Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The dog collar, so often taken for granted, has a long and illustrious history. Anyone fortunate enough to share their life with a dog in the present day is participating in an ancient tradition every time they place a collar around their dog’s neck and take it out for a walk....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Heraclitus of Ephesos (l. c. 500 BCE) was an early Pre-Socratic philospher who claimed that the First Cause of existence was fire and that life itself was characterized by strife and change. Heraclitus did not see this condition as a bad thing, however, but simply as the nature of life itself, as the fundamental essence of what makes life what it is....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. As the Roman Empire expanded further eastward, annexing territories that were once the domain of the Parthians, the legions of Mesopotamia, Cappadocia, and Arabia were called upon to safeguard these newly acquired territories. Mesopotamia had two permanent legions, I Parthica and III Parthica, Cappadocia was the home base of XII Fulminata and XV Apollinaris, while III Cyrenaica was stationed in Arabia....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The extraordinary quality and quantity of the marble sculpture which adorned the 5th century BCE Parthenon in Athens made it the most richly decorated of all Greek temples. The sculpture, now mostly separated into the Parthenon Marbles (Elgin Marbles) and the Acropolis Museum Collection of Athens, once consisted of 92 metopes, a unique frieze running around all four sides of the building, and both pediments filled with 50 monumental figures....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In ancient Athens, women had no life outside the home unless they were prostitutes or were engaged in religious activities such as festivals. Every Greek deity in every city-state had their own cult (sect) but the cult of Athena offered women positions of power and autonomy in a city-state that regularly denied them both....
1970 Once a Leader “In his recent message to Congress on the environment President Nixon listed 37 steps ‘we can take now and that can move us dramatically forward toward what has become an urgent common goal of all Americans: the rescue of our natural habitat as a place both habitable [by] and hospitable to man.’ The steps are designed to achieve progress in four major areas: control of water pollution, control of air pollution, management of solid wastes and provision of more recreational areas and open space....
For the most part, the thousands of languages in the world today fall into one of two categories (notable exceptions being Japanese, some Scandinavian dialects and northern Spain’s Basque tongue): tonal or nontonal. Two linguists believe they know the genetic underpinnings for these differences. During a study of linguistic and genetic data from 49 distinct populations, the authors discovered a striking correlation between two genes involved in brain development and language tonality....
Key concepts Physics Mechanics Linkages Geometry Introduction Have you ever wanted to reach something way up high on a shelf? Or have you ever watched construction workers who need to reach up a tall utility pole? A scissor lift is a device that can extend to a great length but also fold up very compactly. In this project you will build your own scissor lift from common household materials! Background Mechanical linkages are a type of machine generally made up of rigid bars connected to each other by rotating or sliding joints....
The western edge of Havana hides a side of Cuban society that tourists rarely see. High fences and thick vegetation wall off the grand estates and embassies where the elites congregate. And amid these enclaves of privilege lies a cluster of concrete buildings belonging to the Polo Científico del Oeste—the ‘scientific pole’ of Cuba’s capital city. Here, a cluster of biotechnology research institutions are protected from the chaos and poverty of a city in transition....
IMAGINE IF YOU WERE TO WALK INTO A DELI, ORDER A CLUB SANDWICH, throw some dollar bills down and have the cashier say to you, “That’s great. All I need now is your name, billing address, telephone number, mother’s maiden name, and bank account number.” Most customers would balk at these demands, and yet this is precisely how everyone pays for goods and services over the Internet. There is no currency on the Web that is as straightforward and anonymous as the dollar bill....
By Declan Butler of Nature magazineIt is a nightmare scenario: a human pandemic caused by the accidental release of a man-made form of the lethal avian influenza virus H5N1.Yet the risk is all too real. Since September, news has been circulating about two groups of scientists who have reportedly created mutant H5N1 variants that can be transmitted between ferrets merely breathing the same air, generally an indicator that the virus could also spread easily among humans....
It has been five years since a team of scientists resurrected the 1918 influenza virus from the lungs of a long-frozen victim. At the time, the Jurassic Park–like feat was both widely celebrated and sharply criticized. Opponents worried about the risk of an accidental (or intentional) release of the revived killer, which claimed between 50 million and 100 million lives in about 15 months and has been dubbed the worst plague in human history....
Last September, under x-ray assault, the rapid implosion of a plastic shell into icy isotopes of hydrogen produced fusion at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF). This wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill fusion reaction: it was the first one NIF has ever produced wherein the fuel released more energy than it absorbed. The laboratory’s 192 lasers have been pumping energy into a succession of tiny fuel pellets since 2010. In this instance, the scientists got the timing right....
Cutting-edge gene-editing techniques have produced an unexpected byproduct — tiny pigs that a leading Chinese genomics institute will soon sell as pets. BGI in Shenzhen, the genomics institute that is famous for a series of high-profile breakthroughs in genomic sequencing, originally created the micropigs as models for human disease, by applying a gene-editing technique to a small breed of pig known as Bama. On September 23, at the Shenzhen International Biotech Leaders Summit in China, BGI revealed that it would start selling the pigs as pets....
For most of the past century the scientific consensus held that the adult human brain did not produce any new neurons. Researchers overturned that theory in the 1990s, but what role new neurons played in the adult human brain remained a mystery. Recent work now suggests that one role may be to help the brain recover from traumatic brain injury. Cory Blaiss, then at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and her colleagues genetically engineered mice such that the researchers could selectively turn neurogenesis on or off in a brain region called the hippocampus, a ribbon of tissue located under the neocortex that is important for learning and memory....
REDWOOD CITY, Calif.—A 1,400-acre swath of salt flats along the western edge of San Francisco Bay has become the latest site for a development dispute that promises to become increasingly common in coastal U.S. cities: Whether new waterside growth makes sense when sea levels are rising. Agribusiness giant Cargill, which owns the Redwood City site, has made salt in San Francisco Bay for decades. Cargill has downsized in recent years, selling 16,500 acres of salt ponds in the area–60 percent of its local operations–to the state and federal government in 2002 for $243 million in cash and tax credits....
Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The Iceland Meteorological Office has increased the risk of an eruption at Bárðarbunga (or Bardarbunga) volcano, after hundreds of earthquakes were reported over the weekend. The risk level has been set to orange, which is the fourth-highest on a five-level scale. Here we asked Dave McGarvie, a volcanologist at The Open University, to explain what we need to know....
On the day Patricia Hunt’s career veered into an entirely different field, her graduate students at Case Western Reserve University were grumbling, itching to use some exciting new data in their own experiments, but were told to wait while Hunt (just one last time) checked on her subjects. Hunt, a geneticist, was exploring why human reproduction is so rife with complications. She had a hunch the chromosomally abnormal eggs that plague human pregnancies were tied to our hormones....
Summit Camp, Greenland–The guts of a thermal drill spilled out over a table and onto the wood-planked floor of a domed five-person tent. Five highly caffeinated planetary scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., continued updating the 122-centimeter-long, 7.6-centimeter-wide device with the software, firmware and hardware needed for its first field test. A square hole cut in the floor revealed the material that would serve as a Martian analogue....
Even as high-definition televisions are eclipsing entire walls in homes, tiny screens are proliferating on cell phones, pocket PCs and portable media players. The telecommunications industry has long considered supplying video to nomadic subscribers its next big opportunity after voice calls and text messaging, so wireless carriers have been upgrading their systems to third-generation, high-speed networks for that purpose. But thanks to new transmission standards, another industry plans to enter the field, one with much more experience in video delivery: digital TV (DTV) broadcasters....
