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Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Buried for most of its life in the desert sand, an air of mystery has always surrounded the Great Sphinx, causing speculation about its age and purpose, method of construction, concealed chambers, role in prophecy, and relationship to the equally mysterious pyramids. Much of this theorizing is to the despair of Egyptologists and archaeologists, who, reasonably it seems to me; only give credence to theories that are backed up by tangible evidence....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The medieval toilet or latrine, then called a privy or garderobe, was a primitive affair, but in a castle, one might find a little more comfort and certainly a great deal more design effort than had been invested elsewhere. Practicality, privacy, and efficient waste disposal were all considered and, even today, one of the most prominent and easily identifiable features of ruined medieval castles is the latrines which protrude from their exterior walls....

NOVEMBER 1958 POLITICS BEFORE DATA— “The school of Soviet genetics led by Trofim D. Lysenko seems to have acquired a new lease on life. It had been expected that various non-Lysenkoist geneticists would represent the U.S.S.R. at the International Congress of Genetics in Montreal, but none arrived. Their absence, and the last-minute sub­mission of several papers, gave the Soviet contribution to the meeting a distinctly Lysenkoist flavor. The Congress adopted a resolution condemning ‘any at­­tempts on the part of governments to in­­terfere on political, ideological or other grounds with the free pursuit of science and free dissemination of scientific information....

Dear EarthTalk: What’s the story with animal cloning? Is the meat industry really cloning animals now to “beef up” production? – Frank DeFazio, Sudbury, MA Cloning has been controversial ever since Scottish scientists announced in 1996 that they had cloned their first mammal, a sheep they named Dolly. While Dolly lived a painful, arthritic life and died prematurely, possibly due to the imperfections of cloning, industry nonetheless began seeking out ways to capitalize on the new technology....

Excerpted from Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna. Copyright © by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press. If Michelangelo were reborn today, amidst all the turmoil that marks our present age, would he flounder, or flourish again? Every year, millions of people file into the Sistine Chapel to stare up in wonder at Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Creation of Adam....

This story is a supplement to the feature “Self-Cleaning Materials: Lotus Leaf-Inspired Nanotechnology” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. By switching the hydrophobicity of precise locations on a surface, scientists hope to control fluids moving through networks of microscopic channels on so-called microfluidic chips. Researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea attached a molecule based on azobenzene on top of polymer-silica multilayers [see box on preceding page]....

Roughly 8.7 million years ago, in areas that would become southern Idaho and northern Nevada, the grasslands began to break open, unleashing curtains of lava and clouds of gas and ash that rolled across the North American landscape. Within hours, if not minutes, the land would have been pummeled by black volcanic glass that rained from above, killing animals such as rhinoceroses, camels, and horses that roamed the region and destroying plants....

The star often called the most mysterious in the galaxy has begun darkening again. Scientists are now rushing to watch the event with as many telescopes as they can muster to attempt to understand what is causing its bewildering fluctuations of light. The star, called KIC 8462852 and nicknamed “Tabby’s Star” after Yale University astronomer Tabetha “Tabby” Boyajian, first made news in 2015 when researchers discovered something odd about its light, whose strange brightenings and dimmings have even caused some to speculate it might host alien megastructures around it....

When a cancer cell throws out its trash, it can turn healthy neighbors into fellow tumor cells, researchers have found. Many cells, including cancerous ones, shed thousands of tiny membrane-bound vesicles called exosomes that contain proteins, DNA and RNA. The process is thought to be a waste-management system, but it may also facilitate cell-to-cell communication: some of these vesicles can then merge with other cells and dump their payload inside. In a study published online on October 23 in Cancer Cell, researchers show that when human breast-cancer exosomes can cause tumors when mixed with normal cells then injected into mice....

By Tom Miles GENEVA, Nov 9 (Reuters) - Greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere reached a record high in 2014 and the relentless fuelling of climate change is endangering the planet for future generations, the World Meteorological Organization said on Monday. “Every year we say that time is running out. We have to act NOW to slash greenhouse gas emissions if we are to have a chance to keep the increase in temperatures to manageable levels,” WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said in a statement....

