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In a patch of otherwise empty desert 30 miles south of Dubai, the outline of what is expected to become the Middle East’s largest photovoltaic solar project is taking form in the sands of the United Arab Emirates. The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, launched in 2013 with 13 megawatts of capacity, is expected over the next 15 years to expand to 3,000 MW, providing the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) enough power to meet 15 percent of UAE’s demand....

Scientists have found the exact source of Stonehenge’s smaller bluestones, new research suggests. The stones’ rock composition revealed they come from a nearby outcropping, located about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) away from the site originally proposed as the source of such rocks nearly a century ago. The discovery of the rock’s origin, in turn, could help archaeologists one day unlock the mystery of how the stones got to Stonehenge. The work “locates the exact sources of the stones, which highlight areas where archaeologists can search for evidence of the human working of the stones,” said geologist and study co-author Richard Bevins of the National Museum of Wales....

Africa needs a green revolution. Food yields on the continent are roughly one metric ton of grain per hectare of cultivated land, a figure little changed from 50 years ago and roughly one third of the yields achieved in the rest of the world. In low-income regions elsewhere in the world, including China and India, the introduction of high-yield seeds, fertilizer and small-scale irrigation boosted food productivity beginning in the mid-1960s and opened the escape route from extreme poverty for huge populations....

Who is responsible when AI harms someone? A California jury may soon have to decide. In December 2019 a person driving a Tesla with an artificial intelligence driving system killed two people in Gardena in an accident. The Tesla driver faces several years in prison. In light of this and other incidents, both the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating Tesla crashes, and NHTSA has recently broadened its probe to explore how drivers interact with Tesla systems....

Is theoretical physicist Ed Witten more influential in his field than the biologist Solomon Snyder is among life scientists? And how do their records of scholarly impact measure up against those of past greats such as Karl Marx among historians and economists, or Sigmund Freud among psychologists? Performance metrics based on values such as citation rates are heavily biased by field, so most measurement experts shy away from interdisciplinary comparisons. The average biochemist, for example, will always score more highly than the average mathematician, because biochemistry attracts more citations....

“We will get woolly mammoths back.” So vowed environmentalist Stewart Brand at the TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., in February in laying out his vision for reviving extinct species. The mammoth isn’t the only vanished creature Brand and other proponents of “de-extinction” want to resurrect. The passenger pigeon, Caribbean monk seal and great auk are among the other candidates—all species that blinked out at least in part because of Homo sapiens....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. On June 22, 2005, the Sulaymaniyah Museum of Iraqi Kurdistan purchased a pair of gold earrings and on the same day these jewellery items received a registration number of “SM 2892“. They cost the bargain price of 7,000.00 USD. Both earrings weigh approximately 48 grams and are of a 24-carat purity....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Bangkok was once more commonly known as the Venice of the East due to the intricate network of waterways that crisscrossed the city in the 19th century CE. There were few roads in the 1800s CE so the city’s inhabitants travelled and traded along the busy canals or khlongs on the Chao Phraya river - the major river of Thailand that flows through Bangkok....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Inanna and Su-kale-tuda (c. 1800 BCE) is a Mesopotamian myth dealing with rape and justice in ancient Sumer. The work has been interpreted as an astral myth or a figurative account of the rise of the southern states against Akkad, but the most direct interpretation of the poem is a condemnation of the crime of rape....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. One of the most fascinating aspects of the female pharaoh Maatkare Hatshepsut’s reign (1479 - 1458 BCE) is the artwork she left behind. Art served an important purpose in Egyptian society; every statue, mural, and motif had a significant meaning. Pharaohs frequently used art as a way to disseminate information about themselves, a propaganda tool to justify their rule and emphasize their divine nature to the common people (many of whom were illiterate)....

