Posts

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Early medieval Iceland, the Viking colony, was a democratic and egalitarian society, but the scarcity of resources and the rough environment created competition, where local chieftains resorted to different tactics to acquire wealth and money, from using their advantage as men of the law and representatives of the people to the often complex social relationships they had with their followers....

A tomb newly excavated at an ancient cemetery in Egypt would have boasted a pyramid 7 meters (23 feet) high at its entrance, archaeologists say. The tomb, found at the site of Abydos, dates back around 3,300 years. Within one of its vaulted burial chambers, a team of archaeologists found a finely crafted sandstone sarcophagus, painted red, which was created for a scribe named Horemheb. The sarcophagus has images of several Egyptian gods on it and hieroglyphic inscriptions recording spells from the Book of the Dead that helped one enter the afterlife....

By Anna Ringstrom STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Iceland’s Met Office on Monday raised its risk level to the aviation industry for an eruption at its Bardarbunga volcano to orange, which is the fourth level on a five-grade scale. Ash from the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano in 2010 shut down much of Europe’s airspace for six days, affecting more than 10 million people and costing $1.7 billion. There has been intense seismic activity at Bardarbunga since Aug....

PHILADELPHIA—Gene Karpinski isn’t that tall. But it didn’t keep him off the basketball court in the late 1960s, when environmentalism was leaping skyward and his sneakers squeaked as a freshman player at Brown University. “I’m still playing, that’s what’s important,” Karpinski said this week. Four decades later, with wooly white sideburns accounting for much of his hair, Karpinski is still working on environmental issues in his 11th year as president of the League of Conservation Voters....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. (ISNS) – Blood has long been the focus of research – but it still offers some surprises. A new study reveals that plasma, the fluid in which blood cells travel, behaves a bit like a solid on small scales. Blood is a suspension of cells inside a liquid. As it flows, it delivers vital oxygen and nutrients to all parts of the body....

The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World by Steve LeVine Viking, 2015 (($28.95)) Why didn’t electric cars win the race for vehicular dominance at the beginning of the 20th century? After all, they were cleaner and easier to use than cars burning gasoline. The answer, in a word, is batteries. Now, in the early years of the 21st century, the electric car is making a comeback of sorts, but the challenge remains the same—how to get more juice out of battery chemistry....

China has had a bumper few years in space exploration, and its ambitions are about to get bolder. The China National Space Administration has released an overview of its plans for the next five years, which include launching a robotic craft to an asteroid, building a space telescope to rival the Hubble and laying the foundations for a space-based gravitational-wave detector. The missions were highlighted in a white paper, ‘China’s Space Program: A 2021 Perspective’, released last month....

The serene waters of sky pond, one of the most popular tourist attractions in northeastern Asia, belie the fact that it is nestled inside the crater of one of the region’s most dangerous volcanoes—a peak known as Changbai Mountain to the Chinese and Mount Paektu to Koreans. That 2,744-meter-tall volcano, which straddles the border between China and North Korea, last erupted in 1903 but has displayed signs of awakening in recent years....

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A storm expected to blast the East Coast with rain and snow through Thursday morning is threatening to snarl traffic for millions and impede air travel ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. The nor’easter that formed over the Gulf of Mexico and is sweeping the northeast will bring rain to major cities, including New York and Boston, while higher elevations of New England will see as much as a foot of snow, said National Weather Service meteorologist Andrew Orrison....

Wouldn’t it be great to reach your arm into a fourth dimension of space? You could then liberate yourself from the shackles of ordinary geometry. Hopelessly tangled extension cords would slip apart with ease. A left-handed glove could be flipped over to replace the right-handed one your dog ate. Dentists could do root canals without drilling or even asking you to open your mouth. As fantastic as extra dimensions of space sound, they might really exist....

