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Scientific American’s review of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1964 ended with the pat pronouncement that the book was “much ado about very little.” The short piece, which appeared two years after the initial publication of Structure as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, discarded as unoriginal Kuhn’s critique of the positivist argument that science progresses relentlessly forward toward the truth. The reviewer’s glib dismissal missed the mark....

With NASA’s Cassini spacecraft now just a blur of molecules in Saturn’s cloud tops, another gas giant is rotating into the crosshairs of the planetary exploration community. Cassini plunged intentionally to its death Friday (Sept. 15), bringing an end to 13 years of exploration that revolutionized researchers’ understanding of the Saturn system and its ability to host life. But NASA still has a probe investigating a giant planet. That spacecraft, called Juno, has been orbiting Jupiter since last summer....

TROY, N.Y.—The hallowed halls of academia are not the place you would expect to find someone obsessed with evil (although some students might disagree). But it is indeed evil—or rather trying to get to the roots of evil—that fascinates Selmer Bringsjord, a logician, philosopher and chairman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Cognitive Science here. He’s so intrigued, in fact, that he has developed a sort of checklist for determining whether someone is demonic, and is working with a team of graduate students to create a computerized representation of a purely sinister person....

Arsenic-contaminated groundwater and soil affect millions of people worldwide; the substance can cause skin lesions, cancer and other illnesses if it gets into drinking water and crops. But the Chinese brake fern, Pteris vittata, naturally accumulates arsenic levels that would kill most other organisms—and somehow it continues to thrive. The mechanism behind this tolerance has long been a biochemical puzzle. Now plant researchers Jody Banks and Chao Cai, both at Purdue University, and their colleagues have explained how it happens....

Early risers this week will be treated to a spectacular display by the moon and the four brightest planets in the sky, in a fitting celestial welcome to the new year. Weather permitting, the planets Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Saturn will be visible stretching across the dawn sky right along the ecliptic (the invisible line that the sun follows across the sky). The ecliptic is something of an illusion, since the sun does not really move along it....

By Sharon Bernstein SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill on Tuesday to make it harder for parents to opt out of vaccinating their children for communicable diseases in the aftermath of a measles outbreak at Disneyland that was linked to low inoculation rates. The law, which makes California the third state to eliminate religious and other personal exemptions to vaccinations, generated vociferous opposition from some parents, many who feared a now debunked link between childhood vaccinations and autism and others who feared intrusion on the religious exemption....

Pity the corn plant. Its tall, gangly, inefficient architecture makes it an environmental laggard among plants, one that sucks up water and fertilizer while leaching out gobs of nutrients that run off in rainfall, polluting surface waters from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico. But a plant geneticist at Purdue University aims to raise the corn plant’s stature in a more carbon-sensitive world by lowering its height and its need for water and nutrients....

ERICE, Italy—If you think of Earth’s poles as fraternal twins, the Arctic has been the wild one in recent years, while the Antarctic has been a steady plodder. Withered by summer heat, Arctic sea ice has shrunk to record low coverage several times since 2005, only to rebound to within 95 percent of its long-term average extent this winter. By comparison, Antarctica, with some 90 percent of the world’s glacial reserves, has generally shed ice in more stately fashion....

For the first time since record keeping began in the 1960s, per capita food production in sub-Saharan Africa is beginning to rise. According to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2007, “agricultural growth in sub-Saharan Africa has accelerated from 2.3 percent per year in the 1980s to 3.3 percent in the 1990s and to 3.8 percent per year between 2000 and 2005.” As a result, the report stated, “rural poverty has also started to decline in 10 of 13 countries analyzed....

Do you have a favorite place to go where you can see the Milky Way? I can’t see it from my house, but if I trespass on a nearby public golf course (shh), I can get a good look at our galaxy, as well as any comets that are just visible to the naked eye. Have you ever looked at Saturn or Jupiter through binoculars and seen their moons? You can see them if you keep your hands steady enough and if—if, if, if—the sky is dark enough....

NASA’s next low-cost planetary missions will attempt to unravel the mysteries of some seriously bizarre asteroids. The space agency has selected projects called Lucy and Psyche via its Discovery Program, which funds highly focused space missions to destinations throughout the solar system. The Lucy project will investigate the Trojan asteroids, which share an orbit with Jupiter, while Psyche will journey to the asteroid belt to study a huge, metallic asteroid named 16 Psyche that resides there....

