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This year the world will mark the 100th anniversary of one of the most devastating infectious disease events in recorded history: the 1918 influenza pandemic, which caused an estimated 50 million to 100 million deaths worldwide. There were several reasons for the awful toll. First, most people likely had no preexisting immune protection to the brand-new strain that had emerged. Second, this particular virus may have been unusually lethal. Third, crowding and poor sanitation allowed for rampant disease transmission, especially in regions where access to health care was limited....

Craig Montgomery, chair of the chemistry department at Trinity Western University, explains. In order to understand how helium has this effect on a voice, it is helpful to first consider how sound waves form and travel, as well as some basic properties of gases. Sound waves are formed by the vibration of something (a drum-skin or your vocal chords, for instance) in a medium such as air. In the case of a drum, as one strikes its skin, it vibrates up and down....

India endured the world’s largest power failure today (July 31), with a blackout that affected 700 million people, including the nation’s capital of New Delhi. Trains and subway systems stopped, while private businesses and hospitals geared up their generators, the New York Times reported. Today’s blackout followed another large outage yesterday, which affected 350 million people. Although record-setting in size, the blackout wasn’t entirely unexpected. India is chronically short on power, and Indian cities regularly experience temporary power cuts, as many outlets reported....

GENEVA (Reuters) - More than half a million people in Yemen have been infected with cholera since the epidemic began four months ago and 1,975 people have died, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. Each day there are more than 5,000 new cases of the waterborne disease, which causes acute diarrhoea and dehydration, in the country where the health system has collapsed after more than two years of war, it said....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Battle of Yarmouk River (or Yarmuk River; also written as the Battle of Jabiya-Yarmuk) was fought over the course of six days, from 15 to 20 August 636 CE, between the Muslim army of the Rashidun Caliphate (632-661 CE), under Khalid ibn al-Walid (d. 642 CE) and the Byzantine legions, under field commander Vahan of Armenia (d....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (French: Declaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen) is a human rights document adopted in the early stages of the French Revolution (1789-1799). Inspired by Enlightenment Age principles, the Declaration consisted of 17 articles and served as the preamble to the French Constitution of 1791....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. A distinctive red and black colour scheme characterises most of the painted pottery of sixth- and fifth-century Athens. The colours result from the skilful exploitation of the high iron content of Athenian clay by an ingenious process of differential firing. The black areas of a black or red-figured pot were coated in a fine solution of the same clay that was used for the body of the vase....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The creation of the art of dialectic is credited to Zeno of Elea, the philosophical champion of Parmenides’ claim that the essence of reality is One and unchanging. Zeno was Parmenides’ student and protégé and, in defending and defining his mentor’s vision, Zeno wrote a series of philosophical paradoxes that established dialectic as the method of philosophical inquiry still used today....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The fall of Tenochtitlan on 13 August 1521 was a decisive moment in the dramatic collapse of the Aztec empire which had dominated Mesoamerica. Led by Hernán Cortés (1485-1547), the Spanish conquistadors enjoyed superior weapons and tactics. In addition, the Old World visitors brought with them terrible new diseases that caused massive loss of life amongst the indigenous Americans....

Many of us occasionally find ourselves eclipsed by mental fog. Our mind wanders in a lecture, and we miss its key point. We cannot focus on writing an article or preparing a presentation. We are unreasonably slow to calculate a waiter’s tip at a restaurant–and then suddenly fail to recall a colleague’s name when introducing her to a friend. Mental slipups and slowdowns are a part of life, but we may be able to prevent some of them by paying attention to what we eat....

A devastating heat wave swept across Europe in 2003, killing tens of thousands of people, scientists estimate. Many were elderly, with limited mobility, and some already suffered from chronic diseases. But climate change is making such extreme weather more common—and the effects will not be limited to the old and sick. Warming temperatures do not only threaten lives directly. They also cause billions of hours of lost labor, enhance conditions for the spread of infectious diseases and reduce crop yields, according to a recent report....

The hiding spots for the particles making up dark matter are narrowing, and the answer to this cosmic mystery could come within the next three or four years, scientists say. Dark matter is an elusive substance that is invisible and almost never detected, except by its gravitational pull. Yet astronomers say it likely makes up a quarter of the entire universe and dwarfs the amount of normal matter (galaxies, stars and planets) out there in space....

When fish swim in waters tainted with antidepressant drugs, they become anxious, anti-social and sometimes even homicidal. New research has found that the pharmaceuticals, which are frequently showing up in U.S. streams, can alter genes responsible for building fish brains and controlling their behavior. Antidepressants are the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States; about 250 million prescriptions are filled every year. And they also are the highest-documented drugs contaminating waterways, which has experts worried about fish....

Bacteria, like all organisms, have to make a living in an ever changing world. They face shifting climates, varying food supplies and–horror of horrors–antibiotics. How do they adapt? According to the results of a new study, simply by copying the successful innovations of their relatives. Martin Lercher of the University of Bath in England and his colleagues studied a benign strain of Escherichia coli to see how the common intestine dweller picked up new parts for its metabolic network–the internal system of chemical reactions that produce the necessities of life, such as amino acids or cellular structures....

The study of how people process foreign languages has traditionally focused on the topics we wrestled with in high school French or Spanish classes – botched grammar, misunderstood vocabulary, and mangled phonemes. But in recent years psychologists have gone to the laboratory with a phenomenon that historically was only discussed in memoirs by bilingual writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Eva Hoffman: a foreign language feels less emotional than the mother tongue....

As the sea churned all around us, we leaned over the edge of the boat to get a better look. Dozens of dorsal fins cruised here and there; somewhat menacing half-moon tails thrashed about; and, now and then, a colossal gaping mouth breached the water’s surface. The creatures’ size was daunting; their beauty captivating. Scores of white spots and faint stripes decorated their gray-blue backs—patterns that evoked ribbons and specks of light weaving and glinting on a rippling sea....

GERMANY Rail company Alstom unveiled a train powered by hydrogen fuel cells. Scheduled to begin service as early as 2018, the emissions-free train can carry 300 passengers and travel at speeds as fast as 140 kilometers per hour. CANADA Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a minimum tax on carbon emissions of $7.62 per metric ton. The tax is set to begin in 2018 and will increase to $38.11 per metric ton by 2022....

When astronomers using the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Hawaii spotted a mysterious object dashing through our solar system on Oct. 19, they immediately knew it was something special. Traveling at high speed and originating from interstellar space, this object was originally thought to be an ancient comet, but observations revealed it was, in fact, an asteroid from another star system. “For decades we’ve theorized that such interstellar objects are out there, and now—for the first time—we have direct evidence they exist,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D....

Her finalist year: 1985 Her finalist project: Building better bread by studying the growth of yeast in different environments What led to the project: One of Katharine Duderstadt’s fondest memories from eighth grade in Ann Arbor, Mich., was a science project in which she measured the amount of carbon dioxide produced by yeast in different environments. Not only did she like the science, but because she ultimately developed quite an interest in baking as a teenager, she found studying yeast behavior quite a practical pursuit....

What ties America’s second-biggest energy company, ConocoPhillips Co., to a small Houston-based shale driller, Halcón Resources Corp.? They had some of the worst carbon pollution rates among their peers in 2012. Oil and gas operations have come under scrutiny for their climate impacts primarily because they leak methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The fossil fuel sector is the second-biggest emitter of the gas, which is 86 times as bad as carbon dioxide for the climate on a 20-year time scale....