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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. During the period of early Judaism (6th century BCE - 70 CE), Judean religion began to develop ideas which diverged significantly from 10th-to-7th-centuries BCE Israelite and Judean religion. In particular, this period marks a significant movement towards monotheism, the codification of traditions central to religious identity (i.e. the Hebrew Bible), and new ideas regarding the worship of Yahweh....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. We know the names of some potters and painters of Greek vases because they signed their work. Generally a painter signed his name followed by some form of the verb ‘painted’, while a potter (or perhaps the painter writing for him) signed his name with ‘made’. Sometimes the same person might both pot and paint: Exekias and Epiktetos, for example, sign as both potter and painter....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. A great deal has been written about why the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, southern England, was constructed. Perhaps it was designed as a temple to the ancestors, an astronomical calendar, a healing centre or a giant computer? Could it even have functioned as all of these things at various stages during its 1500 year history?...

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In Norse mythology, the Sun and the Moon appear as personified siblings pulling the heavenly bodies and chased by wolves, or as plain objects. Written sources, such as the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, have surprisingly little to say about them, but clues from before the Viking Age put together with the written works speak of their greater role in ancient Scandinavia....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Although the Vikings are routinely depicted as rough, grimy, and violent, they were actually quite refined, took personal hygiene seriously, and wore fine clothes ornamented by jewelry. Some Christian chroniclers who condemned the Vikings also note their fine clothing and attention to personal appearance. Norse Clothing as Depicted in the VikingsHistory Channel (Copyright, fair use)...

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Monkeypox isn’t going to be the next COVID-19. But with the outbreak having bloomed to thousands of infections, with cases in nearly every state, on Aug. 4, 2022, the U.S. declared monkeypox a national public health emergency. One reason health experts did not expect monkeypox to become so widespread is that the U.S. had previously approved two vaccines for the virus....

Apple is holding its special event on Tuesday, and you can get your full dose of the news right here. The press conference, at which Apple is expected to debut a smaller version of the iPad as well as updates to Apple’s Mac line, kicks off at 10 a.m. Pacific. CNET’s Scott Stein, Rich Brown and I will be bringing you the news live from the California Theatre in downtown San Jose, Calif....

Patterns of brain activity in 6-month-old babies accurately predict which of them will be diagnosed with autism at age 2. The findings hint that brain scans may one day help doctors detect autism in infants. The study is small, and its findings need to be replicated before they can be used clinically. But researchers were nearly unanimous in their praise of the study’s promise for early diagnosis of autism. “This is a game-changer for the field,” says Kevin Pelphrey, director of the Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute at George Washington University in Washington, D....

Before the advent of birth control, industrialized agriculture and day care, women and men who chose to have very large families faced an early grave when compared to their less fecund peers. In the largest and most comprehensive study of its kind, Dustin Penn of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Ethology in Austria and Ken Smith of the University of Utah studied the records of 21,684 Mormon couples who wed between 1860 and 1895 in order to examine the trade-off between family size and survival....

In invective-laced Twitter posts and speeches leading up to his victory, Bolsonaro, a former member of the Brazilian army, has proposed expelling international environmental groups, withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, and opening the iconic rainforest to traffic and trade. That could threaten the country’s indigenous people, whom Bolsonaro has said should “either adapt or simply vanish.” He’s also taken a hostile view on preserving roadless areas. He proposed an 870-kilometer (541-mile) paved highway through protected forest, a move that critics say would invite more road construction and economic activity in the area....

By Andrew M. Seaman (Reuters Health) – Eating a heart-healthy diet that includes avocados may lower so-called bad cholesterol among otherwise healthy overweight and obese people, according to a new study. The findings don’t mean people should simply add avocados to their daily diets. Instead, the study’s senior researcher said, the results show that avocados incorporated into healthy diets reduced low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. “They shouldn’t just add an avocado to their diet, but it would be good if they incorporated an avocado into a healthy diet,” said Penny Kris-Etherton, who chairs the American Heart Association’s Nutrition Committee and is a nutrition expert at Pennsylvania State University in University Park....

NEW YORK – Climate scientists need to become more savvy when communicating facts and findings to the public, an expert panel urged yesterday. Scientists argued a new approach is needed to reverse an eroding confidence in climate science among the general public – made worse by the “Climategate” scandal involving leaked e-mails among scientists at a U.K. university. They also said they were seeking a more effective retort to conspiracy theorists who argue that thousands of scientists contributing to the field are lying....

This week, we reported that the Food and Drug Administration left medicines on the market for years after discovering they were approved based on fraudulent studies by Cetero Research, which did testing for drug companies worldwide. Turns out that wasn’t an anomaly: The agency’s slow, secretive response in the Cetero case mirrors how it handled an earlier instance of scientific misconduct at another contract research organization, MDS Pharma Services. The FDA found that data produced from 2000 through 2004 at two MDS facilities in Quebec, Canada, were questionable....

Would you buy a used car online, sight unseen and without a test-drive? How about a plane? A vehicle changes hands on eBay Motors every 60 seconds, including one private business jet that sold for $4.9 million. Every second buyers collectively swap more than $1,839 for products through eBay, sending money to complete strangers with no guarantee that the goods they buy will in fact arrive, let alone in the condition they expect....

Dear EarthTalk: I work for an office equipment company selling copiers, fax machines, computers and printers. Each year new models come out making old ones obsolete. As a result, we have loads of trade-ins with nowhere to go. What can we do with this old equipment? —Jeff P., Worcester, Mass. Electronic waste, or “e-waste” as it’s called, is a growing problem in the United States and abroad, as obsolete or broken computers and other electronic equipment are taking up increasingly precious amounts of landfill space and potentially leaking hazardous substances into surrounding ecosystems....

The USDA, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other august institutions recommend that calorie-containing beverages should be limited in people’s diets. Pretty much all, that is, except for low-fat milk. The U.S. dairy industry made the “Got milk?” slogan one of the most famous of all time—and standard dietary guidelines embrace that entreaty: three cups a day, less the saturated fat, do well by both child and adult. Experts are starting to have second thoughts about that recommendation....

FINALIST YEAR: 1991 HIS FINALIST PROJECT: Teaching a computer to identify cancer cells WHAT LED TO THE PROJECT: Ciamac Moallemi always loved computers. As a kid growing up in Queens – his graduate student parents immigrated from Iran to the US in 1978 when he was three – he spent hours playing around with programs. His father taught mechanical engineering at Polytechnic University’s Brooklyn campus, and so in high school, Ciamac found a gig working with a professor in the school’s computer science department....

Governments and aid organizations spend tens of billions of dollars a year trying to lift the people of developing nations out of poverty through better education, health care and other programs. Evaluating those efforts, however, has proved difficult. Retrospective studies of different populations could not control for differences in wealth and culture. Some economists became frustrated with their inability to answer specific policy questions, such as how to increase school attendance....

It’s one of the most commonly consumed snacks in the Western world and has been made in one form or another for at least three centuries, so you might think nothing new could come of the humble french fry. But British chef Heston Blumenthal put paid to that notion years ago. He and his research chef Chris Young came up with a triple-cooked “chip” with a taste and texture that blow away anything you will find at a burger joint....

Key concepts Water Gravity Erosion From National Science Education Standards: Structure of the Earth system Introduction How do babbling brooks and mighty rivers come to be? They both depend on two things: water and gravity. Although they might look flat, rivers and streams are always flowing slightly downhill. Eventually, most of the water dumps into lakes, seas or the ocean. But what determines the size and shape of a river? Can a small stream turn into a rushing river over time?...