Posts

Michael Suffredini has big business plans for low Earth orbit. After a decade as NASA’s program manager for the International Space Station (ISS) he retired from the agency in September 2015 to pursue opportunities in the private sector, convinced that a golden age of commercial spaceflight was dawning. Partnering with Kam Ghaffarian, CEO of SGT, the company that operates the ISS for NASA and also trains America’s astronauts, Suffredini co-founded Axiom Space in early 2016....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The chariot was the elite arm of ancient Indian armies in the Vedic (1500 BCE – 1000 BCE) and Epic periods (described by the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, 1000-600 BCE) because of the advantages it conferred and the selection of plain ground as battlefields. Chariots were highly mobile and gave an advantage over infantry and cavalry....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The first stage in making a pot is to dig the clay out of the ground. Pieces of grit or plant matter must be removed before the clay can be used. This was done in ancient times, as it is today, by mixing the clay with water and letting the heavier impurities sink to the bottom....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In ancient times, the First Cataract at Aswan marked the southern frontier of Egypt. Beyond lay the land of Nubia, which stretched along the river Nile from the First Cataract southwards for about 250 kilometres (155 mi). This region, known as Lower (northern Egyptian) Nubia, functioned as a buffer zone between the two power centres of Egypt and Kush, the latter extending farther to the south to the Sixth Cataract in modern Sudan....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Second Battle of Newbury on 27 October 1644 was a major battle during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651). There was no clear winner despite the Parliamentarians having a numerical advantage of 2:1. The seeming lack of coordination between the Parliamentarian commanders at Newbury and the definite lack of progress in destroying the royal army led to Parliament forming a new professional fighting force, the New Model Army, which then prosecuted the war with much more vigour and success....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Mongol invasions of Japan took place in 1274 and 1281 CE when Kublai Khan (r. 1260-1294 CE) sent two huge fleets from Korea and China. In both cases, the Japanese, and especially the samurai warriors, vigorously defended their shores but it would be typhoon storms and the so-called kamikaze or ‘divine winds’ which sank and drowned countless ships and men, thus saving Japan from foreign conquest....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Located about 11 miles south of the ancient port city of Miletus on the western coast of modern-day Turkey, the Temple of Apollo at Didyma or Didymaion was the fourth largest temple in the ancient Greek world. The temple’s oracle, second in importance only to that at Delphi, played a significant role in the religious and political life of both Miletus and the greater Mediterranean world; many rulers, from Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE) to the Roman emperor Diocletian (244-313 CE) visited or sent delegations to this oracle seeking the guidance and favor of Apollo....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Women in the Byzantine Empire (4th to 15th century CE) were, amongst the upper classes, largely expected to supervise the family home and raise children while those who had to work for a living did so in most of the industries of the period, from manufacturing to hospitality....

A flat tire is nuisance enough for the lucky motorist that has a spare, a jack, and a safe place to pull over. For an astronaut in a bulky spacesuit, exposed to the harsh lunar environment, it could be a mission wrecker—or worse. That is one of the reasons that designers of tires for lunar rovers both past and future have sought to go airless, and a version now under development by Michelin, in cooperation with NASA, is no exception....

The outlines of a global market for solar-generated electricity are beginning to emerge. An industry that has long been little more than a dream for governments, environmental activists and other strategists hoping to find ways to curb global warming blossomed into worldwide reality last year. Nations from all regions reported to the International Energy Agency for the first time that their markets for what is known as photovoltaic energy were growing....

Cells that prune connections between neurons in babies’ brains as they grow are thought to have a role in autism spectrum disorder. Now, a study suggests that the number and behaviour of these cells—called microglia—vary in boys and girls, a finding that could help to explain why many more boys are diagnosed with autism and related disorders. Donna Werling, a neurogeneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues found that genes associated with microglia are more active in male brains than in female brains in the months before birth....

I’m right-handed. This fact makes it easier for me than for lefties to push revolving doors and play the accordion, though not at the same time. Our societal infrastructure is set up for righties, the result of (or perhaps a continuing cause for) only about 10 percent of humanity being left-handed. It’s actually the brain’s infrastructure that seems to be mostly responsible for almost all of us being righties. A 2009 paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B notes: “Lateralization of brain and behaviour refers to the fact that the hemispheres of the brain differentially control behaviour…....

Seville and Lisbon have thrived for more than a thousand years in a temperate climate. But if global warming continues at the current pace, these cities will be in the middle of a desert by the end of the century, climate modellers report on October 27 in Science. Maintaining the historic ranges of the region’s ecosystems would require limiting warming to just 1.5 ºC, by making substantial cuts to the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, the analysis concludes....

If you give a mouse a beer, he’s going to ask for a cookie—and another, and another. If you give a person enough beer, she might find herself wolfing down a plate of greasy nachos. But why does binge drinking make us binge eat as well? The reason may lie not in the stomach but in the brain, recent research suggests. A study published today in Nature Communications found alcohol activated brain cells that control hunger, sending drunk mice scampering for snacks even when they were not really hungry....

For more than a century, the 3.5 million miles of rivers that snake across the U.S. were treated like open sewers and garbage cans, leaving them steeped in oil, paint, fertilizer, feces and other refuse. Fires that ignited riverine trash were widely considered an acceptable cost of industry, a sign of abundant jobs and economic growth. And there was a common (and erroneous) belief that “dilution was the solution to pollution,” meaning that waterways had an endless ability to absorb our waste and flush it away....

At 9:15 in the morning two or three times a week, Jan Scheuermann maneuvers her electric wheelchair into a research laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, where she plugs her head into a highly sophisticated piece of equipment. Two ports in her scalp connect to a prosthetic limb, a sleek, black anthropomorphic arm that extends from a metal scaffold in the lab. She is one of a dozen or so volunteers worldwide who have received brain implants as part of multiyear experiments on how to manipulate objects with their thoughts alone....

LES ANGLAIS, Haiti – Little comes easy in this tiny coastal village where kids fill plastic buckets with charcoal to sell at market and women sweep bean pods into tidy mounds alongside pastel-painted mud and concrete houses. Litane Morece, who makes her living selling Chiclets gum and candies in front of the local school, burns a few sticks of wood to make her morning coffee. Showing off her steel stove, which she will place atop three large stones to cook fish and rice for that evening’s dinner, Morece says charcoal makes the food tastier, but wood is cheaper....

As you read this sentence, you probably think that this moment—right now—is what is happening. The present moment feels special. It is real. However much you may remember the past or anticipate the future, you live in the present. Of course, the moment during which you read that sentence is no longer happening. This one is. In other words, it feels as though time flows, in the sense that the present is constantly updating itself....

Infectious diseases that leave victims with cognitive deficits or malnutrition instead of killing them do not typically elicit fundraising galas or research dollars, especially when the illnesses disproportionately impact the poorest of the poor. But a new coalition of funders is now trying to throw these neglected diseases a financial lifeline. Although the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the governments of the U.K. and U.S. have moved to help address these issues, research in this area lags well behind research into more lethal and common diseases....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence and the rapid adoption of robots across diverse industries are stalking the fear of jobless growth. Responses to these developments have focused on what to do to ensure that robots don’t steal jobs. Bill Gates, for example, has called for the taxing of robots that take away jobs. This has elicited responses from leading economists, such as Larry Summers (former Vice President of Development Economics, Chief Economist of the World Bank, and US Treasury Department official) who argue against the idea saying that robots are job creators and that the idea of taxing them is profoundly flawed....