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Have you wondered why some cats exhibit strange behavior when exposed to catnip? They act much like a female cat in heat: They may rub their head and body on the herb or jump, roll around, vocalize and salivate. This response lasts for about 10 minutes, after which the cat becomes refractory to catnip’s effects for roughly 30 minutes. Response to catnip is hereditary; about 70 percent of cats exhibit this behavior in the plant’s presence, although it does not affect kittens until they are about six months old and begin to reach sexual maturity....

Sleep deprivation is a quick and efficient way to treat depression. It works 60 to 70 percent of the time—far better than existing drugs—but the mood boost usually lasts only until the patient falls asleep. As an ongoing treatment, sleep deprivation is impractical, but researchers have been studying the phenomenon in an effort to uncover the cellular mechanisms behind depression and remission. Now a team at Tufts University has pinpointed glia as the key players....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As you pack your bags for the cottage or campground this weekend, don’t forget to bring light clothes with long sleeves—and a truckload or two of insect repellent. Spring has come and gone, so welcome to mosquito season. How much we enjoy summer in North America depends a lot on how many mosquitoes there are waiting for us outside....

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 Carrhae in 53 BCE was one of the greatest military catastrophes in all of Roman history when a hero of the Spartacus campaign, Marcus Licinius Crassus (115-53 BCE), initiated an unprovoked invasion of Parthian territory (modern Iran). Most of the information concerning the battle and its aftermath comes from two major sources: the 1st-century CE historian Plutarch’s biography of Crassus and Roman History by Cassius Dio (c....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. To the ancient Egyptians, death was not the end of life but only the beginning of the next phase in an individual’s eternal journey. There was no word in ancient Egyptian which corresponds to the concept of “death” as usually defined, as “ceasing to live”, since death was simply a transition to another phase of one’s eternal existence....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Germanic influence reigned in the Roman Empire from the end of the 4th century CE through the 5th. Germanic individuals took important posts in the government and the military, and Germanic tribes penetrated ever further into lands that had been Roman for centuries. The Western Roman Empire finally collapsed under these various pressures in 476 CE, chief among them the power of invading Germanic tribes....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Darband-i Basara (the Pass of Basara) is a narrow natural gorge which transects the anticlines of the upper part of the Qaradagh Mountain Range. The elevation is about 605 meters above the sea level. A stream descends and passes through the gorge from the north-east to the south-west....

In my March column, I explored why tech gadget firms draw such rabid partisanship. Certainly, in the gadget flame wars, there’s something for everyone these days. Here’s an assessment of the latest companies people love to hate. Apple is Evil. The haters’ beef: Apple stuff is too expensive. Apple is a totalitarian control freak that limits what we can do with our gadgets. Apple is smug and elitist. Yeah, but: So why the rage?...

The black-and-blue rule of baseball—if your pitcher beans our batter, our pitcher will bean yours—it turns out, is highly dependent on the weather. Richard P. Larrick, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and his colleagues examined every at bat in every Major League Baseball game since 1952, keeping an eye peeled for retribution pitches. They then calculated that of the roughly 190,000 at bats that occur every season, about 1,550 result in the batter being struck by a pitch....

Of all the discoveries made by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, the most epochal has been that its landing site, Gale Crater, once held a massive and long-lasting lake. Now, however, a new study suggests this “lake” may have only been a series of smaller, transient puddles. Curiosity landed and began exploring Gale Crater in 2012. Mere months later, at the base of 5.5-kilometer Mount Sharp in the crater’s center, the rover found layers of mudstone—suggestive of sediments that had settled in standing water—as well as flow-rippled rocks from an ancient stream....

The New Black Hole Battle Still confused by Stephen Hawking’s recent remarks on black holes? Read Hawking’s paper here, and find an introduction to the information paradox here. New Cancer Culprit? Investigate the possible link between cholesterol and breast cancer in Molecular Endocrinology, Cell Reports and Science. Cockroach Homecoming See what the Entomological Society of America has to say about Ectobius’sAmerican roots, a chance discovery made at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s Green River Fossil Collections....

Watch the skies and learn where the mercury lies. Arctic seabirds called little auks (Alle alle) pick up mercury while on holiday in southern climes, a new study reveals, and then subsequently transport the toxin back into their main habitat. By tracking the pilgrims, scientists can pinpoint oceanic pools of the pollutant and possible sites of food chain contamination. Pumped into the air by coal-burning factories, mercury has dusted the Arctic (and the rest of the planet) since the industrial revolution....

MIT Media Lab’s Gershon Dublon and Joseph Paradiso believe that augmented reality will go far beyond Google Glass. Soon, data from sensors embedded in a growing number of places will add a new layer to human perceptual experience. But first, two things need to happen. One, sensor data that today are siloed for use in specific applications need to be made available to any device that wants to use the information....

If you own a parrot, you may owe it an apology. “Bird-brained” isn’t an insult: although a bird’s brain may seem diminutive, its small size only makes its mental capacities more impressive. Scientists have known for some time that birds are capable of complex cognition—as tool-making crows and discriminating pigeons reveal. The question was how nature had gotten all that neural hardwiring into such a small package. Research published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a new explanation: bird brains pack neurons more densely than those of other animals....

By Gopal Sharma KATHMANDU (Reuters) - A Chinese woman climbed Mount Everest on Friday, a government official said, the first person to go up from the Nepali side since an April avalanche killed 16 guides and forced hundreds of foreigners to abandon attempts on the world’s highest mountain. The deadliest accident in the history of Mount Everest triggered a dispute between Sherpa guides who wanted a climbing ban in honor of their colleagues for this season ending this month and the government that refused to close the mountain....

In a year when climate change is low on the national political radar, two states are bucking the trend. In New Hampshire and Washington state, governors’ races are incorporating climate change into party platforms and discussing the issue openly. “We know we have to deal with climate change. I’m a person who believes in science,” said Washington Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jay Inslee, a former congressman, in an October interview with the Washington State Public Affairs Network....

The Dutch have a long history with chocolate. Although native Mexicans and their Spanish conquerors first used the bitter bean–and reported on its tonic powers–a Dutchman was the first to extract modern cocoa and neutralize its bitterness with alkali. The modern chocolate bar was born. Now, results from a study of aging Dutch men have shown that cocoa consumers were half as likely to die from disease than those who did not eat the sweet treat....

By Zeeya Merali of Nature magazineIn a feat of technical mastery, condensed-matter physicists have managed to detect the elusive third constituent of an electron – its ‘orbiton’. The achievement could help to resolve a long-standing mystery about the origin of high-temperature superconductivity, and aid in the construction of quantum computers. Isolated electrons cannot be split into smaller components, earning them the designation of a fundamental particle. But in the 1980s, physicists predicted that electrons in a one-dimensional chain of atoms could be split into three quasiparticles: a holon' carrying the electron's charge, a spinon’ carrying its spin (an intrinsic quantum property related to magnetism) and an `orbiton’ carrying its orbital location....

An amazing fact: most of what you see is a confabulation of your brain. Sounds hard to believe, right? After all, you are reading this page. So how inaccurate could your visual system be? Well, it is not that our eyes themselves are inaccurate … just that our brain makes stuff up based on the sparse data it gets from our eyes and then leads you down the garden path....

In mid-November New York magazine ran a cover story on a group of 540 Ashkenazi Jews who, as the headline trumpets, carry “DNA You Wouldn’t Believe.” This group of happy oldsters, all of them over 95, might hold the key to extreme longevity, the article suggests. There is the 105-year-old stockbroker who still goes to work everyday and a peripatetic 109-year-old woman. The article—“What Do a Bunch of Old Jews Know about Living Forever?...