By Jo Marchant of Nature magazineBrendan Foley peels his wetsuit to the waist and perches on the side of an inflatable boat as it skims across the sea just north of the island of Crete. At his feet are the dripping remains of a vase that moments earlier had been resting on the sea floor, its home for more than a millennium. “It’s our best day so far,” he says of his dive that morning....
The first steps that our earliest human ancestors took on two legs may arguably be the biggest ever, for both a man and mankind. Why the switch from all fours to just two limbs? The answer, according to a new study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA: to save a few calories. Anthropologist Herman Pontzer and colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis compared the energy expended when chimpanzees walk on either four or two legs with that used by humans walking upright....
Physicists know little about what spacetime is made of or which rules it follows on very small scales. The latest research into quantum mechanics, however, could shed new light on the nature of the fabric of the universe, says theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario. Arkani-Hamed will explain this idea Thursday at 7 P.M. EST in a public lecture that will be broadcast live here on this page....
Editor’s Note: This piece was part of a larger feature first published in our May 2002 issue. We are posting it because of news from the JUPITER trial, which is alluded to here. In deciding whether a patient requires therapy to prevent an atherosclerosis-related heart attack or stroke, physicians usually rely heavily on measurements of cholesterol in the person’s blood. But that approach misses a great many vulnerable individuals. Several studies suggest that measuring blood concentrations of C-reactive protein – or CRP, a marker of inflammation – could add useful information....
What makes harmless little green grasshoppers turn into brown, crop-chomping clouds of swarming locusts? Serotonin, according to a study published this week in Science. Researchers from universities in the UK and Australia found that that neurotransmitter (a chemical compound that sends impulses between nerve cells and affects everything from sleep to aggression in humans) spurs a cascade of Dr. Jekyll-to-Mr. Hyde–like changes in at least one species of grasshopper — the desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria)....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. As a superpower in its own right and in competition with Rome, Parthia’s empire - ruling from 247 BCE to 224 CE - stretched between the Mediterranean in the west to India in the east. Not only did the Parthians win battles against Rome they were also successful commercial competitors....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. We are pleased to announce that we have entered into a partnership with Mohawk Games a games company that shares our goal of engaging people with ancient history. Mohawk Games has just published Old World, a historical strategy game about classical antiquity in the Mediterranean, and World History Encyclopedia is using the game’s stunning artistic representations of antiquity to illustrate the world’s most-read history encyclopedia....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Roman Empire in the early 1st century CE was often regarded as the perfect empire. The outstanding military prowess of the Romans was used to expand the empire, and once the territories were acceptably pacified, Roman political power was installed from the capital of the empire to the local governments of the territories....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Among the most engaging and influential works from Egyptian literature are the stories in the cycle known as Setna I and Setna II or The Tales of Prince Setna. These are fictional works from the Late Period of Ancient Egypt (525-332 BCE), the Ptolemaic Period (323 -30 BCE), and Roman Egypt (30 BCE-646 CE)....
Locked in frozen vaults in Antarctica and Greenland, a lost world of ancient creatures awaits another chance at life. Once thought to be too harsh and inhospitable to support any living thing, the polar ice sheets are now known to be a gigantic reservoir of microbial life, trapped longer than modern humans have walked the planet. With that ice melting at an alarming rate, the earth could soon see masses of bacteria and other microbes the likes of which it has not seen since the Middle Pleistocene, a previous period of major climate change, some 750,000 years ago....
The mystery of Whitney Houston’s death will not be solved for several weeks, as the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office awaits a full toxicology report. But many experts speculate that the singer’s tragic demise involved a deadly cocktail of alcohol and prescription drugs, including Xanax. Houston wouldn’t be the first star to suffer such a fate: Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith are all thought to have died in part from prescription drug overdoses, which can involve painkillers, sedatives and stimulants, often in combination with alcohol....
With that folk diagnosis in hand, the two Western doctors observing her visit—Bertrand Graz of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and Merlin Willcox of the University of Oxford—got to work. The woman signed an informed-consent form, provided her medical history, and allowed the researchers to take a prick of her blood for parasite counts and other analyses. She would be taking part in a remarkable study to measure the cure rate of an herbal tea prepared with the leaves of a canary yellow poppy....
Little Black Creek has a long history of abuse. The stream in western Michigan runs through an industrialized area, and its sediment has some of the highest levels of cadmium found anywhere in the Great Lakes. Its banks are so eroded and its water so contaminated that it is unable to sustain its native, cold-water trout. And, every time it rains, one of Little Black Creek’s biggest threats rushes in. Nearly one-third of the land around the creek is buried under urban concrete, asphalt and buildings....
In Mozambique, as in much of the world, people cook with charcoal. The dirty fuel causes smoke and soot to billow into their homes. As a result, cardiovascular and lung diseases are rampant from breathing such smoky indoor air—a problem that kills at least two million people worldwide prematurely every year, primarily women and children. Burning charcoal to cook exacerbates pneumonia, emphysema, tuberculosis and even low intelligence, among other human health issues....
BirdsEye Developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, BirdsEye has entries on hundreds of the most frequently seen North American bird species and includes images and bird sounds. It helps to guide avid watchers to birds in their area, based on sightings submitted online to eBird.org, a project of Cornell University and the National Audubon Society. Scientists use these observations to figure out the birds’ range, movements and abundance....
A glider that aims to soar higher than any other piloted aircraft will begin its first campaign this month in the skies above Argentina. For its pilots and engineers, the Perlan Project holds the excitement of breaking the world altitude record for gliding—and perhaps one day reaching close to the vacuum of space. But for Elizabeth Austin, the project’s chief scientist, there’s another thrill: the glider will carry scientific instruments for climate, aerospace and stratospheric research that cannot be done using other means....
In high school biology you probably learned that every one of our body’s cells contains the same genome, or pattern of DNA—but it turns out that this is not true of the brain. Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies recently found that the DNA sequence in human neurons can vary not only from that of the rest of the body but even from one brain cell to the next....
The October 2006 issue covered the technological and theological, the massive and minuscule, the provocative and controversial. In “Impact from the Deep,” Peter D. Ward took a fresh look at the earth’s past with a theory that terrestrial heat and gases, not asteroids, most likely caused several mass extinctions. In “Viral Nanoelectronics,” Philip E. Ross described how viruses coated with selected substances can be wrangled into self-assembling as liquid crystals, nano?...
STEPHEN HAWKING, one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century and perhaps the most celebrated icon of contemporary science, has died at the age of 76. The University of Cambridge confirmed that the physicist died in the early hours of March 14 at his home in Cambridge, England. Since his early 20s, Hawking had lived with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease in which motor neurons die, leaving the brain incapable of controlling muscles....
Residents of Hammarby Sjöstad, a district on the south side of Stockholm, Sweden, don’t let their waste go to waste. Every building in the district boasts an array of pneumatic tubes, like larger versions of the ones that whooshed checks from cars to bank tellers back in the day. One tube carries combustible waste to a plant where it is burned to make heat and electricity. Another zips food waste and other biomatter away to be composted and made into fertilizer....
