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Two years ago this week, a fierce, fast-moving thunderstorm system known as a derecho ripped through the Mid-Atlantic leaving more than 1 million of Maryland’s 2.5 million electricity customers without power. In the aftermath of the storm, the state stepped up efforts to improve the resiliency and reliability of the grid. This week, at the behest of Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), the Maryland Energy Administration (MEA) released a road map for microgrid deployment as part of a strategy to withstand future storms, which are expected to become more intense as a result of climate change....

Adapted from the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. Copyright 2009 by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. http://www.connectedthebook.com/ Nicholas and his wife, Erika, like to joke that they had an arranged marriage, South Asia–style. Although they lived within four blocks of each other for two years and were both students at Harvard, their paths never crossed....

Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum. If humans were to disappear, could another species evolve into a tool-making, crop-raising, language-using beast that would dominate the planet? According to Alan Weisman, baboons might have a reasonable shot. They have the largest brains of any primate besides Homo sapiens, and like us they adapted to living in savannas as forest habitats in Africa shrank. Writes Weisman in The World without Us: “If the dominant ungulates of the savanna—cattle—disappear, wildebeest will expand to take their place....

When we bed down in a new locale, our sleep often suffers. A recent study finds that this so-called first-night effect may be the result of partial wakefulness in one side of the brain—as if the brain is keeping watch. Researchers at Brown University and the Georgia Institute of Technology used neuroimaging and a brain wave–tracking approach called polysomnography to record activity in four brain networks in 11 individuals as they slept on two nights about a week apart....

By Laura Zuckerman March 26 (Reuters) - A radiation leak at an underground nuclear waste dump in New Mexico was caused by “chemically incompatible” contents, including kitty litter, that reacted inside a barrel of waste causing it to rupture, scientists said on Thursday. The U.S. Energy Department report on last year’s radiation accident at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad showed that a drum of waste containing radioisotopes like plutonium was improperly packaged at the Los Alamos National Laboratory near Santa Fe before arriving for disposal....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Beginning in the 16th century, Protestants in France struggled in their rapport with royal power. Protestants owed the recognition of their rights more to sovereign decrees than to genuine tolerance or religious pluralism. The realization that the monarch held the authority to revoke what had been granted led to suspicion and mistrust toward rulers....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The ever evolving pottery from the Minoan civilization of Bronze Age Crete (2000-1500 BCE) demonstrates, perhaps better than any other medium, not only the Minoan joy in animal, sea and plant life but also their delight in flowing, naturalistic shapes and design. Kamares Ware PotteryOri Keren (CC BY-NC-SA)...

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Although there are certainly differences between Eastern and Western philosophical systems, they both aim at the same goal of apprehending Truth and understanding the best way to live one’s life. Modern-day scholarship often makes a serious, and arbitrary, distinction between the two which is unnecessary and erects an artificial boundary between the two traditions....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Curse of Agade is a story dated to the Ur III Period of Mesopotamia (2047-1750 BCE) though thought to be somewhat older in origin. It tells the story of the Akkadian king Naram-Sin (r. 2261-2224 BCE) and his confrontation with the gods, particularly the god Enlil....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The dates of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, have been a concern of, primarily, Western scholars for well over 100 years now owing to the particularly Western need for precise dating of historical persons and events. The problem with precise dating of the Buddha’s life is that it is simply not possible due to a lack of supporting primary sources....

The biotechnology industry has had its share of woes, but so far ‘patent trolls’ have not numbered among them. These companies, which profit by legally enforcing patents they own rather than developing products, may benefit from a 31 August ruling at a US federal court of appeal in Washington DC. The court upheld a lawsuit filed by Classen Immunotherapies of Baltimore, Maryland, against four biotechnology companies and a medical group, for infringing on a patent that covered the idea of trying to link infant vaccination with later immune disorders....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

The electric, push button–operated reclining chair (as opposed to the plain old electric chair) is clearly one of the hallmarks of an advanced civilization. Some models of recliners should probably be sold by prescription only, so soporific can be the effect of yielding one’s back and nether region to its welcoming embrace. I have often mused while relaxing in my own recliner that even if sitting be the new smoking—as it has lately been labeled by virtue of the deleterious effects of long-term butt parking—then splay on....

Take a moment to look at the image on the opposite page. What do you see? Just a neural network? Perhaps you spotted the hidden figure. If so, you have just had a moment of insight. You may have felt a similar jolt when discovering the solution to a math problem, understanding a joke or metaphor, or realizing something unexpected about yourself. These aha moments occur when your brain spontaneously reinterprets information to reach a novel, nonobvious conclusion....

Hackers constantly improve at penetrating cyberdefenses to steal valuable documents. So some researchers propose using an artificial-intelligence algorithm to hopelessly confuse them, once they break in, by hiding the real deal amid a mountain of convincing fakes. The algorithm, called Word Embedding–based Fake Online Repository Generation Engine (WE-FORGE), generates decoys of patents under development. But someday it could “create a lot of fake versions of every document that a company feels it needs to guard,” says its developer, Dartmouth College cybersecurity researcher V....

A swarm of locusts fills your vision. Thunderclouds cover the bedroom ceiling. Sweats drips from your forehead, chest and hands. You have trouble breathing. The walls around you bend and twist. You cover your eyes, but the scenes play out with the same realer-than-real intensity. An audience somewhere is clapping. The windows of your bedroom disappear into blackness, and 100 stamp-size televisions appear, each one reprising a moment of your childhood: the exact lyrics of a song on the radio you heard once when you were two years old, or the color of your socks at a kindergarten birthday party, or the timbre of your grandfather’s voice....

It is hard to know exactly when it became acceptable for U.S. politicians to be antiscience. For some two centuries science was a preeminent force in American politics, and scientific innovation has been the leading driver of U.S. economic growth since World War II. Kids in the 1960s gathered in school cafeterias to watch moon launches and landings on televisions wheeled in on carts. Breakthroughs in the 1970s and 1980s sparked the computer revolution and a new information economy....

Serious athletes and brawling schoolyard children are familiar with the audience effect: people compete harder in front of a crowd. This phenomenon is not unique to humans. Other mammals, birds, fish and even insects fight more vigorously when they know they are being watched by members of their own species. In a surprise twist, however, this propensity does not just occur among friends and family. It turns out that the audience effect can kick in even when the onlookers belong to a different species from the fighters....

All that enters a black hole may not be lost; data could leak out over trillions of years as Hawking radiation. A new analysis indicates that the recovery can proceed much faster than previously thought. Imagine Alice hurling some quantum bits into a relatively young black hole; it would take Bob half of the hole’s lifetime to recover enough Hawking radiation to reproduce the bits. But things change if Alice holds onto her bits until after the hole has reached the halfway mark and Bob has entangled some of his own bits with Alice’s, linking them across any distance....

One of the worst epidemics in human history, a sixteenth-century pestilence that devastated Mexico’s native population, may have been caused by a deadly form of salmonella from Europe, a pair of studies suggest. In one study, researchers say they have recovered DNA of the stomach bacterium from burials in Mexico linked to a 1540s epidemic that killed up to 80% of the country’s native inhabitants. The team reports its findings in a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server on February 8....