozing around in wet soil as it grazes on bacteria. Something truly odd happens, however, when the food runs out. Starving D. discoideum band together to form a conglomerate organism. A multicellular slug of sorts, the group grows into a spore-making tower, a beacon for sending amoebae out to richer grounds. The sudden lifestyle change is interesting enough, but the real evolutionary puzzle is the cells that make up the delicate stalk....

Paleontologists have long searched for clues as to what caused the mass extinction of the large dinosaurs. How did hundreds of species vanish so abruptly, leaving us only their fossilized remains as clues that they ever existed? Such a devastating event would have required a sudden onset of dramatic changes in the Earth’s climate. This event in time is known as the K-Pg boundary, or the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, a marker between an era when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and a world more like today....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Dogs are the oldest domesticated animal in China and were bred as guardians, for transporting goods, for herding, hunting, and as a food source. Archaeological evidence dates the domestication of the dog in China at approximately 15,000 years ago. Remains of dogs have been found in Neolithic graves and their bones in middens dating from the same period onwards....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. John Lee joins World History Encyclopedia to tell us all about his new book, The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert. Kelly (WHE): Thank you so much for joining me! Let us start by talking about what the book is about and who this John Wesley Gilbert is....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola (1548) is a manual of disciplines formulated by Ignatius Loyola (l. 1491-1556) to prepare one spiritually for Christian service. They were initially developed between 1522-1524 by Loyola for himself and then shared with others, specifically his friends who formed the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1534....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Somerset Levels is an area of the British Isles that captivates visitors with its stunning natural landscape and historical sites and monuments. Glastonbury is famous for its apple orchards and music festival. It is one of the most visited small towns on the Levels, but it is also recommended for anyone interested in history and legends about England’s ancient past....

By Barbara Liston ORLANDO Fla. (Reuters) - Scientists say a man-made “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is as big as the state of Connecticut. The zone, which at about 5,000 square miles (13,000 sq km) is the second largest in the world but still smaller than in previous years, is so named because it contains no oxygen, or too little, at the Gulf floor to support bottom-dwelling fish and shrimp....

Imagine you get nine hours of sleep every night, squeeze in long naps whenever you can, and yet every waking hour is a blur of exhaustion, poor focus and longing for the next time your head will hit the pillow. That is the reality for people with primary hypersomnia, a poorly understood, rare condition of perpetual sleepiness and lethargy. The dogma in sleep science has been that unexplained sleepiness is caused by underactive brain regions involved in wakefulness and attention....

There is good and bad news for climate scientists. The good news: Most Americans (79 percent) say that science and scientists are invaluable. The bad news: On controversial topics such as climate change, a significant number of Americans do not use science to inform their views. Instead, they use political orientation and ideology, which are reflected in their level of education, to decide whether humans are driving planetary warming. This comes from a public opinion poll released yesterday by Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)....

Shaping Humanity: How Science, Art, and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins by John Gurche Yale University Press, 2013 How can we paint a picture of someone who lived and died six million years ago, informed by little more than crude artifacts and rare, incomplete skeletal remains? Modeling the dawn of humans through our ancestors’ appearances and behaviors is much more than simple guesswork. Shaping Humanity reveals the secrets of how artist Gurche reconstructs our early primate ancestors from mere bone fragments....

By Theopolis Waters CHICAGO (Reuters) - A California turkey farm has been quarantined after confirmation of the first case of an outbreak of the highly pathogenic H5N8 avian influenza strain in the Pacific Northwest and in a commercial flock, the U.S. government said. The news on Saturday came just weeks after China banned U.S. poultry after an outbreak of another strain of bird flu in the Pacific Northwest. In the latest outbreak, Foster Farms said in a statement that it had informed the U....

Immediate and future radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster may result in hundreds of deaths and emerging cancer cases, according to a yearlong modeling project undertaken by researchers at Stanford University. Started within a week of the Fukushima meltdown, the project is the most detailed model yet of the emission, transport and deposition of radioactive material from the site, accounting for complex interactions between atmospheric conditions and the microphysics of radioactive particles....

Dear EarthTalk: How is that being around trees and other plants can help us feel good? — Amy Mola, Greenville, SC Trees are known to improve air quality by capturing six common air pollutants and toxic gases: ground-level ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and lead. In fact, a single tree can absorb 10 pounds of air pollutants per year. In a study published in 2014, U.S. Forest Service scientists and collaborators calculated that trees are saving more than 850 human lives a year and preventing 670,000 incidents of acute respiratory symptoms....

Dear EarthTalk: I recently heard the term “living building”. Can you explain? —Rebecca Gordon, Seattle, WA Over the past couple of decades, architects and builders looking to green their projects turned to the addition of various piecemeal elements to save water here or cut down on electricity there. Those who added more than a few green touches could apply for and get certified by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) under its Leadership in Energy and Efficient Design (LEED) program....

Moiya is an expert in science communication as well as being a scientist herself, so today I want to ask her about the steps you have to go through to produce a scientific paper. How do you go from an idea to a published paper? Why should we trust these scientific publications more than other writing or news reports we find on the internet? I’ve said on this show before not to trust articles that don’t cite their sources, but we’ve not yet talked about why we should trust those cited sources to begin with....

An alarming feature of Hurricane Ida, which devastated Louisiana on Sunday, was how quickly it evolved from category 1 status in the Gulf of Mexico to category 4 at landfall. The storm’s sustained winds spun up from 85 miles per hour on Saturday to 150 mph the next day when they galloped onshore. The escalation in power was so quick and extreme that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center (NHC) described Ida as a rapidly intensifying storm....

When I was training to be a clinical psychologist, telling parents that their child had autism was a regular part of my job. Now that I’m a parent, I understand better the pained expression that came over their faces as they contemplated this news. Among the many questions taking shape in their minds, I can imagine the one looming largest: Could their child ever be like other children? A recent study, published in February in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, suggests that for some people, the answer is yes....

If you have been practicing a piece of music, hearing it again while you are sleeping could help you play it more accurately the next time, according to a study from Northwestern University published online in June in Nature Neuroscience. Sixteen participants with a range of musical education learned to play two melodies by pressing keys in time with a sequence of moving circles, as in the video game Guitar Hero....