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Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. After defeating Darius III at the battle of Issus in November 333 BCE, Alexander marched his army (about 35,000-40,000 strong) into Phoenicia, where he received the capitulation of Byblus and Sidon. Tyrian envoys met with Alexander whilst he was on the march, declaring their intent to honour his wishes....

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 Ephesus (l. c. 500 BCE) famously claimed that “life is flux” and, although he seems to have thought this observation would be clear to all, people have continued to resist change from his time to the present day. Heraclitus was one of the early Pre-Socratic philosophers, so named because they pre-date Socrates, considered the Father of Western Philosophy....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. When it comes to religion, many people who seek it out, even the most powerful ones, do so to cope with difficult times or events. The innate fragility of the human mind forces the human being to create the desire to find out who is behind anything, good or bad....

Of the 122 attempted missions to the moon, a bit more than half were deemed successful. The vast majority of all these attempts were launched by just two countries: the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. The first nation beyond those two to shoot for the moon was Japan, which sent the successful Hiten probe in 1990 to fly by our natural satellite and release the lunar orbiter Hagoromo. Europe, China and India have since joined the club, and Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL aimed to become the first private organization to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface this past April but ultimately failed....

Blows to the head that were once considered a relatively harmless result of rough-and-tumble play appear to be sending more kids than ever before to U.S. emergency rooms. New work published in the May 13 issue of JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association finds that head injuries led an estimated 2.5 million people to visit a U.S. emergency room in 2010. About one third of the cases were children, with most ER visits sparked by falls or some collision involving the head....

Some 870 million years ago two dead stars became one. Their merger shook the fabric of space with a gravitational wave that swept through Earth on August 14, 2019, rippling through three pairs of carefully calibrated lasers designed to detect their passage. An automated system sent out a preliminary alert 21 seconds later, vibrating smartphones and pinging laptops around the world. A few years after the Nobel Prize–winning first gravitational-wave detection, which stemmed from a pair of colliding black holes, such alerts had become commonplace....

Two researchers have created a strikingly simple model of chaotic behavior, in which variations in initial conditions become so tangled and magnified by the system’s dynamics that the outcome appears to be unpredictably random. The team, then based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), did this by bouncing a tiny droplet on a soap film, using an inexpensive speaker to drive the miniature trampoline. Physicist Tristan Gilet, then a visiting student at M....

That six-year-old kid bent over a coloring book may become a 3D artist when he grows up—you never know. Now a new program can help him get a taste of that future, faster. Members of the Human Interface Technology Lab in Christchurch, New Zealand, have written a program that turns a colored-in coloring page into a 3D, animated scene. They first showed their program at conferences in 2011, and on March 5, they won best “Tech Note,” or short paper, at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ 3D User Interfaces conference....

Located at the edge of a more than three-billion-year-old ice cap covering Mars’s south pole, the region known as Planum Australe would rank high on any list of the Red Planet’s least interesting locales. Frozen, flat and featureless, it seemingly offers little more than windblown dust and drifts of crystallized carbon dioxide for any aspiring explorer to see. Unless, that is, one could somehow peer deep underneath its frigid surface to the base of the ice cap some 1....

Why do so many people suffer from depression? Research in the U.S. and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives. This staggeringly high prevalence—compared with other mental disorders that affect only around 1 to 2 percent of the population, such as schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder—seems to pose an evolutionary paradox. The brain plays crucial roles in promoting survival and reproduction, so the pressures of evolution should have left our brains resistant to such high rates of malfunction....

We tend to think black holes gobble up all the matter around them—but they can actually spew out as much as they suck in. And sometimes they seem to go downright crazy. Astronomers recently spotted one black hole, nearly 10,000 light-years from Earth, belching out an enormous explosion of x-ray light. Measurements of this tantrum have given scientists one of the clearest pictures yet of what happens when black holes erupt with energy....

If you had trouble polishing off any open bottles of sparkling wine on New Year’s Eve, you may have employed an old kitchen trick to keep the leftover bubbly … well, bubbly. The trick is simple: just put a teaspoon, handle down, into the bottle’s mouth. Many people have cited anecdotal evidence that the spoon helps keep sparkling wines effervescent in the fridge for a day or more after opening. There’s just one problem....

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union’s fisheries chief proposed on Wednesday a cut of up to a third in the amount of cod the bloc’s fishermen can catch next year, warning that stocks are at risk of collapse in some areas.Scottish fishermen are likely to be worst affected by such quota limits after the European Commission proposed a continued ban in 2014 on landings of cod off Scotland’s Atlantic west coast to try to avert a possible crash in numbers....

An ancient shrub that grows on only one island in the world has inexplicably swallowed up six mitochondrial genomes’ worth of DNA, puzzling scientists and perhaps shedding light on the “junk” DNA that bloats the human genome. For reasons scientists can only guess at, Amborella has ingested the entire mitochondrial genomes of a moss and three green algae plus several hundred miscellaneous genes from another alga and from an undetermined number of flowering plants....

Pressure is mounting on the Japanese government to intervene in the clean-up of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant after experts voiced fears that the power company responsible for the facility is unable to cope. The leakage earlier this month of hundreds of tons of radioactive water — the most serious incident at the beleaguered plant since it was devastated by a tsunami in March 2011 — highlights the failure by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to properly manage the operation....

The Supreme Court ruled today to uphold the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA), which aims to expand health insurance coverage to 32 million more Americans. However, the Court also ruled that the federal government may not penalize states that decline to participate in the expansion of Medicaid that accompanies the ACA by taking away other Medicaid moneys. The Court, which heard arguments on the case in March, decided that the law’s provisions, including the individual mandate and the expansion of Medicaid, are, indeed, constitutional....

Editor’s Note (10/7/20): This story is being republished in light of the growing number of people at the White House who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus—many of whom may have been infected at a ceremony for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett that was held in the Rose Garden a little more than a week ago. In late February about 175 executives from around the world came to the biotechnology company Biogen’s leadership conference in Boston....

When we contemplate the extraordinary abilities and accomplishments of Homo sapiens, it is certainly hard to avoid a first impression that there must somehow have been an element of inevitability in the process by which we came to be what we are. The product, its easy to conclude, is so magnificent that it must stand as the ultimate expression of a lengthy and gradual process of amelioration and enhancement. How could we have got this way by accident?...

U.S. Skiers can still hit the slopes this month near Lake Tahoe, Calif. A resort there is the first in the country to use a “snow factory,” a machine that can make snow in temperatures up to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Traditional snow cannons can generate flakes only below 28 degrees F. NORTHWEST PASSAGE This month a cruise ship with 1,000 passengers is scheduled to traverse the once iced-in Arctic sea route that connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans....

Some of the worst effects are happening in carbon-rich tropical canopies, where tree losses in primary forests last year reached 3.5 million hectares (9.3 million acres) due to rising populations and growing demand for food and energy, according to an analysis released today by the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch. As trees in the tropics fell, they released an estimated 2.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide. That’s equivalent to the annual fossil fuel emissions of India, the world’s third-largest source of greenhouse gases....