In January 2017 Adam decided that the six-month Scandinavian winter had lasted for too long already, and he must do something—anything—to combat his boredom. So as one does, he bought himself a bunch of googly eyes and stuck them all over his hometown of Uppsala, Sweden, to the amusement of passersby. According to the Googly Eyes Foundation, which has the noble mission of spreading the trend “all over the world,” eyebombing is a form of urban art, consisting of sticking googly eyes “onto an inanimate object in the public sphere, in a way that cleverly lends the object the appearance of a living creature....

If you still think of virtual reality as the province of dystopian science fiction and geeky gamers, you had better think again. Faster than you can say “Ready Player One,” VR is starting to transform our world, and medicine may well be the first sector where the impact is profound. Behavioral neuroscientist Walter Greenleaf of Stanford University has been watching this field develop since the days when VR headsets cost $75,000 and were so heavy, he remembers counterbalancing them with a brick....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. We’ve come to expect something radically different from Apple every time it launches a new product and sure enough, the fingerprint sensor unveiled as part of the iPhone 5s, seemed like a revolution in phone security. But almost as soon as the technology was announced, fans and foes set about trying to crack the fingerprint system....

Key concepts Physics Viscosity Starch Emulsion Science of cooking Introduction There’s nothing like your favorite comfort food after a long day, right? Maybe it’s beef stew, a really great salad or many people’s favorite—macaroni and cheese. The sauce has to be just the right texture, though, or your noodles are either swimming—or just one big glob! So how can you get just the right texture? Get ready to invite some friends over to taste test....

Tidal Terra Firma Is Graham P. Collins correct in stating in “The Discovery Machine” [Special Report: The Future of Physics] that the land near Geneva rises 25 centimeters when the moon is full? A shift that large should damage considerable infrastructure. Charlie Gotschalk Sequim, Wash. COLLINS REPLIES: Because the tidal forces from the sun and moon deform the entire earth, all the land in the vicinity of Switzerland is raised by very nearly the same amount at “high tide....

By Zoë Corbyn of Nature magazine Conventional wisdom says that most retractions of papers in scientific journals are triggered by unintentional errors. Not so, according to one of the largest-ever studies of retractions. A survey published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that two-thirds of retracted life-sciences papers were stricken from the scientific record because of misconduct such as fraud or suspected fraud — and that journals sometimes soft-pedal the reason....

Not all asteroids are piles of rocky rubble as seen in Hollywood space operas and sci-fi video games. Some are made of much sterner stuff: iron and nickel, the raw materials that concentrate at the dense, hidden centers of worlds. These heavy-metal members of our solar system are thought to be fragments from the cores of long-vanished orbs broken up by giant impacts, emissaries from otherwise inaccessible depths of time and space that lie billions of years in the past—or thousands of kilometers beneath a world’s surface....

In April 2011, Robert Froemke and his team were reprogramming the brains of virgin mice with a single hormone injection. Before the treatment, the female mice were largely indifferent to the cries of a distressed baby, and were even known to trample over them. But after an injection of oxytocin, the mice started to respond more like mothers, picking up the mewling pup in their mouths. Froemke, a neuroscientist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center in New York City, was monitoring the animals’ brains to find out why that happened....

In 2030, Joe Johnson goes to the doctor with vision problems. The doctor does what doctors in 2030 do for almost any ailment: she runs a full scan of the patient’s genome. The test gives the doctor crucial information she needs to understand Joe’s troubles—and then some. When Joe gets his lab report back his doctor discovers Joe has about an 80 percent chance of developing colorectal cancer. She advises him to receive regular colonoscopies, since the screenings could catch polyps that would be the precursor to the cancer....

By Zachary Fagenson MIAMI (Reuters) - A combination of cooler seas and a quiet West African monsoon season made for a less active Atlantic hurricane season, giving the South and East Coasts of the United States one of their lengthiest reprieves in history from a major hurricane, forecasters said on Monday. “This is the longest without a major hurricane hitting the U.S. since the Civil War era,” said Jeff Masters, chief meteorologist for Weather Underground....