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There was the guy who poisoned a Tylenol bottle, which led to the new world of tamper-proof seals; the woman who first drove off without paying for self-serve gas, triggering the era of having to prepay; and the guy who first befouled a restaurant bathroom, so now only paying customers are allowed to use them. They should have had the guy who first pirated music. He, after all, launched the modern age of copy protection—our current crazy world where the honest are penalized and the pirates go free....

Imagine the universe in its infancy. Most scientists think space and time originated with the big bang. From that hot and dense start the cosmos expanded and cooled, but it took a while for stars and galaxies to start dotting the sky. It was not until about 380,000 years after the big bang that atoms could hold together and fill the universe with mostly hydrogen gas. When the cosmos was a few hundred million years old, this gas coalesced into the earliest stars, which formed in clusters that clumped together into galaxies, the oldest of which appeared 400 million years after the universe was born....

View the Isle Royale Wolf/Moose Study Slide Show On a secluded island in Lake Superior, captive wolf packs and moose populations depend on one another for survival: The moose are the wolves’ chief nutritional source, and the wolves, in turn, help keep the moose population in check. But when the wolves eat too many moose, the resulting food shortage pares down the former’s number, controlling their population, as well. And for the past five decades, scientists have watched this ecological dance in an effort to better understand the predator–prey relationship....

Tropical Storm Barry is lumbering toward the coast of Louisiana and is set to dump monumental amounts of rain. Although New Orleans and the rest of southeastern Louisiana are expected to see the worst rainfall and have been a key focus of emergency preparations, Barry’s impacts will extend much farther inland—and will last for weeks after the storm peters out—as it will add to the already historical flooding along the Mississippi River....

Imagine we rewound the tape of your life. Your diplomas are pulled off of walls, unframed, and returned. Your children grow smaller, and then vanish. Soon, you too become smaller. Your adult teeth retract, your baby teeth return, and your traits and foibles start to slip away. Once language goes, you are not so much you as potential you. We keep rewinding still, until we’re halving and halving a colony of cells, finally arriving at that amazing singularity: the cell that will become you....

But why do parrots and other birds rely on learning for vocal development instead of having each call developmentally hardwired, as with many other birds and animals? Some benefits of learning may include development of context-specific calls. Imitative vocal learning is also a reliable social display of neural functions—requiring good hearing, memory and muscle control for sound production—that may be under consideration by a potential mate or ally. One consequence of vocal imitation is that local dialects can arise....

I love my job, but research suggests I’m in the minority. A 2015 survey by the nonprofit Conference Board found that only 48.3 percent of Americans are satisfied at work. This has not always been the case. In the late 1980s and mid-1990s, job satisfaction hovered around 60 percent. To make matters worse, Americans spend an awful lot of time at their less than joyful jobs: according to Gallup, an average of 47 hours a week for full-time workers—nearly a full day beyond the 40-hour week....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In the early days of the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550-330 BCE), the kings came to realise that, if they were to be able to administer the vast mass of land and the multicultural people who inhabited it, they had to create an organizational system that would enable administration without causing any rebellion or disorder and, more importantly, ensure the timely and fair payment of tribute to the court....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In 1851 CE, a woman named Amelia Bloomer in the United States shocked the establishment by announcing in her publication The Lily that she had adopted the “Turkish Dress” for daily wear and, further, provided readers with instructions to make their own. This “Turkish dress” was a pair of light-weight pants worn under a dress which dispensed with the heavy petticoats and undergarments which constituted women’s fashion....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Frescoes are the source of some of the most striking imagery handed down to us from the Minoan civilization of Bronze Age Crete (2000-1500 BCE). Further, without written records, they are often the only source, along with decorated pottery, of just how the world appeared to the Minoans and give us tantalizing glimpses of their beliefs, cultural practices and aesthetic tastes....

Humans have been searching for centuries for the secret to living longer, but the answer may be as simple as maintaining a positive state of mind. A new study published Monday by researchers at Boston University adds to the evidence that optimistic men and women may live longer than those who are pessimistic. Researchers found that people who scored higher on an optimism assessment were more likely to live past the age of 85....

In many classic science-fiction stories, alien life is based on silicon–the substance at the core of modern electronics technology–rather than on carbon, the fundamental building block of earthly biology. Scientists have even speculated that they might someday create silicon life-forms. Instead the opposite is starting to happen: carbon is serving as the foundation for electronic devices–and in the process is breathing new life into the quest for inexpensive, flexible products that offer a broad range of capabilities....

BEIJING (Reuters) - Residents in the western Chinese city of Lanzhou rushed to buy bottled water on Friday after authorities said the city’s drinking water contained levels of benzene, a cancer-inducing chemical, standing at 20 times above national safety levels. With Beijing having identified the environment as one of its top priorities after years of unchecked economic growth, the government has struggled to make local governments and industries comply with laws....

In 2015 international oil company Shell will begin to capture more than one million metric tons of the odorless, colorless gas known as carbon dioxide. The CO2 will come from three enormous machines near Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, that produce hydrogen to turn bitumen into salable oil. Once captured, the CO2 will be pumped through a pipeline to a site where it will be buried more than two kilometers underground in a porous sandstone formation....

By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - Heart failure patients who struggle with daily tasks like bathing or dressing are more likely to be hospitalized and tend to die sooner than those who are more independent, according to a new study. More than five million people in the U.S. have heart failure and about half die within five years of diagnosis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Treatments include medications, a low-salt diet, and daily physical activity....

In September 2007 less sea ice covered the Arctic than at any point since the U.S. government began keeping records of its decline. All told, it covered 502,000 square miles (1.3 million square kilometers) less ocean than even the year before—a loss equal to an area the size of California and Montana combined. But what might be bad news for polar bears and other animals dependent on sea ice could be good news for the alga known as phytoplankton....

Brilliant shades of blue and aqua coat the iridescent lips of giant clams, but these shiny cells aren’t just for show, new research finds. The iridescent sheen directs beams of sunlight into the interior of the clam, providing light for algae housed inside. In a symbiotic return, the algae use that sunlight to power photosynthesis, resulting in energy for the giant clam. “It ends up being a large part of the energy budget of the clams,” said study researcher Alison Sweeney, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania....

The publication last week of the first treatment guidelines for hepatitis C virus (HCV), and the advent of drugs that can cure most infections of the virus, have left public-health researchers with a touch of déjà vu. Three decades after wrestling to lower the cost of AIDS drugs (prices fell from about US$10,000 per patient per year in the 1990s to less than $100 in the mid-2000s), they are once again asking how expensive life-saving medicines can be made affordable for patients....

One of the primary goals of genetics over the past decade has been to understand human health and disease in terms of differences in DNA from person to person. But even a relatively straightforward trait such as height has resisted attempts to reduce it to a particular combination of genes. In light of this shortcoming, some investigators see room for an increased focus on an alternative explanation for heritable traits: epigenetics, the molecular processes that control a gene’s potential to act....

Californians have long thought of the Sierra Nevada mountains as a “granite wall” that wildfires couldn’t breach. But this summer’s searing heat and dry conditions, exacerbated by climate change, finally let two blazes scale and cross the jagged, rocky peaks for the first time in the state’s recorded history. This grim milestone underscores just how much the climate has shifted over the past century as humans have extracted and burned fossil fuels—and how wildfires will pose new challenges to firefighters and communities struggling to adapt....