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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. Although the ancient Egyptians are often depicted as death-obsessed and dour, they actually had a great appreciation for life and their culture reflected their belief in existence as an eternal journey imbued with magic. Life was a gift from the gods and people were expected to enjoy that gift as fully as possible....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Join World History Encyclopedia as they talk to Frank Holt about his new book When Money Talks: A History of Coins and Numismatics published by Oxford University Press. When Money Talks: A History of Coins and NumismaticsFrank Holt (Copyright) Kelly (WHE): Thank you so much for joining me today....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Defending Clerical Marriage (1524) is an open letter by reformer and theologian Katharina Zell (nee Schütz, l. 1497-1562), written to justify the marriage of Christian clergy. The Catholic Church prohibited clerical marriage, but Katharina had married the pastor Matthew Zell (l. 1477-1548), was criticized for it, and wrote her best-known work in response....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In 378 CE the Tanukhid queen Mavia (r. c. 375 - c. 425 CE) of the Saracens led a successful revolt against the Roman Empire, pitting her forces against the armies under the emperor Valens (364-378 CE). Launching her insurrection from the region of southern Syria, she destroyed Roman territories in southern Jordan through modern-day Israel and Arabia....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Magical Lullaby (popularly known as Charm for the Protection of a Child) is an inscription from the 16th or 17th century BCE. The poem exemplifies the ancient Egyptian’s personal religious and spiritual practices as it is a spell which was sung to ward ghosts away from sleeping children....

Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

The coffee that the caterer had set down alongside some guava-filled pastries was tepid and bitter, with top notes of chlorine. Several of the guests would not touch it, no matter how much they craved caffeine. Standing on a narrow balcony, facing the scrubby hills of Turrialba, Costa Rica, they sipped water or pineapple juice instead. They were entitled to a little coffee snobbery. The roughly 20 people gathered this past March at CATIE, an agricultural university, to discuss the uncertain future of Central American coffee included leading experts on humanity’s most beloved beverage....

Oil giant BP and General Electric Co. announced plans yesterday to collaborate on a 250-megawatt coal-fired power plant that would employ integrated gasification technology and carbon dioxide capture in Southern California. The plant, to be built near Bakersfield in oil-rich Kern County, is the result of a technology licensing agreement between GE Energy and Hydrogen Energy International, a joint venture of BP and mining giant Rio Tinto. Integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) technology is in use at dozens of pilot projects worldwide, but commercialization is still several years away....

View slide show The 2nd annual University Rover Challenge that pitted seven schools’ rovers against each other wrapped in early June. The contest was designed to encourage aspiring engineers and showcase their ingenuity in developing robotic vehicles for use on the Red Planet someday. The challenge unfolded in a series of events held over three days in the desert around Hanksville, Utah. The competition featured a navigation task that simulated the delivery of an emergency oxygen canister to an astronaut stranded a hundred yards (91 meters) away....

A new experiment bridges the old quantum trick of entanglement—the strange faster-than-light communication between particles—with the much newer technique of halting light dead in its tracks. Researchers report in Nature that they have successfully sent a pair of entangled states of light into separate corners of an ultracold atomic cloud, stored them there briefly, and then sent them back on their separate ways without completely destroying the quantum link in the process....

The male foreskin—an unassuming flap of skin eagerly discarded in some cultures—has taken center stage in recent debates over HIV prevention. Although researchers now agree that its removal is a proved method to reduce HIV spread in heterosexual men, the picture for homosexual men remains a bit foggy. In the late 1980s observations of heterosexual men in Africa indicated that those who had been circumcised might be at less risk of contracting HIV than men who left their foreskins intact....

The Higgs particle, the last piece of the Standard Model of particle physics menagerie that has yet to be observed, is running out of places to hide—if, that is, it exists at all. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., today narrowed the range of mass where the Higgs might be found. The Higgs boson, named for British physicist Peter Higgs, is believed to give other elementary particles, such as the heavy W and Z bosons, their mass, so finding it or proving it does not exist would have major implications in ground-up interpretations of how the world works....

Key concepts Plants Seasonal changes Colors Introduction Have you ever wondered why leaves change from green to an amazing array of yellow, orange and red during the fall? Leaves get their brilliant colors from pigments made up of various size, color-creating molecules. During the warm, sunny months, plants use their leaves to turn sunlight into food energy, a process called photosynthesis. This primarily uses a pigment that reflects green light, which gives the leaves their characteristic color....

A recent short article in Scientific American Mind looked at the following question: suppose you have a 5 percent chance of dying from a flu vaccine but a 10 percent chance of contracting and dying of the flu when an epidemic strikes. Do you take the flu shot? Surprisingly often, people do not. (See “Which Flu Risk Would You Take?,” by Nicole Garbarini, in Head Lines, Scientific American Mind, Aug./Sept. 2006)....

They nicknamed it ‘the replicator’—in homage to the machines in the Star Trek saga that can materialize virtually any inanimate object. Researchers have unveiled a 3D printer that creates an entire object at once, rather than building it layer by layer as typical additive-manufacturing devices do—bringing science-fiction a step closer to reality. “This is an exciting advancement to rapidly prototype fairly small and transparent parts,” says Joseph DeSimone, a chemist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill....

In the spring of 2012, Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, received a somewhat unusual request: The American Tradition Institute, a conservative group, wanted to search through his emails. The group was seeking emails with specific phrases, although many of the words in question were not relevant to his research. “They had terms like ‘Michael Mann.’ I know Mike; I don’t collaborate with him. ‘Hockey stick’; I don’t work on that....

Around the time that his cult-classic, drug-culture novel Naked Lunch was released, author William S. Burroughs was experimenting with a writing strategy that he called the cut-up technique. Burroughs would chop up random lines of text from a page and rearrange them to form new sentences, with the aim of freeing his mind and the minds of his readers from conventional, linear ways of thinking. Beat Generation writers such as Burroughs sought to dismantle old belief systems and to encourage alternative ways of looking at the world....

As tremendous ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs swam through Mesozoic seas, a smaller, more common creature also was cruising the currents, playing an outsized role in marine ecosystems. Ammonites, extinct members of the cephalopod group (which includes nautiluses, squids and octopuses), are so diverse and prevalent in the fossil record that they are used by paleontologists as markers to signal different geologic strata. But along with most dinosaurs, these hard-shelled creatures disappeared during the massive Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–T) extinction....

Join us below at 1 P.M. Eastern time on Thursday (June 28) for a live 30-minute online chat with economist Meredith Rosenthal of Harvard’s School of Public Health, who will discuss the future of health care in the U.S. following the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We invite you to post chat questions in advance in the comments below. The ACA, signed into law in 2010 by President Obama, is the most profound change to U....