In spite of sharing genes and environments, siblings are often not as similar in nature as one might think. But where do the supposed differences come from? Alfred Adler, a 19th- and early 20th-century Austrian psychotherapist and founder of individual psychology, suspected that birth order leads to differences in siblings. Adler considered firstborns to be neurotic, because they don’t have to share their parents for years and are essentially dethroned once a sibling comes along....

As we (and many others) predictedlast week, the latest effort at crafting cogent energy policy was much ado about nothing. The bill [pdf], which was introduced by Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Rob Portman (R-OH),would have inched us closer to better, smarter energy policy. A baby step in the right direction but at least a step. And somewhat miraculously in the current congressional climate, it haddrawn unusual bipartisan support, and was expected to garner enough votes to pass....

Sanitation doesn’t get a lot of headlines but, all told, its absence kills 6,000 children a day, according to British charity Water Aid. And the solution chosen by the developed world—the flush toilet—is running up against limits in the amount of water available to flush away human waste. The United Nations has attempted to fill this gap by securing a pledge from developed countries to halve the number of people without any form of sanitation—whether basic outdoor latrines or indoor toilets—by 2015 as part of its Millennium Development Goals (a series of goals for world development, ranging from alleviating poverty to fighting diseases like AIDS)....

Last week’s 7.2-magnitude Good Friday earthquake in Mexico City sent people scurrying out into the streets as chandeliers and other objects spun wildly in houses. The quake wasn’t Earth’s biggest Good Friday temblor (that was the Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964), nor was it the biggest to hit on an April 18th (that was the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake). In some ways, however, it was more unusual than either of those, because Mexico City’s earthquakes are unique....

A handful of animals rely on specially tuned sound—and hearing—to detect objects around them. Bats and whales have some of the best biosonar, and some birds and shrews can also “see” sonically. Dolphins (technically, a cetacean, or type of whale) and some bats produce particular pitches that they use to find prey in the space beyond their field of vision. They process the sound as it is deflected—or echoed—back to them off a moving morsel or other object, thereby gaining a sonic sense of their physical and food landscape....

Any insect unlucky enough to land on the mouth-like leaves of an Australian pitcher plant will meet a grisly end. The plant’s prey is drawn into a vessel-like ‘pitcher’ organ where a specialized cocktail of enzymes digests the victim. Now, by studying the pitcher plant’s genome—and comparing its insect-eating fluids to those of other carnivorous plants—researchers have found that meat-eating plants the world over have hit on the same deadly molecular recipe, even though they are separated by millions of years of evolution....

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Government-funded projects have yielded a wealth of information, but much of this data has historically remained locked up in difficult-to-use form. To get this data to people who might start businesses with them, the Obama administration created the position of chief technology officer. Todd Park, the nation’s current CTO, has plenty of innovation experience. In 1997, at the age of 24, he co-founded his first start-up, called Athenahealth, which provides online data management for physicians....

You can tell a lot from a skull if you know what you’re doing: an expert can suggest a skull’s sex, age and ancestry just by looking at it. But such a subjective assessment would not hold water in a court of law, where it is essential to know how likely a skull belongs to a particular missing person. For that, you need numerical probabilities. When an anthropologist wants to know if, say, a skull comes from a female in her 30s of Cuban descent, it would help to have a big digital database of skulls to query and analyze....

If you have ever found yourself cursing a noisy upstairs neighbor, take solace in the fact that he or she is aging faster than you are. Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that clocks at different gravitational potentials will tick at different rates—a clock at higher elevation will tick faster than will a clock closer to Earth’s center. In other words, time passes more quickly in your neighbor’s upstairs apartment than it does in your apartment....

Female lab mice tend to be docile, passive creatures. But by either genetically shutting down or surgically removing their ability to smell pheromones, scientists transformed them into aggressive, pelvic-thrusting, vocalizing lotharios—without any significant rise in testosterone or other steroid hormones. “The female brain has the neuronal circuit both to control male and female behavior,” says molecular neuroscientist Catherine Dulac of Harvard University. “What is sexually dimorphic is the switch that allows one to be silenced....