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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 ancient Celts who occupied large parts of Europe from 700 BCE to 400 CE displayed a clear belief in an afterlife as evidenced in their treatment of the dead. In the absence of extensive written records by the Celts themselves, we are left to surmise their religious beliefs from secondhand classical authors....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The ancient Egyptians believed that life on earth was only one part of an eternal journey which ended, not in death, but in everlasting joy. When one’s body failed, the soul did not die with it but continued on toward an afterlife where one received back all that one had thought lost....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Today we are talking to Jon Shafer, lead designer of the computer game At the Gates, now available on PC, Mac, and Linux. In this game, you control a Barbarian tribe during the Migration Age, helping them survive, grow, and hopefully bring down the Roman Empire. Or, in the words of the game’s creator:...

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Napoleonic Concordat of 1801 defined France’s relationship with the Catholic Church for over 100 years. The Organic Articles were added in 1802 and provided state recognition of the Reformed and Lutheran confessions alongside the Catholic Church. During the 19th century, political upheaval and attempts to reestablish Catholicism as the state religion led to the termination of the Concordat in 1905....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Temple of Vesta is the popular name given to the round temple near the Tiber River in Rome (now Piazza Bocca della Veritá). The association with Vesta is due to the shape of the building but in fact it is not known to which god the temple was dedicated....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The siege of Damascus in 1148 CE was the final act of the Second Crusade (1147-1149 CE). Lasting a mere four days from 24 to 28 July, the siege by a combined western European army was not successful, and the Crusade petered out with its leaders returning home more bitter and angry with each other than the Muslim enemy....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The 167 stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral, built 1190-1220 CE, are the most complete group surviving anywhere from the Middle Ages. Several windows date to the mid-12th century CE while over 150 survive from the early 13th century CE. There are religious scenes to tell the faithful the key stories of the Bible as well as countless depictions of saints, kings, queens, nobles, knights, and priests....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The idea that Cleopatra VII (69-30 BCE), the famous last queen of ancient Egypt, owed her powerful position to her beauty persists. “The nose of Cleopatra: if it had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have changed,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662 CE) ruminated (Pensées, 162)....

The South African fisherman who pulled a prehistoric-looking blue creature out of his net in 1938 had unwittingly snagged one of the zoological finds of the century: a 1.5-meter-long coelacanth, a type of fish that had been thought to have become extinct 70 million years earlier. Since then, scientists have identified two species of coelacanth, one African and one Indonesian. With their fleshy, lobed fins — complete with bones and joints — and round, paddle-like tails, they look strikingly similar to the coelacanths that lived during the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs still roamed Earth....

Imagine yourself gazing at the sky on a summer night. You look in the direction of a particular star that, you have heard, has a special planet orbiting around it. Although you cannot actually see the planet—you can barely see the star itself—you know it is several times larger than Earth and, like Earth, is made mostly of rock. Quakes sometimes shake its surface, much of which is covered by oceans....

According to recent research, extreme weather could cause four times as much economic loss in the U.S. by 2050 as it does today. And that’s without any increase in the frequency or intensity of storms. The main reason for greater risk is that the population in areas prone to rough weather—including the east, west and Gulf coasts—is rising more rapidly than in many other parts of the country, according to Benjamin L....

Scientists have developed a two-pronged protein that grabs immune system cells with one arm and introduces them to cancer cells it has snagged with the other. The result: eradicated tumors—at certain doses. The technology is only in early human clinical trials, but if it proves effective, this new antibody—a protein employed by the immune system to ferret out foreign invaders—could offer way to stop non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas, a type of cancer, in its tracks....

Despite improved therapies that have resulted in improved prognoses in patients with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which in many cases leads to AIDS, there is still an organ in the body affected by the condition that goes largely unaddressed: the brain. According to Stuart Lipton, a professor at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research’s Del E. Webb Center for Neuroscience and Aging Research in La Jolla, Calif., antiviral medications do not successfully cross the blood-brain barrier, allowing the HIV virus to stow away in the brain for up to several years, quietly wreaking havoc....

Excerpted from Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man, by Jason Mark. Island Press. Copyright © 2015. THE COYOTES WOKE ME UP. They were near, I could tell, almost inside our camp, just beyond where the vehicles were parked. A whole pack, howling in the moonless night—a chorus of coyotes on the edge of the wilderness. The sound was clear in the stillness, the wind having settled after days of bluster....

CLIMATEWIRE | When California suffers a heat wave, it leans heavily on hydropower from the Pacific Northwest to keep the lights on. But that hydropower may not always be available when it’s most needed, as climate change is shifting the ground on which the West’s dams sit. Higher temperatures means snowmelt occurs earlier in the year and leaves less water available for power generation during the depths of summer. The result is a heightened risk of blackouts during extreme heat waves as a result of less hydro availability, according to a report out this week from the North American Electric Reliability Corp....

Sometime in the 2010s a Sulphur-crested Cockatoo living in a sleepy suburb of Sydney, Australia, had a breakthrough. This bird, likely a large, dominant male, somehow figured out how to use its powerful beak to grip, pry and flip open the lids of garbage bins to look for food inside. The innovation soon sparked a trend that spread throughout the cockatoo population. Other birds from different suburbs devised their own styles of bin opening, which spread to become local subcultures: Cockatoos from different areas open bins in distinct ways....

Fifty years ago a young astronomer, indulging in a bit of interstellar voyeurism, turned a telescope on the neighbors to see what he could see. In April 1960 at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va., Frank Drake, then 29, trained a 26-meter-wide radio telescope on two nearby stars to seek out transmissions from civilizations possibly in residence there. The search came up empty, but Drake’s Project Ozma began in earnest the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI....

The breakdown of the Washington policy process has four manifestations. First is a chronic inability to focus beyond the next election. “Shovel-ready” projects squeeze out attention to vital longer-term strategies that may require a decade or more. Second, most key decisions are made in congressional backrooms through negotiations with lobbyists, who simultaneously fund the congressional campaigns. Third, technical expertise is largely ignored or bypassed, while expert communities such as climate scientists are falsely and recklessly derided by the Wall Street Journal as a conspiratorial interest group chasing federal grants....

Watch enough science fiction movies and you’ll probably come to the conclusion that humans are living on borrowed time. Whether it’s HAL 9000’s murderous meltdown in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Skynet’s sadistic self-preservation tactics in the Terminator franchise, artificial intelligence usually comes off as a well-intentioned attempt to serve humanity that—through some overlooked technical flaw—ends up trying to extinguish it. The latest dystopian prophecy arrives Friday with the release of Ghost in the Shell, one of a few major releases this year to feature AI prominently in its plot....

In 1974 Stephen Hawking postulated that black holes should give off a trickle of particles, or radiation, from their outer boundaries. The finding established Hawk­­ing’s reputation as a brilliant scientist and set the stage for his highly visible public profile, which includes provocative best-selling books and guest appearances on The Simpsons. In the midst of all the celebrity, the original theory of Hawking radiation, as the black hole phenomenon is known, has almost been forgotten, at least by the general public....