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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. Of all the pharaohs who ruled ancient Egypt, there is one in particular that stands out from the rest. Over the course of his 17-year reign (1353-1336 BCE), Akhenaten spearheaded a cultural, religious, and artistic revolution that rattled the country, throwing thousands of years of tradition out the window and imposing a new world order....

Big changes are afoot for the energy sector in the next 25 years. Coal and gas are headed out and solar and wind are rushing to take their place on a multi-trillion dollar investment bonanza, according to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance that scopes out the power generating landscape through 2040. The main reason for the big shift in power generation isn’t likely to be because of a grand climate agreement, national polices or carbon pricing scheme, though....

Who hasn’t dreamed of having an invisibility cloak like Harry Potter’s? While these don’t yet exist in reality, it is possible to give people the illusion that they’re invisible, new research suggests. Using clever camera angles, virtual goggles and physical caresses, a team of researchers was able to make people feel as if they had an invisible body. Furthermore, feeling invisible reduced the anxiety brought on by standing in front of an audience, the researchers found....

More than 2,000 years ago, a plague gripped the Greek city of Athens. Ultimately, as much as a third of the population succumbed and the devastation, which helped Sparta gain the upper hand in the nearly 30-year-long war between the city-states. That much Thucydides–an ancient historian, general in the war and plague victim who recovered–conveys in his History of the Peloponnesian War. But he did not leave a precise enough description to decide definitively whether the disease was bubonic plague, smallpox or a host of other ailments....

Hundreds of baby whales died off the coast of Argentina between 2003 and 2014, and seagulls may have played a role in their deaths, a new study suggests. While you might think of seagulls as mere pests—squawking masses of feathers that loom over the beach, waiting for dropped potato chips—these birds pose a serious threat to several species of animals, including the southern right whale (Eubalaena australis). Gull harassment of right whales off Argentina’s Península Valdés has been observed since the 1970s....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. When humans’ genetic information (known as the genome) was mapped 15 years ago, it promised to change the world. Optimists anticipated an era in which all genetic diseases would be eradicated. Pessimists feared widespread genetic discrimination. Neither of these hopes and fears have been realised. The reason for this is simple: our genome is complex....

How are past temperatures determined from an ice core? —G. SPENCER, LONGWOOD, FLA. Robert Mulvaney, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, offers this answer: Temperature is not measured directly but is inferred from the levels of certain isotopes (chemically identical atoms with the same number of protons but differing numbers of neutrons) of water molecules released by melting the ice cores. Water is composed of molecules comprising two atoms of hydrogen (H) and one of oxygen (O)....

A new computer model has learned to recognize vowel categories from multiple English and Japanese speakers without “knowing” the number of vowels it is looking for or having a complete list of sounds to analyze, according to a new report. Instead, it gradually lumps vowels into distinct groups by considering them one at a time, reminiscent of how an infant might attend to sounds. The designers of the model say it is an early step toward improved voice recognition software and a better understanding of how the infant mind comes to recognize that the voices it detects are speaking one language and not another....

Astronomers say that they have discovered the first example of a long-sought cosmic oddity: a bloated, dying star with a surprise in its core — an ultra-dense neutron star. Such entities, known as Thorne-Zytkow objects, are theoretically possible but would alter scientists’ understanding of how stars can be powered. Since Thorne-Zytkow objects were first proposed in 1975, researchers have occasionally offered up candidates, but none have been confirmed. The latest work, reported on 6 January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society outside Washington DC, focuses on a red supergiant star in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way....

Running helps mice to recover from a type of blindness caused by sensory deprivation early in life, researchers report. The study, published on 26 June in eLife, also illuminates processes underlying the brain’s ability to rewire itself in response to experience — a phenomenon known as plasticity, which neuroscientists believe is the basis of learning. More than 50 years ago, neurophysiologists David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel cracked the ‘code’ used to send information from the eyes to the brain....

