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The history of the solar system is a dish best served cold. And it is so very cold on Ultima Thule. That is the message beaming back to Earth from NASA’s New Horizons probe now that it has completed its historic exploration of a small body in the Kuiper Belt, the sprawling population of dwarf planets and cometlike objects out beyond Neptune. When New Horizons flew past at 12:33 A.M. Eastern time on January 1, Ultima was a hair over four billion miles from the sun....

PITTSBURGH—A hulking four-wheeled robot stands idle, sheathed in steel and packed with hoses and cameras in the lobby of a Carnegie Mellon University research facility here. A mechanical claw extends from the end of a large boom. The device, called Workhorse, was designed for an entirely different environment: the dark, radiation-tainted confines of a building containing a failed nuclear reactor. It was never used for its intended purpose, but it reflects a burst of creativity in robotics that accompanied the cleanup of the worst commercial nuclear plant accident in the U....

Quantifying Quandary In “The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap,” David Dobbs reports on a growing number of experts who believe that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is being overdiagnosed. In support of this argument, Dobbs cites a 1990s study in which researchers asked veterans “about 19 specific types of potentially traumatic events…. Two years out, 70 percent of the veterans reported at least one traumatic event they had not mentioned a month after returning, and 24 percent reported at least three such events for the first time....

Key concepts Cooking Food Heat Polymer Pectin Introduction Does your family have jellied cranberry sauce with Thanksgiving dinner? Jellied cranberries are thick and retain the shape of the mold in which they are placed, which might mean a turkey-shaped mold or even the shape of the can if you use one of the popular canned verities. Taking a bite of wiggly jellied cranberries can be a fun addition to a delicious meal, but cranberries can also be served as a liquidlike sauce....

Alexander von Humboldt, one of the founding fathers of the natural sciences, traveled the world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, recording his observations as sketches of everything from the stars to plant distribution on a mountainside—some of which appear in this collection of adventurers’ drawings, compiled by writers and explorers Lewis-Jones and Herbert. Also here are drawings by Charles Darwin, father of modern taxonomy Carl Linnaeus and fearless flower hunter Margaret Mee....

On top of the usual “spills in aisle five,” grocery stores have another mess they’re hoping to clean up: greenhouse gas leaks. U.S. EPA announced yesterday that its partnership to cut greenhouse gas emissions from grocery stores has reached 50 states. The partnership, called GreenChill, now has 7,000 members, about a fifth of all supermarkets in the United States. Much of their carbon footprint comes from the electricity that powers their lights, soda fountains, meat slicers and other equipment....

About 13.8 billion years ago, just 400,000 years or so after the big bang, the universe abruptly went dark. Before that time, the entire visible universe was a hot, seething, roiling plasma—a dense cloud of protons, neutrons and electrons. If anyone had been there to see it, the universe would have looked like a pea soup fog, but blindingly bright. Around the 400,000-year mark, however, the expanding universe cooled enough for hydrogen atoms to form at last—an event known as recombination....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Friday announced a federal strategy to reverse a rapid decline in the number of honey bees and other pollinators in the United States that threatens the development of billions of dollars in crops. As part of the plan, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced $8 million in funding for farmers and ranchers in five states who establish new habitats for honey bee populations. “Honey bee pollination alone adds more than $15 billion in value to agricultural crops each year in the United States,” the White House said in a statement announcing the establishment of a multi-agency task force and other measures....

Our brains are exquisitely tuned to perceive, recognize and remember faces. We can easily find a friend’s face among dozens or hundreds of unfamiliar faces in a busy street. We look at one another’s facial expressions for signs of appreciation and disapproval, love and contempt. And even after we have corresponded or spoken on the phone with somebody for a long time, we are often relieved when we are able to meet him or her in person and are able to put “a face to the name....