Slideshow: View the “super tipper” For more than a century “tipper” trucks—so called for their ability to lift their cargo beds at an angle that allows their contents to empty without manual intervention—have helped construction crews haul heavy building materials, including tons of asphalt and gravel at a time. The typical model of tipper seen on construction sites worldwide is the dump truck, which uses a hydraulic lift to raise one end of its cargo bed high into the air while its contents slide out of the back or to the side....

Postpartum depression afflicts 10 to 20 percent of the nearly four million women who give birth in the U.S. every year. The condition can interfere with normal bonding between mothers and infants and jeopardize children’s development through adolescence. There is no specific treatment, but a promising new drug may change that. “There is a real need to identify [depressed] women and treat them—and treat them quickly,” says Samantha Meltzer-Brody, director of the Perinatal Psychiatry Program at the University of North Carolina Center for Women’s Mood Disorders....

Chemistry has many laws, one of which is that the rate of a reaction speeds up as temperature rises. So, in 1989, when chemists experimenting at a nuclear accelerator in Vancouver observed that a reaction between bromine and muonium—a hydrogen isotope—slowed down when they increased the temperature, they were flummoxed. Donald Fleming, a University of British Columbia chemist involved with the experiment, thought that perhaps as bromine and muonium co-mingled, they formed an intermediate structure held together by a “vibrational” bond—a bond that other chemists had posed as a theoretical possibility earlier that decade....

Before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the United States, Chris Trondsen felt his life was finally in control. As someone who has battled obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and other mental health issues since early childhood, it’s been a long journey. “I’ve been doing really, really well,” Trondsen said. “I felt like most of it was pretty much—I wouldn’t say ‘cured’—but I definitely felt in remission or under control. But this pandemic has been really difficult for me....

Deserts across the globe may contain some of the world’s “missing” carbon sinks — land masses scientists had not previously identified that absorb carbon from the atmosphere, according to researchers at China’s Lanzhou University. A study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience found that closed, or endorheic, basins in deserts — areas into which water flows but doesn’t flow out — are significant storehouses of carbon, but their ability to act as carbon sinks may diminish as the globe warms....

Danish researchers have for the first time identified a gene that increases the risk for cannabis use disorder. About 10 percent of people who ingest cannabis, the most commonly used illicit substance in the world, suffer cravings and withdrawals when they try to stop their habit. All substance abuse is the result of a combination of environmental and genetic factors, but until now, none of those genetic factors had been identified....

EVEN 500 YEARS AGO people had some inkling that what we eat affects our well-being. “A good coke is halfe a physycyon,” wrote Andrew Boorde in 1547 in Breviary of Health. Head chefs, or majordomos, seasoned their dishes with early ideas about diet and nutrition that still influence meals today, as Rachel Laudan explains in her article, “Birth of the Modern Diet,” starting on page 4. We have been grappling with what food means for health ever since....

Last year word broke of a computer virus that had managed to slip into Iran’s highly secure nuclear enrichment facilities. Most viruses multiply without prejudice, but the Stuxnet virus had a specific target in its sights—one that is not connected to the Internet. Stuxnet was planted on a USB stick that was handed to an unsuspecting technician, who plugged it into a computer at a secure facility. Once inside, the virus spread silently for months, searching for a computer that was connected to a prosaic piece of machinery: a programmable logic controller, a special-purpose collection of microelectronics that commonly controls the cogs of industry—valves, gears, motors and switches....

Of all the sciences, astronomy has shed particularly brilliant light on our place in the universe. But it is not well-known that much of our understanding of outer space comes from a different discipline altogether: geology. Ask somebody to name a tool that we use to uncover the secrets of the cosmos, and they’ll likely say telescope rather than microscope or rock hammer. But if you think about it, pretty much anything we can get our hands on that comes from outer space is a rock....

There are two striking features of language that any scientific theory of this quintessentially human behavior must account for. The first is that we do not all speak the same language. This would be a shocking observation were not so commonplace. Communication systems and other animals tend to be universal, with any animal of the species able to communicate with any other. Likewise, many other fundamental human attributes show much less variation....