Less than eight years from now, on Friday the 13th of April 2029, a 370-meter-wide asteroid called Apophis will pass by the Earth, coming nearer to our planet than geosynchronous satellites. But despite the calendrical bad omen, this will be a lucky day: Apophis will not strike our planet—this time, anyway (its orbit ensures Apophis will visit us again in 2036, 2051, 2066 and so on). In 2029, this asteroid’s passage will instead be a cosmic close shave, the equivalent of a speeding bullet brushing against the hairs on your head—in which the “bullet” carries the equivalent impact energy of all the world’s nuclear arsenals combined....

By Scott Malone BOSTON (Reuters) - Officials and residents in the Boston-area city of Revere were picking up the pieces early on Tuesday after it was raked by a rare tornado that knocked out power and damaged homes and buildings. The National Weather Service said a tornado touched down during a storm that brought heavy rains, lightning and flooding to Boston, Massachusetts, and many of its northern suburbs on Monday. “Obviously we had a monumental storm come through our city early this morning,” Revere Mayor Daniel Rizzo told reporters....

Neurosurgeon Ivar Mendez of the University of Saskatchewan often shows a video clip to demonstrate his work treating Parkinson’s disease. It features a middle-aged man with this caption: “Off medications.” The man’s face has the dull stare typical of Parkinson’s. Asked to lift each hand and open and close his fingers, he barely manages. He tries but fails to get up from a chair without using his hands. When he walks, it is with the slow, shuffling gait that is another hallmark of Parkinson’s, a progressive neurological disorder that afflicts an estimated one million Americans, most of them older than 60....

By Geoff BrumfielScientists have explained how lightning can occur even in the driest deserts. A new theory describes how neutral dust can gain an electrical life of its own.For centuries, researchers have known that clouds of neutral particles can sometimes gain a net charge. This can cause even the driest sand to generate lightning, and sugar refineries and coal-processing plants can experience unexpected explosions. Most researchers have ascribed such events to static build-up, but Troy Shinbrot, a physicist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N....

Revelations that Volkswagen, the world’s biggest car maker, rigged its emissions testing in the United States to circumvent regulations and boost its sales have sent shock waves through the car industry. On September 22, the company admitted that it had used special software to lower emissions during laboratory tests of some of its diesel vehicles; on September 23, its chief executive, Martin Winterkorn, resigned. The firm’s admission suggests that about half a million cars on US roads and 11 million worldwide may be emitting substantially higher levels of nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide (collectively known as nitrogen oxides or NOx) than expected from lab tests....

Is it “the biggest cyberattack in history”? Or just routine flak that network-security providers face all the time? News websites across the Western world proclaimed Internet Armageddon today (March 27), largely due to a New York Times story detailing a “squabble” between the spam-fighting vigilantes at Spamhaus and the dodgy Dutch Web-hosting company Cyberbunker. “Fight Jams Internet,” the Times headline said. “Global Internet slows,” the BBC proclaimed in the wake of the Times’ story....

By Reuters Staff (Reuters Health) - More than 1.5 million Americans avoided death from cancer since 1991 thanks to falling smoking rates and better cancer prevention, detection and treatments, according to a study from the American Cancer Society. The overall rate of deaths from cancer decreased from about 215 per 100,000 people in 1991 to about 169 per 100,000 people in 2011, researchers found. “Further reductions in cancer death rates can be accelerated by applying existing cancer control knowledge across all segments of the population, with an emphasis on those in the lowest socioeconomic bracket and other disadvantaged populations,” write Rebecca Siegel and her colleagues in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians....

The foreign secretaries from more than 90 countries will converge on the State Department today for the Obama administration’s third and final summit on the health of the world’s oceans. The Our Ocean summit will focus on the nexus of climate change and ocean issues—a link U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Jonathan Pershing told reporters yesterday is not well-understood. “While climate change is a huge issue, in many ways we should think about it as an exacerbating factor for things that are already problematic,” said Pershing....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Egyptian law was based on the central cultural value of ma’at (harmony and balance) which was the foundation for the entire civilization. Ma’at was established at the beginning of time by the gods when the earth and universe were formed. According to one version of the story, the god Atum emerged from the swirling waters of chaos to stand on the first dry land, the primordial ben-ben, to begin the act of creation....