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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. The coronation ceremony of the British monarchy as we know it today involves many elements that have been a part of the pageantry ever since the 11th century CE. Such features of the ceremony carried out in Westminster Abbey since 1066 CE have been maintained by successive monarchs right down to the present queen, Elizabeth II and her own coronation on 2 June 1953 CE, as all rulers were keen to show they were part of a long-standing tradition....

There is much cheesy lore about the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse: that he popularized the word “eureka”; that he used mirrors to set Roman ships on fire; that a Roman soldier killed him in 212 B.C. while he was tracing diagrams in the sand. Not only is the lore probably untrue, historians say, but it also fails to capture the true significance of his achievements, which spanned mathematics, science and engineering and inspired the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo and Isaac Newton....

The TerraPower “wave reactor” concept is backed by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, is endorsed by Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman Jr. and has gotten a receptive ear from President Obama’s Energy Department. But it’s headed overseas for its next crucial step, if ongoing negotiations with a foreign sponsor are successfully completed, says Roger Reynolds, TerraPower’s technical adviser. The Bellevue, Wash., startup says it has verified the theory behind its slow-burning reactor through supercomputer simulations and now needs to build a pilot version of the reactor, to evaluate how the metal fuel casings in the core will withstand decades of radioactive bombardment....

Starbucks customers will soon have much faster Wi-Fi speeds, thanks to the company’s new partnership with Google. Starbucks said that Google, in conjunction with Level 3 Communications, will now be providing Wi-Fi service in Starbucks’ U.S. locations that’s up to 10 times faster than the current service powered by AT&T. The faster service will first appear in new Starbucks locations over the next month. Starbucks will then roll it out to its 7,000 other U....

Bats that nest inside curled-up leaves may be getting an extra benefit from their homes: the tubular roosts act as acoustic horns, amplifying the social calls that the mammals use to keep their close-knit family groups together. South American Spix’s disc-winged bats (Thyroptera tricolor) roost in groups of five or six inside unfurling Heliconia and Calathea leaves. The leaves remain curled up for only about 24 hours, so the bats have to find new homes almost every day, and have highly specialized social calls to help groups stay together....

Poetry, perfumed love notes, intimate e-mails and latenight phone messages have been the choice forms of communication for humans in love. Stags, on the other hand, have to rely on a simple, full-throated roar to convey their desire. True, the stag’s primitive bellow is effective–smitten females approach while rival males look for cover. Likewise the cries of dogs, cats and birds all serve these animals well as simple forms of communication....

Flawed prescription practices are fueling the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance, the top U.S. public health agency official said today. “We estimate about half of all the antibiotics used among people in the United States are either unnecessary or inappropriate. We are taking this precious resource and squandering it,” Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the President’s Council on Advisors on Science and Technology in Washington, D....

When answering a question, your accuracy in assessing whether you have gotten the answer right—or wrong—might depend on the volume of gray matter in a certain part of your brain, according to a new study. Introspection—or metacognition, self-awareness about one’s thinking—is a high-level mental process. “Accurate introspection requires discriminating correct decisions from incorrect ones, a capacity that varies substantially across individuals,” researchers behind the new findings explained in their study....

After 26 years, 230 million kilometers, and a combined year in orbit, space shuttle Discovery is headed home one last time. The oldest, most utilized shuttle in NASA’s fleet is inbound from its final visit to the International Space Station and is scheduled to touch down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida just before noon Eastern Standard Time on March 9. But Kennedy, the traditional home of the shuttle program, may not be the final destination for Discovery this time around....

A friend of mine lives in a middle-class neighborhood of New Delhi, one of the richest cities in India. Although the area gets a fair amount of rain every year, he wakes in the morning to the blare of a megaphone announcing that freshwater will be available only for the next hour. He rushes to fill the bathtub and other receptacles to last the day. New Delhi’s endemic shortfalls occur largely because water managers decided some years back to divert large amounts from upstream rivers and reservoirs to irrigate crops....

