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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. Genocide is often viewed as a particular feature of our own current age. This perception largely stems from the terrible events which took place during World War Two in the 20th century CE in the parts of Europe occupied by the Nazis. However, there are certain occasions in the ancient world which could also be possibly considered as genocide....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Although marriages in ancient Egypt were arranged for communal stability and personal advancement, there is evidence that romantic love was as important to the people as it is to those in today. Romantic love was a popular theme for poetry, especially in the New Kingdom (1570-1069 BCE) when works appear praising the virtues of one’s lover or wife....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Sammu-Ramat (r. 811-806 BCE) was the queen regent of the Assyrian Empire who held the throne for her young son Adad Nirari III (r. 811-783 BCE) until he reached maturity. She is also known as Shammuramat, Sammuramat, and, most notably, as Semiramis, the legendary and semi-divine super-heroine immortalized by later historians....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Women feature prominently in the gospels and Book of Acts of the Christian New Testament as supporters of Jesus’ ministry. The most famous of these is Mary Magdalene, most likely an upper-class woman of means instead of the prostitute label still wrongly attached to her, but there is also Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, Mary the mother of Jesus, the Woman at the Well in Samaria, the Woman Taken in Adultery, and many others who are referenced warmly at times in the epistles even when women, in general, are given second-class status....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Punic funerary remains of Mahdia, a series of tombs carved into the rock, date back to a period between the 5th and the 2nd century BCE and are located in the northeast of Tunisia. These tombs are useful for us to understand the acculturation between the local populations known as Libyans and the Phoenicians of eastern origin....

Another epidemic besides COVID-19 stalks the land. This one takes a heavy toll on the young. It has been raging ever more lethally for the past 20 years with no flattening of the curve in sight: an American epidemic of suicide. Between 1999 and 2017 the age-adjusted suicide rate in the U.S. climbed 33 percent, from 10.5 to 14 deaths per 100,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention....

Teaching parents of children with autism how to interact more effectively with their offspring brings the children benefits that linger for years, according to the largest and longest-running study of autism interventions. The training targeted parents with 2–4-year-old children with autism. Six years after the adults completed the year-long course, their children showed better social communication and reduced repetitive behaviours, and fewer were considered to have “severe” autism as compared to a control group, according to results published on October 25 in The Lancet....

Science has given humanity more than its share of letdowns. It has set limits to our technology, such as the impossibility of reaching the speed of light; failed to overcome our vulnerabilities to cancer and other diseases; and confronted us with inconvenient truths, as with global climate change. But of all the comedowns, the second law of thermodynamics might well be the biggest. It says we live in a universe that is becoming ever more disordered and that there is nothing we can do about it....

PARIS, May 30 (Reuters) - A heritage committee of the UNESCO cultural agency stopped short of placing Australia’s Great Barrier Reef on an “in danger” list, but the ruling on Friday raised long-term concerns about its future. The long-awaited ruling by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee welcomed Australian efforts to maintain the environmentally sensitive region but noted its outlook was “poor” and called on the government to stick rigidly to commitments to protect it....

Two naturally color-blind squirrel monkeys, Dalton and Sam, can now see their food—and the world—in full color, after a decade of study by a husband and wife research team who treated them with gene therapy. The findings are the latest to blindside the traditional wisdom that adults cannot acquire vision they never had. It also sheds light on new leads in the quest to understand how color vision evolved in the first place....

Psychedelic drugs are making a quiet comeback, as a smattering of recent studies have demonstrated their medicinal potential. The latest finding suggests it is time to revisit LSD as a treatment for addiction. Pl-rjan Johansen and Teri Krebs of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology analyzed six clinical trials of LSD from 1966 to 1970 and published their results in March in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. The study subjects were being treated for alcohol abuse at inpatient clinics....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Thursday will designate the largest marine sanctuary in the world in an area of the Pacific Ocean that will be off-limits to commercial fishing and deep-sea mining, the White House said on Wednesday. Obama will sign a proclamation that increases the size of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument by six-fold to 490,000 square miles (1.27 million sq km/370,000 sq nautical miles). The White House said in a statement the area is “of particular interest because science has shown that large marine protected areas can help rebuild biodiversity, support fish populations, and improve overall ecosystem resilience....

By Kylie Gumpert (Reuters) - More than a quarter of Americans lie about it, and 36 percent say they would rather do an unpleasant activity like cleaning the toilet or working on their taxes. Flossing one’s teeth, according to a Harris Poll survey, is in some cases a less desirable activity than listening to the sound of nails on a chalkboard or to small children crying on a bus or plane....

Scientific American lost a good friend on August 14 with the death of physicist and demographer Sergei Petrovich Kapitza, 84, the founding editor of V Mire Nauki, the magazine’s Russian edition. Kapitza was at the helm of V Mire Nauki when it launched in 1983 in the Soviet Union, and he successfully popularized science in his home country and abroad. He was perhaps best known as host of the long-running science television show Ochevidnoye-Neveroyatnoye (Evident but Incredible), which was launched in 1973 and for which he was awarded the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science in 1979....

By Ewen CallawaySex and violence are intertwined in mice. A tiny patch of cells buried deep within a male’s brain determines whether it fights or mates, and there is good reason to believe humans possess a similar circuit.The study, published February 9 in Nature, shows that when these neurons are quieted, mice ignore intruding males they would otherwise attack. Yet when the cells are activated, mice assault inanimate objects, and even females they ought to court....

By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazineEnvironmentalists and many politicians have called the oil sands a planetary-scale threat as they fight to prevent further development of the resource. Andrew Weaver and Neil Swart, both climate scientists at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, listened to the rhetoric and decided to run some calculations. Because of the energy-intensive process for producing oil from this region, it is true that greenhouse gas emissions are higher than average....

In December the U.S. Air Force flew a C-17 transport plane across the country powered in part by a new propellant: natural gas transmuted into a synthetic liquid fuel. Heat and catalysts converted methane into syngas (carbon monoxide and hydrogen) which were then transformed into liquid hydrocarbons (otherwise known as oil and its derivatives): petroleum, gasoline and, in the case of aviation, kerosene. “Hitler flew Messerschmitts on it,” says William Anderson, assistant secretary of the U....

Crisis, what crisis? The future of particle physics has been a major talking point of late, with decisions on next-generation high-energy colliders contrasting with skepticism as to whether such monumental (and monumentally expensive) megamachines should be built in the first place. Many physicists say such critiques are unjustified, yet acknowledge the profound uncertainties surrounding plans for future forays deeper into the subatomic realm. Late last week Japan announced it would delay its decision on whether or not to build a new facility called the International Linear Collider (ILC)....

Eight years is a long time to maintain singular focus on any goal, particularly one as complex and expensive as sending a robot to explore the moon. Teams competing in the Google Lunar X PRIZE—first announced in September 2007, with a deadline of December 2015—know this firsthand, which is why several of them jumped at the chance to win a piece of the $6 million being offering as “milestone prizes” to help fund some of the competition’s best ideas....

The desert badlands on the northwestern shores of Kenya’s Lake Turkana offer little to the people who live there. Drinking water is elusive, and most of the wild animals have declined to near oblivion. The Turkana scrape by as pastoralists, herding goats, sheep, cattle, donkeys and the occasional camel in the hot, arid countryside. It is a hard life. But millions of years ago the area brimmed with freshwater, plants and animals....