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By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazineA collection of teeth from dinosaurs in the western U.S. has produced the first solid evidence that these ancient animals undertook seasonal migrations.It is often hard to determine what dinosaurs looked like from fossils–and trying to infer behavior adds a whole different level of difficulty. Nevertheless, it has often been assumed that dinosaurs did migrate.Henry Fricke, a geochemist at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, and his colleagues now seem to have hard evidence that sauropod dinosaurs moved hundreds of kilometers every year....

Key concepts Physics Wind power Aerodynamics Introduction Have you ever seen a wind turbine? Wind turbines are large towers with blades on top that are spun by the wind. They are one source of clean, renewable energy. They use the movement from the wind-spun blades to generate electricity. But in order for the turbines to work best, environmental engineers have to figure out where to put wind turbines so that they get the best exposure to steady, consistent winds....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Artillery weapons in medieval Europe included the mounted crossbow (ballista) and single-arm torsion catapult (mangonel), both similar to ancient Roman machines. As armies battled further afield such as in the Byzantine Empire and against the Arab caliphates, in particular, so new ideas spread from China and India across Eurasia and into western Europe....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Iran, or Persia as it was formerly known, is a country with a long and rich history stretching back thousands of years and where many civilisations thrived. With 24 historical sites registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List and each with its own story to tell, Iran offers an incredible variety of archaeological and cultural wonders....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. JvdC: The Jericho River is a historical fantasy novel about Western Civilization. Can you tell us a bit more about how you managed to squeeze such a broad area of history into a single novel? Advertisement DT: The key is that The Jericho River really is a fantasy, rather than a historical novel....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Mongol invasions of Russia and Eastern Europe occurred first with a brief sortie in 1223 CE and then again in a much larger campaign between 1237 CE and 1242 CE. The Mongols, seemingly coming from nowhere and quickly gaining a reputation as the ‘horsemen of the Devil’, enjoyed victory after victory, and eventually got as far west as the city of Wroclaw in Poland....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Huldrych Zwingli (l. 1484-1531) wrote his 67 Articles in 1523 as a confession of faith to be presented at the First Disputation in Zürich where he defended his beliefs against accusations of heresy by the Catholic Church. Zwingli’s 67 Articles are often cited with Martin Luther’s 95 Theses as among the most important of the early Protestant Reformation....

1969 Transuranium Elements “Up to 1963 the rate of discovery of transuranium elements had been high. Each step forward has required more and more complex apparatus and methods to increase the number of protons in the nucleus, while at the same time the stability of the nuclei produced has decreased, making them difficult to observe and identify. Nonetheless, heavy synthetic elements are a subject of livelier interest than ever because of advances in the theory of nuclear stability, which have given rise to the possibility of synthetic elements beyond the dreams of early workers in the field....

WASHINGTON — It’s called a “courtesy hearing,” but Representative Tom Price, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, can expect some of his Senate interrogators to get a little rough. Price, an orthopedic surgeon and six-term GOP congressman from Georgia, will appear before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions to answer questions on Wednesday. It’s a courtesy hearing because a separate panel, the Senate Finance Committee, will actually vote on his nomination....

When I was in college, my friend and I attended a tax seminar in which we were told that paying taxes was unnecessary because the Sixteenth Amendment—empowering Congress to levy an income tax—was never legally ratified. After a long and detailed history of the irs, we were advised not to file a tax return and given instructions on what to do and say when the feds come a-knockin’. The slick presentation seemed internally coherent and logically plausible in the room, but later, after some reflection, I figured it couldn’t possibly be true because no one would pay taxes if it were....

The 2018 eruption of Kilauea in Hawaii featured the spectacular collapse of the volcano’s caldera, creating a hole nearly as deep as One World Trade Center in New York City is tall at its summit. Now new research finds that this dramatic change was triggered by only a small leak of magma from the reservoir beneath the peak. Instantaneous and explosive caldera collapses, such as the event that formed Oregon’s Crater Lake 7,700 years ago, are a better known phenomenon....

Most medically important antibiotics come from soil bacteria. Conventional wisdom holds that dirt microbes evolved these compounds as lethal weapons in the fierce battle waged beneath our feet for food and territory. For more than 15 years microbiologist Julian Davies of the University of British Columbia has been arguing otherwise. “They’re talking, not fighting,” Davies says. His respected if not wholly accepted theory is that bacteria use most of the small molecules we call antibiotics for communication....

They seem normal enough. But how come Grandpa doesn’t act retarded—and Sonny is clearly no budding Einstein? Those questions pop up when intelligence researchers look at the startling trends in IQ scores. Massive point gains occurred from one generation to the next throughout the 20th century—a phenomenon dubbed the “Flynn effect,” after psychologist James R. Flynn. The IQ gains were troubling: either today’s children are far brighter than their parents, or the tests are not good measures of intelligence....

On a knob of rock in the Cook Strait known as North Brother Island, a population of the lizardlike creature called the tuatara is quickly becoming all male. When scientists examined the imbalance in the late 1990s, the sex ratio was already 62.4 percent male, and it has rapidly worsened since then, to more than 70 percent. Researchers say climate change is the cause: ground temperature determines the sex of tuatara embryos, with cooler temperatures favoring females and warmer ones favoring males....

Four years ago, Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead (R) proposed an idea that made some in America’s top coal-mining state uncomfortable. His plan was to invest $15 million in a test facility at a coal plant, where scientists could explore strategies for capturing carbon dioxide emissions and turning it into an economic product like cement or methanol. “When I was first proposing the idea to members of the Legislature, they thought addressing CO2 was a knock on coal,” Mead said in an interview yesterday....

Stellar explosions known as type Ia supernovae have proved invaluable to astrophysicists as markers of cosmic distance. Their brightness and consistency in observed properties allow astronomers to use them as “standard candles” to determine distances to objects in the sky. Just a decade ago type Ia supernovae took center stage when researchers harnessed them as evidence that the universe is accelerating in its expansion under the sway of a previously undiscovered influence known as dark energy....

The dangers of life in the National Football League made headlines in 2009, when a study commissioned by the NFL found that retired players were 19 times more likely than other men of similar ages to develop severe memory problems. The obvious culprit: continued play after repeated head injuries. Indeed, head injury can imitate many types of neurodegenerative disease, including Parkinson’s disease and, as journalist Jeffrey Bartholet reports in “The Collision Syndrome,” on page 66, perhaps even amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease....

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are no longer just gizmos in a geek’s garage or military tools that fly reconnaissance missions considered too dangerous for humans. They are increasingly being used for scientific study. And this spring, a UAV dedicated to research science made aerial history. On May 6, a diminutive aircraft called the Tempest was the first official UAV to intercept a supercell thunderstorm, the type of storm that produces tornadoes....

Post Updated 2/18/2014 The famed scientist is at Duke this spring, kicking off a scientific partnership between the Nicholas School and the biodiversity foundation that bears his name. His advice to young folks: “Be an ‘ologist.” For the past two weeks, those of us at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment have been basking in the glow of Edward Osborne Wilson, arguably the greatest scientist of our time, a founding force in the field of sociobiology and, for many, the “father of biodiversity....

A trove of email correspondence from Scott Pruitt’s scheduler reveals details about the EPA administrator’s approach to climate policy. Specific mentions of climate change and greenhouse gas regulations were scant in over 10,000 pages of emails with Millan Hupp, director of scheduling and advance at EPA. But the documents—obtained by the Sierra Club through the Freedom of Information Act—show how the administrator and his staff approached discussions about climate and deregulation and how he engaged with critics of the Clean Power Plan and the Paris Agreement....