BOSTON – Scott Newman was laid off in February from his job repairing home oil heaters, a victim of the dismal economy. Today, he sits in a class with a new job, learning how to sleuth out wasted energy in homes. Newman is in the vanguard of a green-collar corps created by the nation’s first carbon cap-and-trade program, operating in 10 northeastern states. Workers are being hired for a booming expansion of energy efficiency programs, financed by money raised from power companies paying for their carbon emissions under the program....

Today the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a case challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed greenhouse gas regulations. The Issue in Front of the High Court: The Tailoring Rule Today’s challenge comes from six different lawsuits that have been “rolled into one.”Texas is one of the big plaintiffs, but the American Chemistry Council is the primary one. At issue is EPA’s “tailoring” rule [pdf],a solution that has placed the pro-regulation and anti-regulation camps on strange sides of the argument....

The demands placed on smart phones by marathon sessions of texting, streaming video and surfing the Web require that they have blazing-fast processors while, at the same time, be able to disburse the heat these processors generate. A team of engineers is proposing something of a counterintuitive model to designing smart phones in the future—one that has processors alternately powering up and then cooling down, more like sprinters than long-distance runners....

Move north or south from the lush, dense tropical forests and seas, and the numbers of species calling those places home drop off sharply. Scientists have known about this equatorial bulge of biodiversity for more than a century, yet its explanation remained elusive. Researchers focused on species formation and extinction to explain why the tropics had such diversity of life. In 1974 the highly regarded botanist G. Ledyard Stebbins declared that the tropics were either a cradle, where new life evolved more frequently than at other latitudes, or a museum, where old, stodgy life persisted there longer....

Although the widespread adoption of electric vehicles and their related infrastructure has always suffered from chicken-and-egg syndrome, Nissan and FedEx, along with several utilities and technology companies have formed a coalition to break the stalemate. At a press conference Monday in Washington, D.C., the Electrification Coalition announced its formation as well as a new 130-page report on the dangers of oil dependence, the benefits of electric vehicles, and ways to overcome roadblocks that have kept these vehicles from being deployed en masse....

Emotional smarts and general intelligence may be more closely linked than previously thought, new research suggests. In a group of Vietnam veterans, IQ test results and emotional intelligence, or the ability to perceive, understand and deal with emotion in oneself or in others, were linked. And in brain scans, the same regions of the brain seemed to perform both emotional and cognitive tasks, the study found. The findings were published in the journal Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience....

SOTANG, Nepal – A two-day’s walk from the nearest road, over the hills and valleys below Mount Everest, farmer Budhiman Tamang loads a basket of cabbages to take to the weekly market. His cabbages are double the average local size, and since cabbages are sold by the kilo, they double his profit, too. Two years ago, Tamang couldn’t even grow enough cabbages to sell. But since then, he’s learned the magic of human urine....

If only my car could fly! Who has not uttered this cry in traffic? But what motivated the people who began designing flying cars near the turn of the 20th century? Most aviation pioneers of the time were thinking not in terms of flight alone but of “personal mobility” and getting cars to take wing, according to John Brown, editor of the Internet magazine Roadable Times. In fact, he notes, “the true brilliance” of the Wright Brothers—who demonstrated sustained, controlled powered flight at Kitty Hawk, N....

In Pennsylvania, the closer you live to a well used to hydraulically fracture underground shale for natural gas, the more likely it is that your drinking water is contaminated with methane. This conclusion, in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in July, is a first step in determining whether fracking in the Marcellus Shale underlying much of Pennsylvania is responsible for tainted drinking water in that region....

Radiation is notoriously harmful to the human body. And yet in certain applications it can be a lifesaver. When do the benefits of radiation outweigh the harm? Paul Schaffer, associate laboratory director of the life sciences division of Canada’s particle physics laboratory TRIUMF (TRI-University Meson Facility), which uses particle accelerators to create radioactive materials for medicine, explains in a public lecture that will be broadcast live here on this webpage Wednesday, December 2 at 7 P....