Posts

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. To the University of Ingolstadt (1523) is an open letter by the German reformer Argula von Grumbach (l. 1490 to c. 1564) protesting the dismissal, arrest, and imprisonment of the young scholar Arsacius Seehofer (l. c. 1504 to c. 1539) for teaching Lutheran beliefs at the school. The university ignored the letter, but it was printed and became a bestseller....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The wearing of cosmetics and perfumes by both men and women goes back a very long way indeed as the ancients were just as keen as anyone to improve their appearance as quickly and as easily as possible using all manner of powders, creams, lotions, and liquids. Written and pictorial records combine with remains of the materials themselves to reveal how the ancients not only improved their looks and smell but also tried to cure such irritating challenges to one’s vanity as baldness, grey hairs and wrinkles....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Neolithic Revolution began between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago at several widely dispersed locations across the world, when our ancestors first began planting and raising crops. Agricultural communities sprang up almost simultaneously in Mesopotamia, China, Southeast Asia, Africa, Mesoamerica, and South America replacing the hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence that had been utilized for hundreds of thousands of years by Homo....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Harappa is a large village presently in the province of Punjab in Pakistan. The modern town is a part of and lies next to the ancient city. The site of Harappa is important in that it has provided proof of not just the Indus Valley Civilization as it was in its prime, but also of preceding and succeeding cultures as well and is the only site included in this category....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The description of Babylon and Babylonian customs in Histories by the Greek historian Herodotus (l. c. 484-425/413 BCE) has long been challenged for accuracy and been found wanting, leading some scholars to dismiss the work entirely as more fiction than fact. This rejection of the Histories, however, derives from applying modern-day historical standards to an ancient historian and, ultimately, is unfair and unprofitable....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. RECOTechnology is a small game-developer studio based in Madrid, Spain. Their latest video game - Numantia - allows players to explore the conflicts between the ancient Iberians and ancient Romans. James Blake Wiener of Ancient History Encyclopedia (AHE) speaks to Mr. Pablo Serrano of RECOTechnology about the game and ancient Iberia in this exclusive interview....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Prayer to Thoth for Skill in Writing is a literary piece dated to c. 1150 BCE from the latter period of the New Kingdom of Egypt (c. 1570- c. 1069 BCE) in which a young scribe prays for inspiration to Thoth, god of wisdom and writing....

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 Philippi in 42 BCE was an all-Roman affair fought between the young Octavian, chosen heir of Julius Caesar, and the mercurial Mark Antony, widely regarded as the greatest living Roman general on the one side against Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Caesar and champions of the Republican cause on the other....

Schizophrenia, depression, addiction and other mental disorders cause suffering and cost billions of dollars every year in lost productivity. Neurological and psychiatric conditions account for 13 percent of the global burden of disease, a measure of years of life lost because of premature mortality and living in a state of less than full health, according to the World Health Organization. Despite the critical need for newer and better medications to treat a range of psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, drugs to treat these diseases are just too complex and costly for big pharmaceutical companies to develop....

Humanity has done little to address climate change. Global emissions of carbon dioxide reached (another) all-time peak in 2010. The most recent international talks to craft a global treaty to address the problem pushed off major action until 2020. Fortunately, there’s an alternative—curbing the other greenhouse gases. An economic and scientific analysis published in January in the journal Science found that taking steps to curb methane and black carbon (otherwise known as soot) could improve air quality, human health and agricultural yields....

Solids and liquids could hardly seem more different, one maintaining a rigid shape and the other flowing to fit the contours of whatever contains it. And of all the things that slosh and pour, superfluids seem to capture the quintessence of the liquid state–running through tiny channels with no resistance and even dribbling uphill to escape from a bowl. A superfluid solid sounds like an oxymoron, but it is precisely what researchers at Pennsylvania State University have recently witnessed....

The science video blog Veritasium offers this nifty little puzzle. Does a wooden block, when shot by a vertically aimed rifle, go higher when it’s hit dead center or off-center? In the latter case, the bullet causes the block to spin. Several science communicators are asked the question in this set-up video: Did you pick an outcome? If not, don’t worry—here’s the result of the experiment: UPDATE (9/3/13): Derek Muller, the creator of Veritasium, has posted the answer....

Humans pick up on sarcasm instinctively and usually do not need help figuring out if, say, a social media post has a mocking tone. Machines have a much tougher time with this because they are typically programmed to read text and assess images based strictly on what they see. So what’s the big deal? Nothing, unless computer scientists could help machines better understand wordplay used in social media and on the internet....

Breast cancer is second only to lung cancer as the leading cause of cancer death among women. This year alone, nearly 180,000 women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, and some 40,000 will die from it, according to the American Cancer Society. There are some risk factors that a woman cannot control, such as her age and race as well as genetics, or family history, but there are also choices she can make to lower her odds of getting it....

Traditional crystals are composed of extremely orderly, symmetrically arranged repeating patterns of atoms that don’t move. Recently, however, a team of physicists has proposed a type of crystal that gets its symmetry from the elegant movement of its components, like a swarm of satellites in space. Thinking about the space-based gravitational wave detector eLISA led Latham Boyle, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, to theorize a new spin on crystals....

Thousands of years after the last woolly mammoth lumbered across the tundra, scientists have sequenced a whopping 50 percent of the beast’s nuclear genome. Earlier attempts to sequence the DNA of these icons of the Ice Age produced only tiny quantities of code. The new work marks the first time thatso much of the genetic material of an extinct creature has been retrieved. Not only has the feat provided insight into the evolutionary history of mammoths, but it is a step toward realizing the science-fiction dream of being able to resurrect a long-gone animal....

It is one of the most serious allegations that could be made about a doctor: manipulating patients’ histories to make money. So it is no wonder that the charges, levied by editors of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in January against medical researcher Andrew Wakefield, are still getting close scrutiny. Now an American whistleblower advocacy group has joined the fray over Wakefield, who in 1998 hypothesized a link, now scientifically disproven, between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) and autism....

When chemist Harvey Washington Wiley took the helm of the agency that would become the U.S. Food and Drug Administration more than a century ago, his mandate was narrow: making sure the label on a bottle or can matched the food or drug inside. Concerns about the safety of the contents were not addressed until 1938, and companies hawking their wares did not have to prove they were actually effective until 1962....

SMARTS VS. SENSE Regarding “Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss,” by Keith E. Stanovich: I have been teaching at the college level for more than a dozen years, and I’ve often wondered why some of my best and brightest students utterly fail in certain tasks that less “intellectual” students are able to excel in. Thank you for the introduction to “dysrationalia,” a phenomenon that seems to explain a lot....

Cognitive Pseudoscience: The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark by Mark Turner Oxford University Press: 2014 In 1908 mathematician Henri Poincaré described the creative process as a collision of ideas rising into consciousness “in crowds … until pairs interlocked.” Soon after, Gestalt psychologist Norman Maier, behaviorist Clark Hull and others began studying how ideas and behaviors combined, and in the 1980s, in laboratory research with both animals and people, I showed that the combinatorial process was orderly and predictable and that it could be modeled on a computer....