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Mystery spots: In southwestern Africa’s Namib Desert, the lack of rainfall keeps vegetation sparse. Yet in some areas, mysterious rings of grass with bare centers appear and thrive. Now scientists have discovered these so-called fairy circles are indeed created by wee little creatures—termites. Many organisms live in and around fairy circles, which range from one to 50 meters in diameter and persist for decades. But scientists writing in March in Science found only one species consistently inhabiting even the youngest fairy circles—the sand termite Psammotermes allocerus—making it the most likely culprit....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Religious practices in ancient China go back over 7,000 years. Long before the philosophical and spiritual teachings of Confucius and Lao-Tzu developed or before the teachings of the Buddha came to China, the people worshipped personifications of nature and then of concepts like “wealth” or “fortune” which developed into a religion....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Song of the Hoe is a Sumerian praise poem celebrating the hoe for its many uses and linking it to the creation of the world by the great god Enlil. As the economy of Mesopotamia was almost entirely based on agriculture, it is not surprising to find an agricultural implement as the subject of a hymn of praise....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The HMS Gloucester was wrecked in the North Sea, about 30 miles off the shore of Norfolk, England, shortly after dawn on 6 May 1682. It was a warship in the navy of Charles II of England (r. 1660-1685), and at the time of its loss, it was the flagship of a small fleet of ten ships on their way to Scotland to fetch Mary of Modena, the pregnant wife of James, Duke of York, the brother of Charles and the future James II of England (r....

The jubilation of the Paris climate agreement, where delegates from around the world triumphantlydeclared the climate crisis would finally be tamed, will have felt very hollow to many in the US in the six years since. Following the landmark 2015 deal to curb dangerous global heating, the US has experienced four of its five hottest years ever recorded. A drought of a severity unprecedented in modern civilization has tightened its grip upon the American west, parching cities and farms, fueling the eight largest wildfires on record in California and smothering much of the rest of the country in a choking pall of smoke....

MENLO PARK, Calif. — The anarchist grew animated as he explained his plan to subvert a pillar of global capitalism by teaching the poor to make their own medicines — pharmaceutical industry patents be damned. Then he took another sip from a flute of Taittinger Champagne. Swaggering, charismatic, and complex, Michael Laufer has become a fixture in the growing biohacker movement ever since he published plans last year for a do-it-yourself EpiPencil — a $35 alternative to the pricey EpiPen....

The year was 1961. A barite mining operation at the Jebel Irhoud massif in Morocco, some 100 kilometers west of Marrakech, turned up a fossil human skull. Subsequent excavation uncovered more bones from other individuals, along with animal remains and stone tools. Originally thought to be 40,000-year-old Neandertals, the fossils were later reclassified as Homo sapiens—and eventually redated to roughly 160,000 years ago. Still, the Jebel Irhoud fossils remained something of a mystery because in some respects they looked more primitive than older H....

Why haven’t humans evolved eyes in the back of the head? — B. Craft, Wills Point, Tex. S. Jay Olshansky,a biodemographer at the University of Illinois at Chicago, looks into this query: As much as we might appreciate the value of detecting predators that approach from behind—or of keeping an eye on the offspring who follow us—it is important to remember that selection is not directed toward the development or formation of anything, let alone “perfect” organs....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Grassroots volunteer efforts are “springing up” across the U.S. to help older adults navigate the confusing web sites for making COVID-19 vaccine appointments, reports freelance science writer Marla Broadfoot for Scientific American (3/3/21). Organized efforts are helping people in California, Kentucky and Maryland, some of which are bilingual in Spanish and in English, the story states....

An E.U. body has outlined a plan to phase out most fossil-fueled cars by 2050. Europe already has among the highest fuel taxes in the world, and Europeans are already used to smaller cars, more transit and more walking than elsewhere in the developed world. Yet in a white paper released Monday, the European Commission said that to meet climate goals by midcentury, gasoline- and diesel-run cars must disappear from cities....

CARNATION, Wash. – Even on a foggy fall day, the view is beautiful near this aptly named hamlet 25 miles east of Seattle: rows of dahlias create a canvas of colors across the Snoqualmie Valley. But when the Snoqualmie River floods – and it’s been doing so more often in recent years – the scene turns wretched. Water can be six feet deep, swamping everything. This fall, the river started rising in September after unusually heavy rains....

