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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 Maya hieroglyphic writing system was a sophisticated combination of pictographs directly representing objects and ideograms (glyphs) expressing more abstract concepts such as actions, ideas and syllabic sounds. Maya writing has survived on stone carvings, stucco, various manufactured artefacts, and codices. Examples are found across Mesoamerica. Deciphered in the 20th century, around 75% of surviving texts can be understood....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Saladin (c. 1137 – 1193 CE), the Muslim ruler who crushed the mighty Crusader army at the Horns of Hattin (1187 CE) and re-took Jerusalem after 88 years of Crusader control, was born in a world where the disunity of the Muslims had allowed foreign invaders to take over their territory....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Nile River was the source of life for the ancient Egyptians and so figured prominently in their religious beliefs. At night, the Milky Way was considered a heavenly Nile, associated with Hathor, and provider of all good things. The Nile was also linked to Uat-Ur, the Egyptian name for the Mediterranean Sea, which stretched out to unknown lands from the Delta and brought goods through trade with foreign ports....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. An English medieval castle, if a large one, could have a household staff of at least 50 people, which included all manner of specialised and skilled workers such as cooks, grooms, carpenters, masons, falconers, and musicians, as well as a compliment of knights, bowmen, and crossbow operators. Most staff were paid by the day, and job security was often precarious, especially for the lowest servants who were dismissed when a castle lord travelled away from the castle....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. São Tomé and Principe are islands located in the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa. They were uninhabited before being colonised by the Portuguese from 1486. So involved were they with the slave trade, they became known as the Slave Islands where West Africans were gathered in their thousands and shipped to work plantations in such colonies as Portuguese Brazil....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Modern practitioners of Judaism and Christianity often turn to the Bible for stories concerning women and their roles in ancient religion and society. It is important to acknowledge that these stories were written by men. The male perspectives provide little information about the actual thoughts and feelings of women....

Apart from a brief break in the 1960s and 1970s, British engineering and drivers have played a dominant role in setting the land speed record in the fastest cars on the planet. Starting from Lydston Hornsted’s Benz No. 3, which broke the record to reach 124mph exactly 100 years ago, to the current land-speed-record holder Andy Green’s Thrust SSC, which crossed the supersonic barrier to reach 763mph in 1997. Now the people behind Thrust SSC have set themselves an even more challenging target to reach the land speed record of 1,000 mph in a new car called Bloodhound SSC....

In a renovated warehouse in a weary-looking section of troy, n.y., 25-year-old katie bellucci has the rapt attention of 27 fifth graders. They are singing, stamping, clapping and waving their hands in the air—far more excitement than you would expect for ratios and fractions. The class is working together on a word problem involving a fictional basketball team with a win-to-loss ratio of 9:3. What is the ratio of losses to total games played?...

By now we have all seen the spectacular images of volumes of water crashing down the Oroville Dam spillway in California and blasting upward into the air as they hit an enormous crater in the spillway floor, flooding down the adjacent hillside, threatening people in towns below. Those images reveal a big mistake: failure to update infrastructure to defend against climate change. The menacing floodwaters last week forced the emergency evacuation of 188,000 residents....

Around 13,000 years ago, the world’s climate began to change. Seas rose, glaciers retreated and ecosystems began to transform. At roughly the same time, humans arrived in North America, perhaps attracted by migrating game or newly hospitable land. Over the course of the next few millennia a host of indigenous large-bodied mammals, such as the mammoth, died out. Scientists have long debated whether climate warming or human hunting brought about this megafauna extinction....

Key concepts Forensics Liquids Physics Models Introduction Do you enjoy watching crime mysteries or reading about investigations? Every criminal leaves behind evidence at the crime scene. The trick to catching the lawbreaker is collecting all the evidence and making sense of it. This is what a forensic expert does. In this Halloween-themed science activity you’ll be correlating the size of bloodstains to a distance traveled—but don’t get too grossed out; you’ll be doing it all with fake blood....

U.S. EPA has sent a draft rule to the White House that could limit regulations on greenhouse gas emissions to cover only very large industrial sources. The agency yesterday submitted a rule to the White House Office of Management and Budget that experts say will likely limit strict permitting requirements to industrial sources of more than 25,000 tons a year of carbon dioxide equivalent. The rule is aimed at shielding smaller sources of emissions from being subject to any new regulatory regime....

Schoolbooks typically present explorers as intrepid individuals who, at the behest of colonizing leaders, sail wooden ships to new lands, ride on horseback across uncharted mountains or slash their way through the jungle. But today most explorers who are making fundamental discoveries are scientists. And whether the frontiers are minuscule, like the human genome, or massive, like our deepest oceans, we still have much left to learn about planet Earth. The quests that modern scientists pursue rival anything in a history book or an adventure novel....

Among the more persistent points of fascination throughout the COVID pandemic has been the tectonic shift occurring within the dog-human relationship. Dogs, we are told, were adopted in record numbers over the past year and a half, shelters and rescues emptied out, and breeders had huge waiting lists for new “stock.” Indeed, such has been the dog-acquisition frenzy that the phrase “pandemic puppies” has become a COVID-era catchphrase. We know the general contours of why dogs suddenly seemed even more popular than ever before....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Does science inspire fiction or does it work the other way around? In the case of medical technology, the long-running TV and film series Star Trek has increasingly been inspiring researchers worldwide. Two teams were recently awarded the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize for developing handheld devices that can diagnose a range of diseases and check a patient’s vital signs without invasive tests – inspired by Star Trek’s medical “tricorder” device....

Editor’s Note (10/5/18): From a relatively young age, Doris Tsao distinguished herself as a leading scientist investigating the way the brain recognizes faces. On October 4 the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recognized Tsao by giving her one its 25 fellowships (“genius” awards) for 2018 ($625,000 allocated over the next five years). In doing so, the foundation acknowledged: “her most notable line of research has focused on uncovering the fundamental neural principles that underlie one of the brain’s most highly specialized and socially important tasks—recognizing a face....

Humans have a seemingly primal need to understand how we came to be the way we are today. Pieces of our ancient forebears generally are hard to come by, however. Scientists working to interpret our evolution often have had to make do with studying a fossil toe bone here or a jaw there. Now, in an amazing bounty, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger and his team have uncovered two well-preserved partial skeletons of Australopithecus sediba that date from nearly two million years ago at a site near Johannes­burg, South ­Africa; the specimens include bones from every region of the body....

The genius of the then emergent genre (back in the days when a megabyte could still wow) was its juxtaposition of low-life retro culture with technology that seemed only barely beyond the capabilities of the deftest biomedical engineer. Although the implants could not have been replicated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology, the best cyberpunk authors gave the impression that these inventions might yet materialize one day, perhaps even in the reader’s own lifetime....

Excerpted from Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death by Katy Butler. Copyright © 2013 by Katherine Anne Butler. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc On the idealistic and hopeful day in 1958 when the forty-three-year-old Swedish ice-skater and businessman Arne Larsson was given the world’s first fully implantable pacemaker, few in the worlds of business, engineering, or medicine foresaw a time when there would be a need or a market for hundreds of thousands more....

By Sid Perkins of Nature magazineAn explanation presented this week for a famed and enigmatic jumble of marine reptile fossils has blurred the lines between science and science fiction. The latest proposal suggests that the jumbled remains of these vast marine reptiles were stockpiled by an even more immense creature: a squid-like ‘kraken’ estimated to be around 30 metres long – more than twice the size of today’s largest known cephalopod....