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The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The remains of a 6-inch long mummy from Chile are not those of a space alien, according to recently reported research. The tiny body with its strange features—a pointed head, elongated bones—had been the subject of fierce debate over whether a UFO might have left it behind. The scientists gained access to the body, which is now in a private collection, and their DNA testing proved the remains are those of a human fetus....

We are all familiar with the electric and magnetic forces. Electric force is what makes electrically charged objects attract or repel each other depending on whether their charges are of the same or opposite signs. For example, an electron has negative electric charge, and a proton has a positive charge (of opposite value). The attractive force between them is what makes the electron spin around the nucleus of the atom. Electric forces create what is called an electric field....

The climate crisis has created an acute awareness of history: human decisions made in the past are clearly having a large and critical impact on the present, and what is done in the present can have a large and critical impact on our future. It is becoming equally clear that our past is difficult to shake off as we are so far mostly continuing along the same behavioral paths as before....

Imagine an Internet where unseen hands curate your entire experience. Where third parties predetermine the news, products and prices you see—even the people you meet. A world where you think you are making choices, but in reality, your options are narrowed and refined until you are left with merely the illusion of control. This is not far from what is happening today. Thanks to technology that enables Google, Facebook and others to gather information about us and use it to tailor the user experience to our own personal tastes, habits and income, the Internet has become a different place for the rich and for the poor....

The new animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars features an army of cloned soldiers doing battle with droids on far-flung planets. For those of us who grew up watching the Star Wars movies, droids and laser blasters are almost as real as cell phones and Wi-Fi. But what in Star Wars qualifies as remotely plausible, according to our understanding of science, and what is pure fantasy? To help answer this question, ScientificAmerican....

Consciousness matters to us. Many would say it matters more than anything. We relish the beauty of a winter sunset, the memory-fueled comforts of a homecoming, the inviting caress of a lover’s hand. Conscious sensations lie at the core of our being. Without access to this marvel, we’d be poorer creatures living in a duller world. Yet the fundamental nature of consciousness remains a scientific mystery. The problem is not that we do not understand consciousness at all—some aspects of it are relatively easy to explain....

The U.S. Postal Service has finalized a plan to replace its aging mail trucks with mostly gasoline-powered models, defying calls for more electric vehicles from the Biden administration, Democratic lawmakers and environmentalists. In a record of decision released yesterday, the USPS stuck with its proposal for a 10-year contract with Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Defense LLC to supply up to 165,000 new mail trucks, with only 10 percent required to be battery electric and the remaining 90 percent allowed to be gas-powered vehicles....

Physical cleanliness and moral purity have a long association in religion, language and other human behaviors. Cleanliness is next to godliness; the Mandarin term for a thief is “a pair of dirty hands”; and, perhaps most famously, Lady Macbeth desperately attempts to wash away a spot of blood after murdering Duncan. Behavioral researchers Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist at Northwestern University explored this so-called “Macbeth effect” in a series of experiments with undergraduates....

Dear EarthTalk: Are there certain brands or retail stores where sustainable furniture options can be had? And what should I look for when shopping for greener furniture?—W. Cary, Trenton, N.J. While we now opt often for greener cars, appliances, household cleaners and food to up the sustainability quotient of our lifestyles, the furniture we spend all day and night in close contact with is often far from eco-friendly. The vast majority of sofas, chairs, beds and other upholstered furniture we love to lounge on contain potentially carcinogenic formaldehyde and/or toxic flame retardants and stain resistors that have been linked to developmental and hormonal maladies....

Tennessee does not immediately come to mind as a progressive force in science and technical education. Even today the legacy of the infamous 1925 Scopes trial persists: a relatively new state law invites teachers to criticize mainstream science, be it evolution or global warming. Yet the antediluvian “Monkey Bill,” as opponents call the 2012 legislation, has not prevented the state from taking the national spotlight as an educational innovator. In May, Republican governor Bill Haslam signed a bill that will make Tennessee’s two-year community colleges and technical schools free to any high school graduate starting in 2015....

Alcohol abuse does its neurological damage more quickly in women than in men, new research suggests. The finding adds to a growing body of evidence that is prompting researchers to consider whether the time is ripe for single-gender treatment programs for alcohol-dependent women and men. Over the past few decades scientists have observed a narrowing of the gender gap in alcohol dependence. In the 1980s the ratio of male to female alcohol dependence stood at roughly five males for every female, according to figures compiled by Shelly Greenfield, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The estimated expanse of the Achaemenid Empire at its height c. 500 BCE was two million square miles. Most of this territory was conquered by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Empire, who reigned from 559 to 530 BCE, the fourth king in his dynastic line as relayed in the opening quote from the Cyrus Cylinder, a foundational text for the study of Cyrus....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Finding a maritime route to the East and gaining access to the lucrative spice trade stood at the root of the European Age of Exploration. However, when Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached the Indian Ocean in 1493, he found a vibrant international trade network already in place, whose expanse and wealth was well beyond European imagination....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. This text is part of an article series on the Delian League. The sixth and last phase of the Delian League begins with the Decelean War, also referred to as the Ionian War, and ends with the surrender of Athens (413/2 – 404/3 BCE). The final nine years of the Delian League became the most chaotic for the alliance as a whole....

Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi have done it again. This time they’ve spelled out how 139 countries can each generate all the energy needed for homes, businesses, industry, transportation, agriculture—everything—from wind, solar and water power technologies, by 2050. Their national blueprints, released Nov. 18, follow similar plans they have published in the past few years to run each of the 50 U.S. states on renewables, as well as the entire world....

From baby boomers fearing memory loss to college students wanting a mental boost, interest in brain-training products is soaring. Yet among leading scientists, there is persistent scrutiny and skepticism. Last year 70 cognitive researchers signed a statement speaking out against computer-based games that promise better cognitive performance, citing a lack of scientific evidence to back such claims. Within this morass of hype and hope, at least two companies have committed to rigorous testing of their digital products to treat specific health conditions before making them available on the market....

From Nature magazine There is no more iconic image in biology than that of DNA’s double-stranded helix, which coils and supercoils on itself to form dense chromosomes. But a quite different, square-shaped type of DNA structure can easily be created in the laboratory by the folding of synthetic DNA strands rich in guanine, one of the building blocks of DNA. Scientists have long believed that these so-called ‘G-quadruplex structures’ may occasionally form in the DNA of living cells....

Weather data is big business in the United States, with services like AccuWeather, the Weather Channel and Weather Underground together generating more than $1 billion in revenue each year. Now, one of those companies – the newly renamed Earth Networks, which owns the popular WeatherBug website and desktop weather widget – is hoping to do the same for climate data. The company, formerly AWS Convergence Technologies Inc., said today it has partnered with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to launch the world’s largest greenhouse gas monitoring network....

IN PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, a “cerebroscope” is a fictitious device, a brain–computer interface in today’s language, which reads out the content of somebody’s brain. An autocerebroscope is a device applied to one’s own brain. You would be able to see your own brain in action, observing the fleeting bioelectric activity of all its nerve cells and thus of your own conscious mind. There is a strange loopiness about this idea. The mind observing its own brain gives rise to the very mind observing this brain....

The brown slurry is piped through tubes into the top of the human body — or the bottom. It can even come in pill form. For years, doctors have been transferring feces into ill people’s intestines to replace resident microbes with a fresh batch. The procedure is often a therapeutic success, but protocols for it vary wildly. As it steadily grows more popular, regulators are now working to define what a standard fecal transplant should be, and how to deliver one safely....