A mining crew is trapped deep underground after a cave-in. Firefighters run into a smoke-spewing high-rise to battle a violent blaze. A team of soldiers breaches a door and storms into a dark building. In any of these life-threatening scenarios, the direst question on the lips of rescuers or supervisors is, “Where are they right now?” Dr. Alonzo Kelly, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center, has a solution to answer that query....

Think of overfishing and sea creatures like majestic bluefin tuna, steely sharks or New England’s treasured cod come to mind. For most of us, seaweed isn’t part of the overfishing conversation. But the Marine Stewardship Council, best known for its ecolabeling and certification program for wild seafood, says seaweeds are an important component of the marine ecosystem that deserve more attention and protection. Last month the MSC announced its plan to develop the first global standard for sustainable seaweed....

Three days after a wind-whipped blaze claimed the lives of 19 “hotshot” firefighters near Yarnell, Ariz., investigators have begun the grim work of establishing how nature and chance could have gotten the better of a team of the fire service’s best. “What I can tell you is that our hotshot crews are some of our most elite firefighters. They were trained for almost anything,” said Bequi Livingston, an 18-year veteran of the hotshots who now works as a fire operations health and safety specialist with the Forest Service’s Southwest Region....

The world’s biggest active volcano, Hawaii’s towering Mauna Loa, may be rumbling back to life, according to the Hawaii Volcano Observatory. But don’t change any tropical vacation plans yet: there are no signs the massive peak plans to erupt, the observatory said in its weekly update, released June 12. Rather, what’s jolted the interest of observatory geologists is a jump in the number of tiny earthquakes jarring Mauna Loa. Four separate earthquake swarms — clusters of earthquakes grouped closely in time and location — have occurred since March 2013 beneath Mauna Loa....

Exotic particles can be incredibly ephemeral, sticking around for tiny fractions of a second before decaying. The recent discovery of a new type of particle called a tetraquark may turn out to be equally short-lived, according to a new study casting doubt on the finding, although the issue is not yet settled. The new tetraquark—an arrangement of four quarks, the fundamental particles that build up the protons and neutrons inside atoms—was first announced in late February by physicists taking part in the DZero experiment at the Tevatron collider at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois....

By Richard Monastersky of Nature magazineThe U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is embarking on a $100-million research program to investigate what will happen to the 1,500 billion tonnes of organic carbon locked up in frozen soils of the far northern permafrost when they thaw in the rapidly warming Arctic climate.The program, called the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments–Arctic (NGEE), is designed to develop a fine-scale model that can simulate how soil microbes, plants and groundwater interact on the scale of centimeters to tens of meters, to control the amount of organic carbon stored underground in the permafrost zone....

The world of science news was recently abuzz with an incredibly exciting new discovery—a roughly Earth-mass planet orbiting the star Proxima Centauri a mere 4.2 lightyears away. The discovery has been described as an “astronomy dream come true.” As shocking as it sounds, we find exoplanets, or planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, all the time now. We know of nearly 3,000 such planets plus another 2,500 planet candidates. So what makes this recent discovery, dubbed Proxima b, so particularly exciting?...

The first of the latest round of IPCC reports was released today in Stockholm. Ever since 1990 when the first assessment was released, the science community,on a cycle of roughly every five years or so, goes through a huge collaborative effort to collectively agree on what we know about climate change and express this knowledge in a comprehensive assessment report that is reviewed and vetted by scientists and policymakers before being released to the public....

Two very different Saturn moons hang near the giant planet’s iconic rings in a beatiful new photo from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The photo, which was taken on Oct. 27 but just released Tuesday (Jan. 19), shows the spherical Tethys and the lumpy Janus, whose disparate shapes are a direct result of their divergent sizes. “Moons like Tethys (660 miles or 1,062 kilometers across) are large enough that their own gravity is sufficient to overcome the material strength of the substances they are made of (mostly ice in the case of Tethys) and mold them into spherical shapes,” NASA officials wrote in a description of the image....