It’s tough to be the boss. A recent Wall Street Journal article described the plight of one CEO who had to drag himself out of bed each morning and muster his game face. It would be a long day of telling other people what to do. It got so bad, we are told, that he had no choice but to take a year off work to sail across the Atlantic Ocean with his family....
In 2013 the world followed, via tweets, blogs and videos, as scientists negotiated the underground system of caves known as Rising Star just outside Johannesburg, South Africa. Ultimately the researchers, working under the direction of paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, would bring up more than 1,500 bones and bone fragments belonging to an archaic human species. The team has concluded that the fossils represent a previously unknown relative of ours, now named Homo naledi....
He is one of the world’s best known and most successful entrepreneurs, with hundreds of patents to his name—including the Segway scooter. But you will never see Dean Kamen in a suit and tie: the eccentric inventor dresses almost exclusively in denim. He spent five years in college before dropping out, does not take vacations and has never married. Kamen presides (along with his Ministers of Ice Cream, Brunch and Nepotism) over the Connecticut island kingdom of North Dumpling, which has “seceded” from the U....
Some people are friendly drunks, whereas others are hostile, potentially endangering themselves and others. The difference may lie in their ability to foresee the consequences of their actions, according to a recent study in the online Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Brad Bushman, a psychologist at Ohio State University, and his colleagues asked nearly 500 volunteers to play a simple game. The subjects, an even mix of women and men, believed they were competing against an opponent to press a button as quickly as possible....
Gard Otis, a professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario who studies bee behavior, ecology and evolution, explains. Bees buzz for two reasons. First, the rapid wingbeats of many species create wind vibrations that people hear as buzzes. The larger the bee, the slower the wingbeat and the lower the pitch of the resulting buzz. This is a phenomenon of the wingbeats and not specifically of bees–some flies, beetles, and wasps also have buzzy flight caused by their wingbeats....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In the search for ever more impressive and lethal weapons to shock the enemy and bring total victory the armies of ancient Greece, Carthage, and even sometimes Rome turned to the elephant. Huge, exotic, and frightening the life out of an unprepared enemy they seemed the perfect weapon in an age where developments in warfare were very limited....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The process of determining ethnicity is a problematic venture, even more so when interpreted through the archaeological record. Despite this issue, evidence, such as the four-room house, has been preserved that can be interpreted to represent ethnic markers and help illuminate the lives of individuals and groups from the past....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Set within the Anti-Taurus mountain range in southeastern Turkey, beyond the borders of Adiyaman, is the archaeological wonder of Mount Nemrut. Forgotten for centuries, the spellbinding peak of Nemrut Dagi (its Turkish name) has since managed to capture the imagination of thousands of visitors who come annually to witness the pure magic of its landscape at dawn and dusk, when the mighty stone heads glow gold....
ICY BAY, Alaska—The icebergs looked impenetrable. Roman Motyka needed a route through. “If you see an opening anywhere, let me know,” said the University of Alaska Fairbanks glaciologist, at the wheel of a small skiff puttering through the ice-choked bay off the Gulf of Alaska. Beyond the iceberg maze loomed the nose of a glacier that, contrary to a warming climate, is advancing into the sea. Motyka and his team were here - in one of the most ice-covered regions on the planet - to find out why....
By Carey Gillam April 22 (Reuters) - An advocacy group seeking a ban on the world’s most widely used herbicide said Wednesday it is launching a U.S. public testing project to gather data on detectable levels of the herbicide in drinking water, human urine and breast milk. The project, backed in part by organic organizations and critics of genetically modified crops, is the latest move in a brewing battle pitting agribusiness interests against consumer and environmental groups over the fate of the weed-killer called glyphosate....
As Mexican drug cartels have grown in power over the past several years, their ascent has sparked a sharp increase in murders and kidnappings. The physical toll in several areas of the country is staggering: An estimated 100,000 people are dead or missing, caught up in fighting among the cartels, government forces and recently formed paramilitary groups trying to control the drug gangs in regions where local police have proved ineffective....