Good news for the world’s vanishing corals: a new study shows that commercial fishing bans in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef kept a lid on coral-gobbling starfish. “This is definitely good news for coral,” says John Bruno, an associate professor of marine science at the University of North Carolina (U.N.C.) at Chapel Hill. Researchers found that there were as many as seven times fewer outbreaks of coral killing crown-of-thorns starfish—which can have up to 20 spike-covered arms and grow up to two feet (0....

Before satellite images and drones could pinpoint the exact location of enemy targets, warfare was often more like a game of Battleship: a complex series of guesses based on spotty information. During World War II the British began to change that. They sent their fastest planes not to drop bombs, but to take pictures. By flying over German territory in planes outfitted with several cameras, pilots built a set of images that overlapped one another and could be viewed stereoscopically—that is, in 3-D....

Key concepts Physics Collisions Elasticity Coefficient of restitution Density Introduction One way to figure out how something works is to look inside—always with permission, of course! This approach works for all sorts of things, even items that are not mechanical or overly complicated. When you grab a baseball, the first thing you might think is how hard it is. You don’t necessarily think of a baseball as bouncy. But that’s exactly what a ball does when it collides with a bat....

Editor’s note: In the 1960s, activist Jane Jacobs (who would have turned 100 on May 4, 2016) questioned whether massive urban planning projects work, and objected to demolishing old neighborhoods for sterile new buildings and highways. She described factors including mixed-age buildings and short blocks as leading to better neighborhoods. Has the state of city planning science changed since then? In 1961 urbanist Jane Jacobs didn’t pull any punches when she called city planning a pseudoscience....

Despite the romantic notion that adversity makes a person mentally tough, new research suggests the opposite is true. Investigators at the University of Leicester in England read a narrative describing a bank robbery to 60 volunteers, then asked them to complete a test of their recall of details. The subjects were next asked a series of leading questions designed to elicit wrong answers about the same details. Participants were also told that their original responses may have been wrong and that they were being asked again to see if they would change their tune....

Airplane emissions are a big problem for the climate—and steadily rising. If the aviation sector were a country, it would rank seventh worldwide in carbon pollution. Experts predict that aircraft emissions, on their current trajectory, will triple by 2050 as demand for flights increases. To prevent this dire scenario, a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with government and industry collaborators, is attempting to fundamentally redesign airplanes....

By Nina ChestneyWARSAW (Reuters) - Rich and poor were deadlocked on Wednesday over how to raise aid to help developing countries cope with the damaging effects of global warming, in a setback at United Nations climate talks in Warsaw seeking progress towards a 2015 accord.Bolivia and other developing countries accused the rich of failing to show willingness to discuss aid or compensation for losses and harm due to global warming, such as rising sea levels or creeping desertification....

LONDON − Researchers in the UK have established a link between changing climate and agriculture that could have significant consequences for food supplies in South Asia. They have found evidence of a relationship between rising average temperatures in India and reduced wheat production, which was increasing until about a decade ago but has now stopped. The researchers, John Duncan, Jadu Dash and Pete Atkinson, all geographers at the University of Southampton, say an intensification is predicted for the recent increases in warmth in India’s main wheat belt that are damaging crop yields....

As a high school running back stretches forward to get that extra yard, he is met with a ferocious blow to the head by the opposing team’s linebacker. After a quick shake of the head to clear the cobwebs, the player returns to his team’s huddle unaware that he’s just sustained a concussion that could eventually affect his memory, judgment, reflexes, speech, balance and coordination. Football parents take heart, some high school teams are now testing a new helmet sensor that promises to alert coaches when players have been hit hard enough to cause a concussion, potentially averting further brain injury....

We humans are social animals. Most of us interact with others on a daily basis, and form complex social groups containing dozens of friends, relatives and peers. Maintaining such a network involves tracking our own relationships to individuals within it, and also requires some understanding of their relationships to one another. With such knowledge, we can quickly figure out another person’s social standing and, with that, infer how best to behave toward them....