Natalie Paquette spends her time thinking about how to grow an extra dimension. Start with little circles, scattered across every point in space and time—a curlicue dimension, looped back onto itself. Then shrink those circles down, smaller and smaller, tightening the loop, until a curious transformation occurs: the dimension stops seeming tiny and instead becomes enormous, like when you realize something that looks small and nearby is actually huge and distant....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Cats in the Middle Ages were generally disapproved of, regarded as, at best, useful pests and, at worst, agents of Satan, owing to the medieval Church and its association of the cat with evil. Prior to the widespread acceptance of Christianity, however, cats were considered valuable members of society and were even worshipped in some cultures....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Morocco, then known as Mauretania, was annexed by the Roman Empire in 40 CE. The Romans in Morocco left a vast legacy with archaeological sites that dot the country’s northern landscape, especially Volubilis, with its vestiges of Roman houses, temples, mosaics, and wide-paved streets. However, three smaller sites exist at Lixus, Sala Colonia, and Banasa....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Indigenous peoples of Austronesian ancestry are the original inhabitants of Taiwan. Taiwanese indigenous peoples — formerly called Taiwanese aborigines, Formosan people, and Gaoshan (臺灣原住民族) — lived in relative isolation for over 5,000 years until the 16th and 17th centuries. Successive waves of colonization by the Chinese, Spanish, Dutch, Manchus, and Japanese each took their toll on the Taiwanese indigenous peoples, but today, they are experiencing a cultural renaissance....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Silla Kingdom ruled south-eastern Korea during the Three Kingdoms period (1st century BCE - 7th century CE) and then, as the Unified Silla Kingdom, all of Korea from 668 to 935 CE. The Silla produced fine pieces of art, but their most celebrated works are undoubtedly the five gold crowns which have been excavated from five royal tombs....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Provence has inherited a rich legacy from antiquity, boasting some of the best-preserved Roman ruins in Europe. In the 2nd century BCE, the Romans began their conquest of the region and called it “Provincia Romana,” giving us the region’s present name, “Provence.” Thanks to the Pax Romana, which was to last for several centuries, the province, later renamed “Gallia Narbonensis” (after its capital “Narbo Martius” which is present-day Narbonne, France), experienced a period of unprecedented growth....

If you’re a betting person, it would be close to a sure bet to go all-in on 2015 taking the title of warmest year on record. “I would say [we’re] 99 percent certain that it’s going to be the warmest year on record,” Jessica Blunden, a climate scientist with ERT, Inc., at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said during a press teleconference on Thursday. According to the global temperature data compiled separately by NASA, NOAA, and the Japan Meteorological Agency, this July was the warmest July on record going back more than a century....

It turns out that helping prevent the spread of tuberculosis (TB) may be as simple as opening a window. Researchers in Peru have found that natural ventilation can move more than twice as much air through hospital wards than expensive, hard-to-maintain fans can. In principle, such ventilation dilutes the concentration of TB (not to mention of other airborne diseases) in the air, reducing the risk of infection for hospital workers and other patients....

December 1964 Moon Rocks “We expect that the study of lunar geology will help to answer some longstanding questions about the early evolution of the earth. The moon and the earth are essentially a two-planet system, and the two bodies are probably closely related in origin. In this connection the moon is of special interest because its surface has not been subjected to the erosion by running water that has helped to shape the earth’s surface....

A different kind of truck stop is coming soon to Atlanta. Greg Roche, vice president for infrastructure at Clean Energy Fuels, is presently scouting locations to build one of the California-based company’s natural gas fueling stations for long-haul trucks by the end of this year. With fracking techniques freeing more and more natural gas in the U.S., the alternative fuel is suddenly much cheaper than those made from petroleum. “A trucker can save one third of his energy spend by switching to natural gas,” Roche notes, thanks to the historically low prices for the gaseous fuel occasioned by the boom in U....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Traumatic events during childhood - as well as growing up with abuse, neglect or a dysfunctional family - may increase the risk of developing high blood pressure later in life, a small study suggests. Researchers followed about 400 people over more than two decades and found that, after adjusting for socioeconomic factors and medical history, those who experienced several extremely stressful events during childhood had a much steeper rise in blood pressure at age 30....