From Nature magazine It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery. Lord Kelvin defined the absolute temperature scale in the mid-1800s in such a way that nothing could be colder than absolute zero....
The Flying Machine Book: Build and Launch 35 Rockets, Gliders, Helicopters, Boomerangs, and More, by Bobby Mercer. Chicago Review Press, 2012 ($14.95) Scholastic’s Discover More series of print books comes with supplemental online material, including My Body (ages 4 and up), Planets (6 and up) and The Elements (9 and up). (from $7.99) The Ultimate Book of Saturday Science: The Very Best Backyard Science Experiments You Can Do Yourself, by Neil A....
By Quirin SchiermeierThe pitch-black lakes hidden beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet will finally start to release their secrets next year. At a meeting last week, scientists from Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States described their plans to explore the planet’s last uncharted ecosystems by drilling into three very different examples of these subglacial lakes.Over the past 40 years, radar imagery has revealed around 150 freshwater lakes of various sizes and ages beneath the massive Antarctic ice sheet....
For most of us, it’s an uncomfortable tingling sensation—that occasional, disturbing feeling that someone is behind us, watching. But for millions of people around the world who suffer from visual and auditory hallucinations, this minor annoyance develops into a frequent torment. Feeling of Presence, or FoP, is the disconcerting notion that someone else is hovering nearby, walking alongside you or even touching you. It’s the stuff of ghost stories, but also a real symptom of several neurologic conditions, including schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease....
James Bridenstine, a Republican member of the US Congress from Oklahoma, has been tapped to be the next head of NASA. Bridenstine is a strong supporter of lunar exploration and commercial space flight. If confirmed by the Senate, he will take the reins of an agency that is building a new heavy-lift rocket to fly astronauts to an as-yet-undecided destination. Bridenstine has repeatedly argued that the United States should return to the Moon—to, among other things, mine water ice to fuel a fleet of satellites with lunar hydrogen and oxygen....
Excerpted with permission from The Secret World of Sleep: The Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest, by Penelope A. Lewis. Available from Palgrave Macmillan Trade. Copyright © 2013. (Scientific American and Palgrave Macmillan are part of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.) You are terrified and running along a dark, narrow corridor. Something very evil and scary is chasing you, but you’re not sure why. Your fear is compounded by the fact that your feet won’t do what you want—it feels like they are moving through molasses....
Two well-publicized satellite falls a month apart got me wondering: Is this the new normal? After all, there is plenty of junk in orbit, and it can’t stay up there forever. And NASA, along with many other space agencies, now requires that satellites tumble back to Earth sooner rather than later once their useful lifetimes have ended so as to limit collisions in orbit. So how often are we going to be hearing about inbound satellites—and worrying about the ever so slim chance that they might kill us?...
Nestled into the payload of a Delta 2 rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is a satellite that should open new targets for astronomical study both near and far. NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), slated for launch no earlier than 6:09 A.M. Pacific Standard Time on December 11, is charged with mapping the sky in the mid-infrared to create an atlas of objects whose emitted light is invisible to human eyes and largely absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Colonial American currency was a work in progress from the time of the earliest English settlements of the 1600s until the United States of America minted its own money in 1783. The monetary system was far from standardized, and trade within the colonies often relied heavily on the barter system and cashless transactions than exchange of coins or banknotes....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The concept of a curse laid on a tomb or gravesite is best known from ancient Egypt but the practice was quite common in other civilizations of antiquity. The tomb or grave was the eternal home of the physical remains of the deceased to which his or her soul could return at will, furnished with all of the keepsakes, tools, food and drink, and various objects the dead person would want or need in the next life....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Possibly being overjoyed by the tales of mythical exploits of Heracles, Semiramis, the fabled queen of Assyria, Cyrus, King of Persia and so on, Alexander the Great set out from the tiny kingdom of Macedon for a daring adventure, unheard of in the entire civilized world. His theatre of war was vast, extending from out of the Danube River to beyond Indus in northwest India....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Sacred cakes in ancient Greece were baked loaves, biscuits, pastries, and sponges sweetened with honey (meli) and prepared as unburnt offerings to the gods and goddesses and other divine beings. Unburnt offerings were substitutes for or a complement to animal sacrifices whose bones and fat would then be burnt on the altar while their meat would be served in a cultic feast....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The art of the Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE) of ancient China is characterised by a new desire to represent everyday life and the stories from history and mythology familiar to all. The arts were fuelled both by a political stability with its consequent economic prosperity and the development and highly successful combination of brushes, ink, and paper....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In the decades of the 20s and 30s of the 1st century CE, a Jew from the town of Nazareth in the Galilee began preaching that the God of Israel would soon intervene in history, restoring that nation to God’s original plan and glory. From this ministry, Jesus of Nazareth ultimately came to be worshipped not only as a god but as a physical manifestation of the God of Israel on earth....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Siege of Acre, located on the northern coast of Israel, was the first major battle of the Third Crusade (1189-1192 CE). The protracted siege by a mixed force of European armies against the Muslim garrison and nearby army of Saladin, the Sultan Egypt and Syria (r. 1174-1193 CE), lasted from 1189 to 1191 CE....
Dear EarthTalk: What are these “ocean deserts” I’ve been hearing about? Also, didn’t I read that there was a huge mass of plastic bottles floating around somewhere on the ocean surface? – Wally Mattson, Eugene, OR So-called “ocean deserts” or “dead zones” are oxygen-starved (or “hypoxic”) areas of the ocean. They can occur naturally, or be caused by an excess of nitrogen from agricultural fertilizers, sewage effluent and/or emissions from factories, trucks and automobiles....
Worrywarts, beware: all that fretting may be for naught. Anxiety has long been interpreted as a symptom of hyperawareness and sensitivity to danger, but a study published last December in Biological Psychology turns that logic on its head. Tahl Frenkel, a graduate student in psychology at Tel Aviv University, asked 17 students who had anxious personalities and 22 students who were more mellow to identify when they detected fear in a series of increasingly frightened faces....
Black holes might be black, but they are not necessarily invisible. They come in a variety of sizes, from minuscule to supermassive, with a key common feature: a boundary known as the event horizon, beyond which light cannot escape. Black holes near an object such as a star, however, can brighten when they feed, flaring as superheated dust and gas swirls down to oblivion. Those without such a companion are much more difficult to spot, black as they are, but they can still be indirectly detected via their gravitational effects on other nearby objects....
On September 4, astronomers detected a gamma-ray burst from the farthest reaches of the universe, at a time just 900 million years after its birth. The event represents the most distant such explosion ever recorded. Signifying the death of massive stars, gamma-ray bursts are some of the universe’s most powerful explosions. The September 4th burst, dubbed GRB050904, was first detected by NASA’s Swift satellite. Scientists subsequently used a number of telescopes around the world to observe it and determined that it has a redshift of 6....
More than 150 million birds have been killed by various strains of avian flu, according to the World Health Organization. Outbreaks in Asia and Europe have only been contained by wiping out poultry flocks. Various vaccines to date have proven ineffective or difficult to administer. But now two independent groups of researchers have shown that incorporating the proteins of various strains of bird flu into an existing virus vaccine can yield effective protection for birds....
