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They lie buried—their long, tentaclelike arms out stretched—in all the tissues of our bodies that interact with the environment. In the lining of our nose and lungs, lest we inhale the influenza virus in a crowded subway car. In our gastrointestinal tract, to alert our immune system if we swallow a dose of salmonella bacteria. And most important, in our skin, where they lie in wait as stealthy sentinels should microbes breach the leathery fortress of our epidermis....

Scientific experiments to measure the rate and effects of climate change on plants aren’t matching up to what is happening in nature, a new study finds. In fact, observations on the environment show that changes in nature is happening much faster than in the scientist’s lab. Researchers with Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the University of California, San Diego, found that experiments may underestimate the true timing of flowering and leaf-making by between four and eight times....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Arch of Janus, erected in the 4th century CE, stands in the forum Boarium of Rome and was most probably set up as a boundary-marker rather than a commemorative triumphal arch. The four-way marble arch stands over the Cloaca Maxima or Great Drain which ran down to the river Tiber....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. World History Encyclopedia is joined by Egyptologist and author Garry Shaw to chat about his new book Egyptian Mythology: A Traveller’s Guide from Aswan to Alexandria. Kelly (WHE): Do you want to start with telling us what the book is about? Advertisement Garry Shaw (Author): Absolutely! So, it is a travel mythology, which is quite unusual....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Dacian Wars started after Decebalus (r. c. 87-106 CE) raided the Roman province of Moesia in 85 CE. Emperor Domitian’s (r. 81-96 CE) Dacian campaigns in 86-87 CE reached an uneasy peace, but the conflict was renewed under the reign of Emperor Trajan (r. 98-117 CE). Trajan’s Dacian Wars, recorded on Trajan’s Column, ended with Decebalus’ death, and Dacia became a Roman province....

This weekend’s rare supermoon total lunar eclipse will offer a mix of risk and scientific opportunity for a NASA moon-orbiting spacecraft. Earth’s nearest neighbor will be plunged into darkness Sunday evening (Sept. 27) North American time, during an eclipse that takes place when the moon is closest to Earth during its elliptical orbit (and therefore looks abnormally big and bright in the sky). The event will thus be a “supermoon” total lunar eclipse — the first such eclipse since 1982, and the last until 2033....

Last year Sean A. Spence, a professor at the school of medicine at the University of Sheffield in England, performed brain scans that showed that a woman convicted of poisoning a child in her care appeared to be telling the truth when she denied committing the crime. This deception study, along with two others performed by the Sheffield group, was funded by Quickfire Media, a television production company working for the U....

As desert sands yield to asphalt and concrete, the climate is shifting in Arizona’s “Sun Corridor,” an expanding urban region that includes Phoenix, Tucson, Prescott and Nogales. Researchers are now finding that efforts to offset the climate shift may carry side effects of their own. Towering buildings, dark roads and sparse vegetation combine to trap heat, making cities warmer than surrounding areas. Previous studies showed that these effects are profound. “What we saw was that urbanization-induced warming is just as important as greenhouse gas-induced climate change,” said Matei Georgescu, an assistant professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University....

It took more than a decade for Cape Wind, a 468-megawatt offshore wind project destined for the Nantucket Sound, to find its way through an unfinished regulatory labyrinth of government permits and sign-offs. Now, with developments up and down the Eastern Seaboard paving the way for a raft of new offshore wind projects, regulators, analysts and a nascent industry are looking for ways to expedite the process. In part, the length of the regulatory procedure stems from the plurality of agencies involved, said Alison Bates, a graduate student at the University of Delaware who has studied Cape Wind’s journey....

For centuries, mariners have told stories of sailing at night in “milky seas”—ephemeral patches of steadily glowing ocean that make the water’s surface appear ghostly green or white, sometimes stretching from horizon to horizon. Scientists have long been intrigued by this unusual type of bioluminescence, which is thought to be produced by bacteria. But they searched in vain for photographic evidence—until now. Steven Miller, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University, has just published a paper that includes the first known photograph of a milky sea....

