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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. The Battle of Naseby in Northamptonshire on 14 June 1645 was one of the most important battles of the English Civil Wars (1642-1651). The Royalists, led in person by King Charles, were soundly defeated by the Parliamentarians’ numerically superior New Model Army. Naseby was not the end of the war, but the destruction of the king’s infantry meant a Parliamentary victory was now inevitable....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Crates of Thebes (l. c. 360-280 BCE) was one of the most important Cynic philosophers of ancient Greece. He was born to a wealthy family in Thebes but gave away his inheritance after realizing the futility of material possessions and the shallow values espoused by society. After renouncing his personal wealth, he moved to Athens where he studied philosophy with Diogenes of Sinope (l....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Travel opportunities within the ancient Greek world largely depended on status and profession; nevertheless, a significant proportion of the population could, and did, travel across the Mediterranean to sell their wares, skills, go on religious pilgrimage, see sporting events or even travel simply for the pleasure of seeing the magnificent sights of the ancient world....

Mathematicians have long likened the experience of mathematical beauty to that of visual and musical beauty. Now scientists in England and Scotland have determined that despite the abstract nature of mathematics, mathematical beauty is linked to activity in the same region of the brain as beauty from sensory sources. The researchers asked 15 mathematicians to view a series of 60 mathematical equations and rate each one on a scale of −5 (ugliest) to +5 (most beautiful)....

From Nature magazine Antarctic researchers are hoping that proposals to create two huge protected areas off the frozen continent’s coast will be successful at the second time of asking next week. The areas would safeguard seals, penguins and fish in vast swathes of water through protected zones in the Ross Sea and eastern Antarctica. They would also create special research zones for scientists to monitor the impact of increased human activity and climate change on this isolated region....

Carbon dioxide is part of nearly everything humans do. It comes out of the tailpipes of our cars, the stacks from most of our power plants and the nostrils on the tail end of every breath we take. From a climate change perspective, of course, all this CO2 is a problem, given the greenhouse property of the gas. A variety of solutions have been proposed, including burying the stuff deep below the earth or sea or switching to fuels that do not lead to its emission, but now a scientist from Italy has offered another possibility: turn it back into fuel....

Sir Nicholas Stern: It clearly is. The science has given us now probability distributions of various different kinds of outcomes in terms of temperature and climate change in relation to given stocks of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We know, for example, that stabilization at 550 parts per million [of carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere] would give us around a 50–50 chance of being [on] either side of a 3-degree Celsius [5....

Something is out there in the cosmos. We can’t see it, we can’t touch it and we know it’s there only by the gravitational pull it exerts on cosmic objects. For decades the story of dark matter has been one revelation after another about what this mysterious material is not, a gradual winnowing of possibilities that has made physicists increasingly nervous. What happens when the last candidate gets crossed off the list?...

In the largest project of its kind, British Telecom will spend ?10 billion (about $19 billion) between now and 2011 replacing its entire public switched telephone network–which serves 22 million subscribers–with a network based on Internet protocol (IP). The company began its first trial of what it calls 21CN (for 21st-century network) with a single exchange in Cardiff, Wales, on November 28 of last year. Rollout is scheduled to begin in 2008....

A Formula 3 racing car made entirely out of recycled and renewable materials could be a sign of things to come in the automotive industry. At least, that is the hope of some British researchers who have built WorldFirst, an unusual automobile made mostly using recycled plastic water and juice bottles, potato starch, carrot fibers and other materials one normally expects to find in the recycling or compost bin. The car reaches a top speed of 238 kilometers per hour and has been driven more than 800 kilometers for testing and demonstrations since it first rolled out of the lab in April....

In what seems like a plot straight out of a low-budget science-fiction film, scientists have revived a giant virus that was buried in Siberian ice for 30,000 years — and it is still infectious. Its targets, fortunately, are amoebae, but the researchers suggest that as Earth’s ice melts, this could trigger the return of other ancient viruses, with potential risks for human health. The newly thawed virus is the biggest one ever found....

Your brain is special. So is mine. Differences arise at every level of the organ’s astonishingly intricate architecture; the human brain contains 100 billion neurons, which come in thousands of types and collectively form an estimate of more than 100 trillion interconnections. These differences, in turn, lead to variances in the ways we think, learn and behave and in our propensity for mental illness. How does diversity in brain wiring and function arise?...

Edited by Dava Sobel It is perhaps not strange that the Radiates, a type of animals whose home is in the sea, many of whom are so diminutive in size, and so light and evanescent in substance, that they are hardly to be distinguished from the element in which they live, should have been among the last to attract the attention of naturalists. They say I came to science through marriage....

His finalist year: 2008 His finalist project: Figuring out whether an ingredient in pesticides and bug repellent is toxic What led to the project: As a boy, whenever Graham Van Schaik visited his grandmother in Florida, he helped her out in the garden. He’d weed and dig, but she wouldn’t let him near her pesticides. “She said it made her feel ill,” he says. He was curious why, and thought he’d found an answer when he looked at the ingredient list....

If you thought you were eating mostly grass-fed beef when you bit into a Big Mac, think again: The bulk of a fast-food hamburger from McDonald’s, Burger King or Wendy’s is made from cows that eat primarily corn, or so says a new study of the chemical composition of more than 480 fast-food burgers from across the nation. And it isn’t only cows that are eating corn. There is also evidence of a corn diet in chicken sandwiches, and even French fries get a good slathering of the fat that makes them so tasty from being fried in corn oil....

Last May, I took a trip to San Diego for my brother-in-law’s graduation from college, and to meet his 4-month old son, Landon, for the first time. Throughout the weekend, I couldn’t suppress my inner science nerd, and often found myself probing my nephew’s foot reflexes. Pressured from my wife’s disapproving looks and the blank stares I received from her family as I explained why his toes curled this way or that, I dropped the shop-talk in favor of baby-talk....

Defendants in a high-profile lawsuit that could have significant implications for thousands of patents on human genes have now asked a federal judge to dismiss the case, calling it a “thinly veiled attempt to challenge the validity of patents.” Two months ago, more than 150,000 researchers, doctors, activists and cancer patients filed a federal lawsuit in New York City against Myriad Genetics, Inc., the University of Utah Research Foundation and the U....

Seattle is trying to save its ambitious climate goals by curtailing car use. A proposal to make drivers pay a fee for coming downtown is a linchpin in a list of initiatives aimed at reducing carbon emissions from the city’s transportation sector. The plan was released by Mayor Jenny Durkan, a Democrat, on Wednesday. The city is facing a climate conundrum: It’s not ratcheting down carbon pollution from transportation fast enough to outrun a population boom....

Plans for working out and eating well often go awry, and the reasons for those lapses are not always obvious. Three new papers highlight unconscious influences that affect our choices. Watch Out for Uncertainty A job search or medical testing can breed doubts about the future, which in turn can interfere with our food choices. In one recent paper, being made to feel uncertain led people to select brownies over fruit....

WASHINGTON — They’re calling it a “revolution for truth.” Activists who reject the robust science supporting vaccinations are gathering here Friday for a protest and march, capped off by a speech from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted and vociferous vaccine skeptic. The demonstrations follow a lobbying push on Thursday, in which activists held 80 meetings on Capitol Hill, many of them with staffers for members of Congress, according to Irene Pi, an organizer from Arizona....