Posts

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Join World History Encyclopedia as they chat with Flora of Flaroh Illustration, a freelance illustrator who loves to create art inspired by archaeological artefacts and myths. Kelly (WHE): What is your process in creating art based on history? Advertisement Flora (Flaroh Illustration): There is not really one set way....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In ancient Egypt, if a woman were having difficulty conceiving a child, she might spend an evening in a Bes Chamber (also known as an incubation chamber) located within a temple. Bes was the god of childbirth, sexuality, fertility, among other his other responsibilities, and it was thought an evening in the god’s presence would encourage conception....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Jerusalem, a holy city for the adherents of all three great monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) was conquered by the armies of the First Crusade in 1099 CE. The Muslims failed to halt their advance, as they were themselves disunited and disorganized, but this was soon to change and the Holy City was to be retaken....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Cyrus Cylinder is a document issued by Cyrus the Great, consisting of a cylinder of clay inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform script. The cylinder was created in 539 BCE, surely by order of Cyrus the Great, when he took Babylon from Nabonidus, ending the Neo-Babylonian empire. This document is considered propaganda, praising the Achaemenid ruler Cyrus and treating Nabonidus like an impious and bad king....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Forty-Two Judges were divine entities associated with the afterlife in ancient Egypt and, specifically, the judgment of the soul in the Hall of Truth. The soul would recite the Negative Confession in their presence as well as other gods and hope to be allowed to continue on to the paradise of the Field of Reeds....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Throughout history, in order for a government to be respected and obeyed, it must possess some form of legitimacy recognized by the governed. Governmental systems have relied on a number of models for legitimacy, among them the dynastic form in which the son or close relative of the monarch succeeds to the throne and passes power down to the next generation....

U.S. railroads have not hauled so much crude oil since the short period at the dawn of the petroleum age, when John D. Rockefeller relied on trains to build his Standard Oil empire. But the long, black tanker trains are only the most visible way that the changing U.S. energy picture is transforming railroads. The fracking revolution has brought other business to railroads, from pipes to propane, and more change is underway....

Editor’s Note: In mid-May, Scientific American will announce the winners of this year’s Scientific American 10. Every Monday we will profile a previous Scientific American 50 winner. Year in Scientific American 50: 2006 Recognized for: Her work on self-assembling viruses for electronic nanotechnology applications. Angela Belcher, a professor of materials science and engineering and of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was inspired by how abalone control calcium carbonate to make their hard shells....

California legislators could pass a bill that would require companies to tell you exactly what personal data they’ve shared with other companies. Known as the “Right to Know Act of 2013,” the bill yanks California consumer law in line with today’s technology, expanding coverage to include online advertising networks, along with pesky direct marketers. Under Assembly Bill 1291, if a California resident asks a company for personal information that’s been shared with any other party, the company would be required to provide a detailed response within 30 days at no charge to the consumer....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine One of the coral species hit hardest by climate change has become the first to have its genome published. The genome of the branching coralAcropora digitifera appears online today in Nature. The draft sequence of a related species common on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the staghorn coralAcropora millepora, was released online earlier this month, prior to formal publication. Corals are under threat from environmental change caused by global warming – which has led to warmer, more acidic oceans – as well as from disease and other stresses....

In his much-ballyhooed 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck describes the conditions of the southern American Great Plains, where a severe drought caused the devastating wind-swept storms of the 1930s dust bowl: “When June was half gone, the big clouds moved up out of Texas and the Gulf, high heavy clouds, rain-heads,” Steinbeck wrote. “The rain-heads dropped a little spattering and hurried on to some other country. Behind them the sky was pale again and the sun flared....

An experiment looking for the signal of dark matter deep in an underground lab in Italy turned up no candidate signals in 11 days of early operation, the experimental collaboration reported in a paper posted online Monday. The underground detector, called XENON100, only recently began taking data but is already challenging prior claims and hints of dark matter signals, according to the team, which published its findings on the physics preprint repository arXiv....

BOULDER – Drastic, economy-changing cuts to greenhouse gas emissions will spare the planet half the trauma expected over the next century as the Earth warms. And that’s the good news. Because failure to significantly curb these planet-warming gases will truly transform our world in less than 100 years. A new study to be published by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research finds that a 70 percent cut in emissions should stabilize temperatures at a mark not too much higher than today....

What will become of humanity hundreds, thousands, millions of years from now? In the September Scientific American, experts make predictions about what the future holds for our kind. Additional predictions follow. “Evolution is not a process that allows us to predict what will happen in the future. We can see what happened in the past only. To do that, we would need to know what was causing some individuals to leave more surviving descendants than others, and to be sure that that selection pressure would be maintained for hundreds or thousands of generations, and know what the genetic and phenotypic basis for the variance underlying these differences was....

Instead of two wings, the first birds might have used four feathered limbs to stay aloft, according to research published today in Science. Birdlike dinosaurs, such as Microraptor and Sinornithosaurus, are known to have had long, sturdy feathers on their hindlimbs. But until now, researchers were not sure whether the earliest birds had already abandoned this extra plumage when they emerged to take to the Cretaceous skies over 100 million years ago....

By Ewen Callaway An experimental gene-therapy treatment for Parkinson’s disease has eased the movement problems of a small number of patients and raised no major safety concerns. The study, reported in The Lancet Neurology, is the first double-blind clinical trial to show a benefit of gene therapy to patients with the neurodegenerative condition.Parkinson’s disease is characterized by tremors, slowness and cognitive problems, and is caused by the death of neurons in brain circuits that makes dopamine....

By Melissa Lee PhillipsAround a fifth of non-primate genome databases seem to be contaminated with human DNA sequences, according to a study.Mark Longo, a geneticist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, and his colleagues found that 18% of public databases of bacterial, plant and animal genome sequences contain stretches of human DNA, possibly as a result of researchers handling samples during sequencing. Their findings are published today in PLoS ONE1....

By Kerri Smith of Nature magazineKamilah lives in San Diego, California, is 35 years old, weighs 136 kilograms and has a dark fur coat covering her skin. And she is the first gorilla to have its full genome sequenced.Researchers have already sequenced the genomes of humans, chimpanzees and orang-utans. Understanding these genetic catalogues, from our closest living relatives, can reveal much about our evolutionary path – such as when we diverged from our primate cousins and what makes humans different from apes....

As deadly wildfires rage across California’s wine country, leaving at least 29 dead and a trail of destruction in their wake, the influence of climate change is again being questioned. Just Monday, Hillary Clinton delivered a speech at the University of California, Davis, in which she noted that “it’s been a tough couple of weeks with hurricanes and earthquakes and now these terrible fires” (Climatewire, Oct. 12). “So in addition to expressing our sympathy, we need to really come together to try to work to prevent and mitigate, and that starts with acknowledging climate change and the role that it plays in exacerbating such events,” she added....

By Tommy Trenchard DUBLIN Sierra Leone (Reuters) - As evening falls over Sierra Leone’s Banana Island archipelago, bats stream from their beachside roosts to circle in their thousands over the jungle village of Dublin. Below them a struggle is playing out over an unexpected commodity - the lowly sea cucumber, a fleshy, sausage-shaped creature that scavenges for food on the seabed. It is a struggle that is familiar to many in the West African country....