For anyone invested in NASA’s decades-long efforts to robotically explore Mars, now is the time for nail-biting. Launched last July and barreling toward the Red Planet and Jezero Crater is the space agency’s Perseverance rover, cocooned in heat-resistant shielding and set for a terrifying, technically audacious fiery nosedive through the planet’s atmosphere on February 18. That ferocious entry will be immediately followed by something many consider even more frightening: the automated lowering of the robot to solid ground on a tether from a hovering, rocket-propelled “sky crane” platform—the same technology that successfully brought Perseverance’s predecessor, the Curiosity rover, to the Martian surface in 2012....
Cognitive science and moral philosophy might seem like strange bedfellows, but in the past decade they have become partners. In a recent issue of Cognition, the Harvard University psychologist Joshua Greene and colleagues extend this trend. Their experiment utilizes conventional behavioral methods, but it was designed to test a hypothesis stemming from previous fMRI investigations into the neural bases of moral judgments (see here and here). In their study Greene et al....
Earth’s molten mantle is a potentially inexhaustible source of energy that could meet 10 percent of our nation’s energy needs, but cost and safety concerns have hampered the growth of geothermal energy. Now, researchers have announced plans to test a more efficient way to tap into safer, low-temperature geothermal stores using nanotechnology. President Barack Obama has promoted geothermal energy as a component for kicking the nation’s fossil fuel habit and reducing greenhouse gas emissions....
LIVERMORE, Calif. – Pity the fusion scientists. Toiling at the National Ignition Facility, a $3.5 billion lab nestled here among vineyards an hour east of San Francisco, they were chagrined when they failed to ignite nuclear fusion by their September deadline last year. Facing public scrutiny, President Obama proposed a 13.8 percent cut for the program in his 2014 budget request, bringing funding down to $401 million, and researchers diverted their attention away from energy and toward experiments focusing on nuclear stockpile stewardship....
Key concepts Water cycle Evaporation Pollution From National Science Education Standards: Changes in environments Introduction Have you ever seen a stream or river right after a big rainstorm? The water is often muddy—and full of leaves, sticks and other things that were washed in by the rain. Even though it’s the same water that moves from sky to ground and back to the sky again, when it rains again, the rain isn’t muddy or full of sticks....
Batman is the most down-to-earth of all the superheroes. He has no special powers from being born on a distant world or bitten by a radioactive spider. All that protects him from the Joker and other Gotham City villains are his wits and a physique shaped by years of training—combined with the vast fortune to reach his maximum potential and augment himself with Batmobiles, Batcables and other Bat-goodies, of course. In the 2005 blockbuster Batman Begins, vengeful Bruce Wayne (played by Christian Bale) hones his killer instincts in the streets for seven years before landing himself in a Bhutanese prison, where he falls in with the mysterious League of Shadows, who teach him the way of the ninja....
BERLIN, Md.—Fifth grader Aman Shahzad looked closely at the level attached to the plumb line. “Lower, lower,” she called out. “OK! The bubble is in the middle.” Her classmate, holding the wooden surveyor’s pole, read the measurement: 14 centimeters. The two students were from Pemberton Elementary School in nearby Salisbury, Md., the first to participate in a new, three-month interdisciplinary unit called “Investigating Climate Science” that spans science, math, economics and government....
In a sign of pessimism about humanity’s future, scientists today set the hands of the infamous “Doomsday Clock” forward one minute from two years ago. “It is now five minutes to midnight,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) director Kennette Benedict announced today (Jan. 10) at a press conference in Washington, D.C. That represents a symbolic step closer to doomsday, a change from the clock’s previous mark of six minutes to midnight, set in January 2010....
A new study tracing the history of the oceans, as recorded in multibillion-year-old sediments brought up in a South African drill core, provides evidence that oxygen emerged on Earth about 300 million years earlier than is broadly agreed. One of the study’s co-authors acknowledges that his paper is contentious, but it supports a number of other analyses carried out in recent years using separate methods. The new research, published online Sunday in Nature Geoscience, focuses on the nitrogen contained in the drill core’s geologic record....