A laptop computer can double as an effective portable knee-warmer — pleasant in a cold office. But a bigger desktop machine needs a fan. A data center as large as those used by Google needs a high-volume flow of cooling water. And with cutting-edge supercomputers, the trick is to keep them from melting. A world-class machine at the Leibniz Supercomputing center in Munich, for example, operates at 3 petaflops (3 × 1015 operations per second), and the heat it produces warms some of the center’s buildings....

By Mark Schrope of Nature magazineMany of the problems that led to the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill have not been addressed, say the members of a commission set up by US President Barack Obama to study the disaster. The group releases a report today on progress towards its 2011 recommendations for preventing future disasters and improving spill response.The commission, which no longer formally exists, conducted visits and interviews under its own initiative ahead of the spill’s two-year anniversary on 20 April....

By Melissa Gaskill of Nature magazine More than a year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster gushed oil into the Gulf of Mexico, scientists say that they have been struggling to gain access to the region’s rigs and drill ships, hampering their research. Marine scientists have long been allowed to install instruments on offshore structures. The equipment can deliver vital data that would not be practical to gather in any other way....

Reprinted with permission from Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler, by Philip Ball. The University of Chicago Press. Copyright © 2014, Philip Ball. All rights reserved. Anti-Semitism did not just deprive German physics of some of its most valuable researchers. It also threatened to prescribe what kind of physics one could and could not do. For Nazi ideology was not merely a question of who should be allowed to live and work freely in the German state—like a virus, it worked its way into the very fabric of intellectual life....

Biologists once thought that human beings were phys­iological islands, entirely capable of regulating their own internal workings. Our bodies made all the enzymes needed for breaking down food and using its nutrients to power and repair our tissues and organs. Signals from our own tissues dictated body states such as hunger or satiety. The specialized cells of our immune system taught themselves how to recognize and attack dangerous microbes—pathogens—while at the same time sparing our own tissues....

When I met with psychologist and author Jesse Bering in October, I asked him when he intended to write a book that I could read on the New York City subway without the cover bringing me unwanted attention. The title of Bering’s 2012 book—Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?—was bad enough, even though it offered up fascinating insights into the evolution of anatomy. But that was nothing compared to the pitchforks-and-torches looks from people who spied me perusing his latest work, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us....

A Question of Semantics In “The Semantic Web in Action,” Lee Feigenbaum, Ivan Herman, Tonya Hongsermeier, Eric Neumann and Susie Stephens describe the development of the Semantic Web, a set of formats and languages to find and analyze data on the World Wide Web easily. The problem with this system is that different people will not agree on exactly how to define all concepts. Any computer application that tries to standardize its ontology will necessarily distort what at least some people are trying to express....

A study in macaques has raised hopes that preventing HIV infection in humans will soon be as easy as a shot in the arm four times a year. In a proof-of-concept study, researchers have shown that an antiviral drug injected into the muscle protects monkeys from infection for weeks afterward. “We believe it’s a very practical, feasible approach to HIV prevention,” says David Ho, a virologist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York and a co-author of the study, which is published online today in Science....

Three years ago northern and central African nations that form the Community of Sahel-Saharan States agreed to a continent-wide belt of trees to combat the remorseless spread of the Sahara Desert. This past June they laid the groundwork for the Great Green Wall of Africa by formally adopting a two-year, $3-million initial phase for the project. Green barriers against the Sahara have been around since the 1960s, but most have been small in scale....

Interactive by Krista Fuentes Base map: NASA/MOLA Science Team Sources: “Martian gullies in the southern mid-latitudes of Mars: Evidence for climate-controlled formation of young fluvial features based upon local and global topography,” by James L. Dickson et al., in Icarus, Vol. 188, pages 315–323, 2007 (gully clusters); “Updated Global Map of Martian Valley Networks: Implications for Hydrologic Processes,” by B. M. Hynek et al., in Second Workshop on Mars Valley Networks, 2008 (valley networks); “Ice, Salt and Warm-Season Flows on Mars,” a NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/UA/LANL/MSSS map, 2011 (seasonal markings); “Radar Sounding Evidence for Buried Glaciers in the Southern Mid-Latitudes of Mars,” by John W....