Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Setna II (also Setna Khaemaus and Si-Osire) is a work of ancient Egyptian literature from Roman Egypt (30 BCE - 646 CE) written in demotic script. It is part of a cycle of stories known as the Tales of Prince Setna featuring a character based on Khaemweset (c....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Atrahasis is the Akkadian/Babylonian epic of the Great Flood sent by the gods to destroy human life. Only the good man, Atrahasis (his name translates as `exceedingly wise’) was warned of the impending deluge by the god Enki (also known as Ea) who instructed him to build an ark to save himself....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Legend of Cutha (also known as the Cutha Legend and Kutha Legend) is a fictional work dated to the 2nd millennium BCE belonging to the genre known as Mesopotamian Naru literature. It features the Akkadian king Naram-Sin (r. 2261-2224 BCE) in a story illustrating a monarch’s proper relationship with the gods and the importance of written records....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Following the collapse of the Agade empire, the centre of power in southern Mesopotamia shifted to the cities of Uruk and Ur. The governor of Ur, Ur-Nammu, established a dynasty which came to dominate the other cities of the region, and whose territory stretched east into Iran. Under his successor, Shulgi, the empire was consolidated and centralised....
Paul from Australia wrote in and asked how he could cultivate his patience. Paul is visually impaired and often gets questions or offers of help from strangers. At first, the questions were welcome conversation starters and the offers of help were charming. But after years and years, as you might imagine, it’s all started to get annoying. Oblivious questions, miss-the-mark offers of help, and awkwardly alarmist people create interpersonal tension that Paul is left to deal with....
A small corner of the neuroscience world was in a frenzy. It was mid-June and a scientific paper had just been published claiming that years worth of results were riddled with errors. The study had dug into the software used to analyze one kind of brain scan, called functional MRI. The software’s approach was wrong, the researchers wrote, calling into doubt “the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies”—in other words, all of them....
The increasingly frequent and intense floods, heat waves, wildfires and other extreme climate events jolt us into realizing that we don’t have the comfortable distance of 2040 or 2050 by which to mitigate climate change. The future we were meant to evade is here already, decades ahead of schedule. As world leaders gather at the global climate negotiations in Glasgow in November, they—and we—need to focus on two imperatives simultaneously. First, we must avoid the unmanageable by rapidly reducing the emissions that are heating up the planet....
As scientists work to create a vaccine against COVID-19, a small but fervent anti-vaccination movement is marshalling against it. Campaigners are seeding outlandish narratives: they falsely say that coronavirus vaccines will be used to implant microchips into people, for instance, and falsely claim that a woman who took part in a UK vaccine trial died. In April, some carried placards with anti-vaccine slogans at rallies in California to protest against the lockdown....
MALTA—U.S. drug stores have been advertising their seasonal flu shots to the public for weeks, and here at Scientific American employees have already been invited to sign up for free jabs next month. These vaccination enticements, for the most part, come down to individuals’ decisions about arming themselves against the flu. But for doctors, nurses and other workers in the health care industry, their level of protection against the season’s circulating flu strains has the potential to impact hundreds of others, noted health experts at the fourth European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI) conference earlier this month in Malta....
Spaceflight, however, has the potential to be more than just a planetary escape hatch for eccentric billionaires. Whether in today’s Earth-orbiting spacecraft or the outposts that may someday be built on the moon and Mars, to exist beyond Earth, we must somehow replicate all of our planet’s life-giving essentials off-world. Technologies that recycle practically everything—that make water, air and food as renewable and self-sustaining as possible—are essential for current and future human spaceflight....
Imagine hanging out with some of the world’s kookiest critters in the jungle’s tallest trees, building a robot that does stand-up comedy, inventing a device that propels you into the air like Batman, or traveling back in a DNA time machine to study ancient animals! Meet the scientists who make it possible. They include ecologist and explorer Mark Moffett, aka “Dr. Bugs,” roboticist Heather Knight, mechanical engineer and daredevil Nathan Ball, and evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro....
To Emily Dickinson, it was “fixed melancholy.” To essayist George Santayana, it was “rage spread thin.” The turns of phrase conjure different emotions, but these two writers were describing the same disorder: depression. The variance is more than a matter of literary or philosophical differences; it also reflects the fact that one was a woman, the other a man. Therapists have long known that men and women experience mental illness differently....
NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour made a successful and historic launch at 8:56 A.M. Eastern time Monday, as the agency approached the end of its shuttle program, first started in the 1960s. The liftoff marked Endeavour’s final mission and the second-to-last shuttle mission for NASA. The 16-day STS 134 mission, commanded by Mark Kelly, carried a cosmic-ray detector called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer 2, two communications antennas, a high-presure gas tank, parts for the Dextre robot, and five other astronauts to the International Space Station: Pilot Gregory H....
Ohio holds a singular place in America’s opioid scourge. In 2014 it suffered more overdose deaths than any other state. Since then such fatalities have only swelled, with 4,050 in 2016—a 32.8 percent increase from the previous year, according to health officials. Fueled by prescription painkillers as well as heroin and fentanyl, the epidemic has overrun city morgues, forced thousands of children into foster care and turned Montgomery County, which encompasses Dayton, into the overdose capital of the U....
The Obama administration today released details of its national suite of auto standards that would mandate increased fuel economy and impose the first-ever greenhouse gas standard on the nation’s cars and trucks. The proposals are a joint effort by U.S. EPA and the Transportation Department and would go into effect with model year 2012. The standards would push corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, standards to a fleetwide average of 35....
The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corp’s treatment for fatal neurological disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), marking the first such U.S. regulatory approval in more than two decades. The drug, known chemically as edaravone, has been sold by Japan-based Mitsubishi Tanabe in Japan and South Korea since 2015. In the United States, the only other approved ALS medicine, generic riluzole, modestly slows the progression of the disease in some people....
Southeast Louisiana is bracing for a mass exodus following Hurricane Ida, which has killed at least 13 people in the state and left hundreds of thousands without power, water and other essential services. While preliminary estimates are rough, experts say the storm could force tens of thousands of people from their homes in four parishes hardest hit by Ida: Lafourche, Jefferson, Plaquemines and Terrebonne. Most of Ida’s damage is concentrated below New Orleans—which saw high winds but relatively modest flooding....
NEARLY 40 YEARS since we declared war on cancer, how goes the campaign against this intractable and ancient adversary? As you will learn in this special edition, our enemy intelligence has improved over the years, enabling us to get a better bead on where the trouble begins. And we have developed stronger weapons, to more precisely pursue and annihilate diseased tissue. Finding Enemy Forces. Cancer’s origins are multifaceted, a combination of an individual’s genetic factors and influences from the surrounding environment and his or her personal history and lifestyle....
Researchers say they have confirmed suspicions that embryonic stem cells claimed to be extracted from the first cloned human embryo by discredited South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang actually owe their existence to parthenogenesis, a process in which egg cells give rise to embryos without being fertilized by sperm. A series of genetic markers sprinkled throughout the cells’ chromosomes show the same pattern found in parthenogenetic mice as opposed to cloned mice, according to a report published online today in the journal Cell Stem Cell....
Dear EarthTalk: I understand that Congress passed legislation not too long ago that protected a few million acres of wilderness areas, parks and wild rivers, in part to help offset climate change. How does conserving land prevent global warming?—M. Oakes, Charlottesville, N.C. The legislation in question is called the Omnibus Public Land Management Act. It was passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Obama in the spring of 2009....
