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Among dance forms, tango holds a unique and potent allure. It showcases two individuals—each with a separate mind, body, and bundle of goals and intentions, moving at times in close embrace, at times stepping away from each other, improvising moves and flourishes while responding to the imaginative overtures of the other—who somehow manage to give the impression of two bodies answering to a single mind. For performers and viewers alike, much of tango’s appeal comes from this apparent psychic fusion into a super-individual unit....

As the first day of spring approaches a scientific mystery will soon return with a roar— the 2013 return of the east coast b rood of cicadas, or Brood II. Now a team of scientists hint they may have a solution as to why this brood and its fellows bizarrely emerge only after lulls more than a decade long—to control their surroundings in ways that may lead to crashes in numbers of predatory birds....

A cancer that has wiped out 70 percent of wild Tasmanian devils became contagious by “switching off” certain genes that would otherwise enable the immune system to recognize it, a new study finds. Devil facial tumor disease is one of only two contagious cancers in the world (the other affects dogs and is nonfatal). It spreads when the Australian marsupials bite or nip each other, transmitting cancerous cells that grow into enormous face tumors....

Hundreds of hospitals along U.S. coastlines are in danger of flooding when hurricanes strike, new research warns. And as sea levels continue rising, so will the flood risks. The findings were published Thursday in the journal GeoHealth by a team of researchers from Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The study examined 682 acute care hospitals in 78 metropolitan areas along the East Coast and Gulf Coast, all situated within 10 miles of the shore....

“Tell me what I’m missing,” my husband said. He, like many of us, had seen headlines about a recent study that surveys the weight, exercise habits and cardiovascular disease risk of over half a million people in Spain. It’s being covered by media outlets as irrefutable proof that no, sorry, forget what the body positivity movement has told you—you cannot be both fat and fit. This is not a new argument....

There’s more than one way to get your hands on a Nobel gold medal. The 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to English physicist James Chadwick for his discovery of the neutron will be offered this morning (June 3). Sotheby’s, which is handling the sale in New York, has estimated that the Nobel medal and its accompanying diploma will sell for $200,000-$400,000. [The 9 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics] Selby Kiffer, Sotheby’s international senior books specialist, sees the medal as a tangible piece of memorabilia for the discovery of something almost incomprehensibly small....

Editor’s Note: Shortly before his death last August at the age of 79, the noted physicist and public intellectual Victor Stenger worked with two co-authors to pen an article for Scientific American. In it Stenger and co-authors address the latest eruption of a long-standing historic feud, an argument between physicists and philosophers about the nature of their disciplines and the limits of science. Can instruments and experiments (or pure reason and theoretical models) ever reveal the ultimate nature of reality?...

Radiation from Japan’s leaking Fukushima nuclear power plant has reached waters offshore Canada, researchers said today at the annual American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Meeting in Honolulu. Two radioactive cesium isotopes, cesium-134 and cesium-137, have been detected offshore of Vancouver, British Columbia, researchers said at a news conference. The detected concentrations are much lower than the Canadian safety limit for cesium levels in drinking water, said John Smith, a research scientist at Canada’s Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia....

Would Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson be given drugs today? In the 1980s a small group of leading psychiatrists revised the profession’s diagnostic manual, called the DSM for short, adding social anxiety disorder—aka shyness—and dozens of other new conditions. Christopher Lane, Miller Research Professor at Northwestern University, uses previously secret documents, many from the American Psychiatric Association archives, to support his argument that these decisions were marked by carelessness, pervasive influence from the pharmaceutical industry, academic politics and personal ambition....

For millennia, artists have chronicled human health and the quest to preserve it. Behold the evolution of medicine through the ages, as encapsulated in this compendium of artifacts, drawings, paintings and biomedical images from the holdings of London’s Wellcome Collection. EXCERPT Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World by Lisa Randall. HarperCollins, 2011 Harvard University physicist Lisa Randall discusses the nature of science and the latest ideas in physics and cosmology....

The fatal Deepwater Horizon drilling platform explosion and subsequent oil spill in 2010 that lasted for four months could have been prevented, according to the final report of President Obama’s National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling released January 11. Ultimately, the disaster stemmed from a lack of preparation—a condition that remains today—as well as mismanagement, the report states. “Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska the same blunt response technologies—booms, dispersants and skimmers—were used, to limited effect,” the seven commission members wrote in the report....

When my kids were born, about 30 years ago, i knew they had inherited about half their DNA from me. At the time, the transfer of DNA from sperm or egg to an embryo was thought to be the only way that heritable information could flow from parents to children, at least in humans and other mammals. Of course, I understood that DNA is not destiny. Yes, many characteristics of a child may be written into his or her DNA and specifically into protein-coding genes—the sequences of DNA code that dictate the shapes and functions of proteins, the workhorses of the cell....

When the Pilgrims landed on the shores of what is now Cape Cod in late November of 1620, they “fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven” for delivering them to a safe harbor. It had been a harrowing two month-long voyage from England on the Mayflower, but their troubles were far from over. The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony struggled greatly that first winter, with half of the Mayflower’s passengers dying of tuberculosis and pneumonia before spring arrived....

Astronomers observed 39 cosmic events that released gravitational waves over a 6-month period in 2019—a rate of more than one per week. The bounty, described in a series of papers published on 28 October, demonstrates how observatories that detect these ripples—usually created by the merging of two black holes—have dramatically increased their sensitivity since the first identification was made in 2015. The growing data set is helping astronomers to map how frequently such events have happened in the Universe’s history....

A highly infectious and deadly strain of avian influenza virus has infected tens of millions of poultry birds across Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. But scientists are particularly concerned about the unprecedented spread in wild birds — outbreaks pose a significant risk to vulnerable species, are hard to contain and increase the opportunity for the virus to spill over into people. Since October, the H5N1 strain has caused nearly 3,000 outbreaks in poultry in dozens of countries....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Tel Kabri is an archaeological site in northwestern Israel that is best known as the location of one of the largest palaces in Canaan in the Middle Bronze Age or “MB” (ca. 2,000–1,500 BCE). Although Tel Kabri reached the height of its power in the MB, it was inhabited during various periods both before and after the MB, from the Pottery Neolithic period (c....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven is a Sumerian poem relating the event, now famous from The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the goddess Inanna/Ishtar sends the celestial bull to attack Gilgamesh after he has rejected her advances. The epic changes several details from the original poem which ends with praise for Inanna instead of Enkidu’s condemnation....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Raising sugar cane could be a very profitable business, but producing refined sugar was a highly labour-intensive process. For this reason, European colonial settlers in Africa and the Americas used slaves on their plantations, almost all of whom came from Africa. If they survived the horrific conditions of transportation, slaves could expect a hard life indeed working on plantations in the Atlantic islands, Caribbean, North America, and Brazil....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Love, sex, and marriage in ancient Greece are portrayed in Greek literature as distinct, yet closely intertwined, elements of life. For many upper-class men, marriages did not take place for love, and other relationships, be it with men or other women, took on this role. Due to this, a lot of the literature discussing love is about the relationships men had outside marriage, often pederastic relationships....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Petition of Right was a list of demands of King Charles I of England (r. 1625-1649) issued by Parliament in June 1628. The petition came after three years of disagreements between the king and Parliament over finances, religious matters, and Charles’ endorsement of certain key but unpopular political figures, notably the Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628)....