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The world is full of Good Samaritans; you’ll find many of them in your own body. James J. Collins, a biologist at Boston University, has found that small numbers of drug-resistant bacteria help their vulnerable counterparts survive antibiotic onslaughts, even at a cost to themselves. Collins and his colleagues exposed one culture of Escherichia coli—some strains of which colonize the human and animal gut; others of which are notorious for causing disease outbreaks—to increasing amounts of an antibiotic over time....

MARRAKECH, Morocco—The Obama administration fulfilled what is probably its final major contribution to the Paris Agreement yesterday, releasing an outline for how the United States can act in the long term to help the world keep warming to a safe level. The midcentury deep decarbonization strategy, developed in collaboration with Canada and Mexico, envisions a future where the world’s largest economy transitions almost entirely to non-fossil-fuel energy sources for transportation and electricity, expands forests and continues to phase down non-carbon-dioxide greenhouse gases....

LONDON – Plankton, tiny marine organisms, are a good way of cleansing the atmosphere of one of the main greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide. To do this they need dissolved iron to help them to grow, and if they lack iron then they cannot do much to reduce CO2 levels. So the eruption in 2010 of an Icelandic volcano gave scientists a perfect opportunity to see how much the cataclysm helped the plankton by showering them with unexpected clouds of iron....

By Eric Hand of Nature magazineWho would have thought that a ringside seat at some of the Universe’s most extreme events could come cheap? But by the standards of space-based astronomy, the NuSTAR telescope that NASA plans to launch as early as this month has a modest budget, US$165 million. Yet it will be sensitive to the high-energy photons produced at the turbulent thresholds of supermassive black holes.Due to be lofted into orbit by a Pegasus rocket launched in mid-air from a carrier jet, NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) is taking aim at an under-explored region of the spectrum....

Imagine a metal arch that, at its highest point, is taller than the Statue of Liberty. Now picture it sliding along the ground for a distance of about three football fields, making it the biggest movable structure ever built. Under this steel rainbow, engineers are planning to entomb the site of the worst nuclear accident in history, at the Chernobyl power plant in the Ukraine, using robotics to dismantle the ruins and permanently seal the wreckage....

One of the greenhouses at the New York Botanical Garden currently reeks. The culprit is a corpse flower—a plant that blooms as rarely as once a decade and maintains its flower for only about 36 hours. The New York Botantical Garden hasn’t had a corpse flower since 1939. This particular 1.9-meter specimen has been 10 years in the making. What exactly does it smell like? “Like if you cook cabbage and steam it, and then you leave it overnight,” says Lameta Nolan, a vistor to the special event....

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying. So wrote 17th-century English poet Robert Herrick, capturing the universal clich that time flies. And who could doubt that it does? The passage of time is probably the most basic facet of human perception, for we feel time slipping by in our innermost selves in a manner that is altogether more intimate than our experience of, say, space or mass....

Editor’s Note: This review, by John Holdren, of Power to the People: How the Coming Energy Revolution Will Transform an Industry, Change Our Lives, and Maybe Even Save the Planet, by Vijay Vaitheeswaran (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), was first published in our December 2003 issue. We are republishing it because of reports that Pres. Barack Obama has picked Holden as his science adviser. For more by Holden, see “The Future of Climate Change Policy: The U....

Carried by the wind, dust particles from places such as the Sahara Desert can float halfway around the world before settling to the ground. As the plastics discarded by humans break down into tiny pieces in the environment, they, too, drift through the atmosphere. Now scientists are a step closer to understanding how these globe-trotting microplastics travel—both locally and on long-distance flights. Researchers spent more than a year collecting microplastics from 11 national parks and wilderness areas in the western U....

Like sex, money is a topic that most people avoid discussing publicly. Yet we regularly leave digital traces of our economic standing—even when expressing ourselves within Twitter’s 140-character limit. In an analysis of roughly 10.8 million tweets posted by more than 5,000 users of the online social media network, the pithy messages were found to provide enough information to reveal a user’s income bracket. Daniel Preot¸iuc-Pietro, a postdoctoral researcher in natural language processing at the University of Pennsylvania, and his colleagues relied on self-identified profession to sort 90 percent of their sample into corresponding income groups....

The main dinner course was just being served in the massive, ancient Greek hall when the expansive ceiling collapsed, crushing every one of the many guests in their seats. Not a single attendee survived, except for the poet Simonides, who had left the room just before the tragedy. In the days that followed, workers who lifted the heavy rubble found that the victims were so horribly disfigured that they were impossible to identify....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Nazca civilization flourished in southern Peru between 200 BCE and 600 CE and amongst their most famous legacies are the geoglyphs and lines - often referred to as Nazca Lines - along the eastern coast of Peru and northern Chile. The designs are stylized drawings of animals, plants and humans or simple lines connecting sacred sites or pointing to water sources....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Sometimes it is the smallest discoveries that have the largest impact. When Alexandra Kleinerman and Alhena Gadotti found a new fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh in 2015 CE, it did not seem to be particularly impressive. The broken tablet bore just 16 lines of text, most of it already known from other manuscripts....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In many depictions of Vikings, whether in film or other media, a group is often seen gathered around a flaming pit while an animal of some type – usually a boar – turns on a spit above. While the people of Scandinavia certainly ate meat, it was not a central part of their diet as they seem to have relied more on dairy products, fruits, and vegetables....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Persian miniature painting is a courtly and aristocratic art, with exquisite colors, balanced compositions, and meticulous attention to detail. Although its origins can be difficult to trace, many consider the Arzhang, the illustrated book of prophet Mani (founder of Manichaeism and himself also an artist) from the 3rd century CE during the Sassanian Empire as the foundation of Persian schools of painting....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The capture of Jerusalem from Muslim control was the primary goal of the First Crusade (1095-1102 CE), a combined military campaign organised by western rulers, the Pope, and the Byzantine Empire. After a brief siege, the city was captured on 15 July 1099 CE and the population massacred....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Heroon of Trysa was the tomb of a powerful Lycian dynast surrounded by a precinct wall covered with remarkable mythological friezes. It was discovered in 1841 CE when a Polish-Prussian school teacher and classical philologist, Julius August Schönborn (1801-1857 CE), set out to explore the Teke Peninsula in southwest Turkey....

Mapping a galaxy isn’t easy when you live inside it. It took astronomers a century after the discovery of the first celestial spiral to prove that the Milky Way itself looks like a giant spiral. Its spiral arms squeeze interstellar gas and dust, causing gas clouds to grow dense, collapse and create new stars; the brightest newborn stars illuminate the arms so gloriously that spiral galaxies resemble glowing cosmic hurricanes. The Milky Way has several of these arms....

In the U.S. it’s uncommon to encounter counterfeit pharmaceuticals, drugs that are manufactured illegally and passed off as the genuine articles. But in countries with weaker regulatory systems such as India and Nigeria these drugs make up 25 to 70 percent of the pharmaceuticals available to consumers. In 2010 counterfeit drugs made up a $75-billion industry, one that only seems to be growing. Because the majority of these drugs—intended to treat patients—contain too much or too little of the active ingredient, anywhere from 100,000 to one million people die every year worldwide....

What do you do when your spacecraft runs out of fuel after a 20-year journey? Send it barreling into the planet it has studied for more than a decade in a final blaze of glory, of course. The Cassini mission launched on October 15, 1997. Seven years later the spacecraft entered Saturn’s orbit. Since then it has made some incredible discoveries at the solar system’s second-largest world, including finding liquid hydrocarbon lakes on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, as well as spying plumes of water ice and particles jetting from a subsurface ocean within another moon, Enceladus....