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We Scientific Americans are emphatic empiricists. And although astronomy and astrology have common historical roots, the modern practice of astrology is total hooey. (And we say that only because we choose not to use stronger words than hooey in a family magazine.) Nevertheless, some staffers were recently musing about what a horoscope would look like in our august pages. (Or September, even.) So here’s a proof-of-concept. It’s not based on science, because it’s impossible to have a horoscope based on science....

Older adults often take longer to make a decision than young adults do. But that does not mean they are any less sharp. According to research at Ohio State University, the slower response time of older adults has more to do with prizing accuracy over speed. In the study, published recently in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, college-age students and adults aged 60 to 90 performed timed tests of word recognition and recall....

By Charlotte Greenfield and Gayatri Suroyo JAKARTA, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Indonesia search and rescue teams hunting for the wreck of an AirAsia passenger jet detected pings in their efforts to find the black box flight recorders on Friday, an official said, 12 days after the plane went missing with 162 people on board. Indonesia AirAsia Flight QZ8501 vanished from radar screens on Dec. 28, less than half way into a two-hour flight from Indonesia’s second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore....

More than 200 cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow, have occurred worldwide since the 1990s. No accepted treatment exists for the devastatingly fatal disease or any of the others caused by infection with the malformed, malignant protein particles called prions. Giovanna R. Mallucci and her co-workers at the Institute of Neurology in London have performed an experiment in mice that could lay the groundwork for an eventual cure....

Science, it is sometimes claimed, is neutral: it is up to society to decide how to employ research findings. Yet society often struggles with its end of the deal. That is because science can also hold up a mirror to the results of our culture’s choices—and we may not like what we see. Consider antibiotics. Since their discovery decades ago, these “wonder drugs” have been used far more widely than for the treatment of sick patients....

Some of us hate meetings. Connie Gersick, a leading scholar of organizational behavior, has made a living out of studying them. She has conducted numerous detailed qualitative studies to understand how meetings unfold, and how the pattern of work and conversation changes over the course of a meeting. She has studied many kinds of meetings—meetings between students and meetings between managers, meetings intended to weigh options to produce a decision and meetings intended to brainstorm to produce something more tangible like a sales pitch....

Key concepts Density Body composition Muscle and fat From National Science Education Standards: Characteristics of organisms Introduction Your body has a lot of different kinds of materials in it. There are, of course, bone, blood, fat and muscle—just to name a few. But all of these parts are hidden away under our skin, so how can we learn more about some of their qualities? Animals have a lot of the same insides as we do, so we can learn some interesting things about our bodies by studying something as basic as meat you can buy at the store....

LOS ANGELES – A DDT deposit in the ocean off Los Angeles County has rapidly shrunk, shocking experts and casting doubt on the need to mount a controversial $60-million Superfund cleanup, according to new data. For decades, government officials and scientists have estimated that 110 tons of the banned pesticide – the world’s largest deposit of DDT – have been sprawled on the ocean floor, where it was discharged by a now-defunct Los Angeles company....

A highly specialized diet combined with rampant sexually transmitted infections are threatening Australia’s cuddly emblematic marsupial. Habitat destruction and human encroachment have lowered numbers in the past few decades but “chlamydial disease is rapidly becoming the major threat to many koala populations,” says Peter Timms, an adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology and koala genetics expert. This bacterial overgrowth can cause infertility, blindness and even death. The disease currently infects as many as half the estimated 80,000 wild koalas in Australia, the only place where they live in the wild....

Ten percent of all of the electricity generated in the U.S. in March came from wind and solar power, marking the first such milestone in U.S. history, according to a new U.S. Energy Information Administration report. The EIA estimates that wind and solar farms likely generated 10 percent of America’s electricity in April as well, which would be another first, according to the report. This year’s milestone shows that renewables are becoming a major source of electricity in the U....

By Natasha GilbertTwo new forms of a devastating wheat fungus, known as Ug99 stem rust, have shown up in South Africa, a study has found.The two South African forms are able to overcome the effects of two resistance genes in wheat that normally prevent stem rust from taking hold. The genes cause plant cells around the infection site to die, stopping the fungus from further infecting the plant. They are two of the most important genes in wheat because they are selected for in crop-breeding programs across the world....

Robert Caldwell, a cosmologist at Dartmouth College, explains. Dark energy and dark matter describe proposed solutions to as yet unresolved gravitational phenomena. So far as we know, the two are distinct. Dark matter originates from our efforts to explain the observed mismatch between the gravitational mass and the luminous mass of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. The gravitational mass of an object is determined by measuring the velocity and radius of the orbits of its satellites, just as we can measure the mass of the sun using the velocity and radial distance of its planets....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Jade was a highly-esteemed material in many Mesoamerican cultures, making it a valued regional trade good and first choice for objects of religious and artistic value such as masks, ceremonial axeheads, figurines, and jewellery. Jade, because of its green colour, was associated with life, water, vegetation (especially maize shoots), and regeneration; some cultures also credited the stone with healing powers....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Monasteries were an ever-present feature of the Medieval landscape and perhaps more than half were devoted solely to women. The rules and lifestyle within a nunnery were very similar to those in a male monastery. Nuns took vows of chastity, renounced worldly goods and devoted themselves to prayer, religious studies and helping society’s most needy....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. European explorers began to probe the Western Hemisphere in the early 1500s, and they found to their utter amazement not only a huge landmass but also a world filled with several diverse and populous indigenous cultures. Among their most important conquests were those of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean (1492-1502); Hernán Cortés in Aztec Mexico (1519-1521), Francisco Pizzaro and Diego de Almagro in Inca Peru (1528-1532), and Juan de Grijalva (1518) and Hernán Cortés (1519; 1524-1525) in Mayan Yucatán and Guatemala....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The exact role and status of women in the Roman world, and indeed in most ancient societies, has often been obscured by the biases of both ancient male writers and 19-20th century CE male scholars, a situation only relatively recently redressed by modern scholarship which has sought to more objectively assess women’s status, rights, duties, representation in the arts, and daily lives; and all this from almost exclusively male source material dealing with a male-dominated Roman world....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. A small carved figurine sits high on a grand multi-tiered pedestal in a magnificent wat (temple) in Bangkok, Thailand. It has been sitting there since 1784 CE and was originally thought to be made of emerald. Hundreds of tourists and pilgrims line up every day to view the figurine, and the Thai people believe it brings prosperity to their nation....

Every so often leaders from business, industry and government sound the alarms about the waning of U.S. scientific and technological prowess and call on academe to produce more graduates. Education leaders at the university level then point an accusatory finger at primary and secondary schools for producing marginal students and at the students themselves for having little interest in science. Yet responsibility rests largely with the universities. They, after all, educated the teachers—the same teachers who seem to have made learning math and science too much like an Olympic triathlon: an ordeal from which few stars emerge....

The National Academy of Sciences’ report on the sustainability of algae biofuels highlights concerns that have already been resolved, industry heads said yesterday. NAS released a comprehensive report yesterday, identifying potential issues of sustainability in the burgeoning algal biofuels industry. In its report, NAS measured the resources needed to produced 39 billion liters – or 5 percent of American transportation fuel – highlighting the low energy output. Companies are already recycling potentially polluting nutrients and using water that is too salty or too dirty for other uses....

On the morning of August 17 last year, a new era of astronomy dawned with a flash in the sky. The burst of gamma rays, glimpsed by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, came from the merger of two neutron stars (extremely dense objects formed when massive stars collapse and die) somewhere in the universe. But gamma rays weren’t the only thing the merger produced. Within seconds of Fermi’s detection, ripples in spacetime from the merger had echoed through two facilities—the U....