Posts

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—A high-school student from Fort Worth, Texas, won top honors July 11 at the first annual Google Science Fair for her project on drug resistance in ovarian cancer. Shree Bose, 17, investigated the connection between an enzyme called AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) and resistance to the chemotherapy drug cisplatin. Bose inhibited the activity of AMPK to see how it affected the death of cancer cells. She found that inhibiting AMPK in cells produced two different reactions to cisplatin, depending on whether or not the cells were resistant to the drug....

Listener Maurine recently asked me about compression gear on Twitter. This is what she said: “I’d be interested in learning more about leg compression recovery systems. I’ve got lots of compression socks and pants. I’m looking more at machines.” Well, Maurine, today I am going to go through both! What is Compression Clothing? Compression garments are often marketed as a type of magical second skin that is going to improve your athleticism....

You are in a small room in a museum with 999 papyri. Each one displays a single Egyptian hieroglyph. Unfortunately, your familiarity with ancient Egyptian is limited to a few children’s books and several Hollywood films. As the haughty museum curator has reminded you several times, you are an amateur. In fact, your only certain ability is to look at two hieroglyphs and decide whether they are the same or not....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The affair of the diamond necklace (1784-86) was a scandal that centered around Queen Marie Antoinette of France (l. 1755-1793). Although the queen was innocent of any involvement in a plot to steal a luxurious diamond necklace, the scandal succeeded in ruining her already damaged reputation, causing increased disillusionment in the monarchy in the years preceding the French Revolution (1789-1799)....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Herodotus’ section of his Histories on burial in ancient Egypt (Book II.85-90) is an accurate description of Egyptian mummification but he purposefully omits the spiritual significance of embalming in keeping with his commitment to refrain from discussing the religious beliefs of other cultures. The spiritual aspect of embalming, however, was central to the practice and is addressed indirectly....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Setna I (also Setna Khaemaus and the Mummies) is a work of ancient Egyptian literature from the Ptolemaic Period (323-30 BCE) written in demotic script. It is part of a cycle of stories known as the Tales of Prince Setna featuring a character based on Khaemweset (c. 1281 - c....

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 Mars Ultor stands in the Forum of Augustus in Rome and was built to commemorate Augustus’ victory in 42 BCE at the Battle of Philippi over the assassins of Julius Caesar. The building became the place where important military decisions were taken and a site of several state ceremonies with a military connotation....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The island of Gla, an enigmatic Mycenaean citadel in the north-eastern corner of the Copais basin lies 70 miles north of Athens, in the region of Boeotia. Lake Copais was the largest lake in Greece until the late-19th century CE when it was drained to create land for cultivation....

The tiny, intact skeleton of a baby rhinoceroslike dinosaur has been unearthed in Canada. The toddler was just 3 years old and 5 feet (1.5 meters) long when it wandered into a river near Alberta, Canada, and drowned about 70 million years ago. The beast was so well-preserved that some of its skin left impressions in the nearby rock. The fossil is the smallest intact skeleton ever found from a group of horned, plant-eating dinosaurs known as ceratopsids, a group that includes the iconic Triceratops....

The band broke up years ago. Or maybe it just stopped playing, as new members joined and the old harmonious notes turned sour. Never mind the Beatles. The band that broke up before it put out its first album was known as the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord (MGGRA), a nearly forgotten 2007 compact among six governors who realized climate change was a pressing state and regional issue. Their goal: to reduce their states’ carbon footprints and begin the transition to an energy economy built upon efficiency, renewables and carbon cap and trade....

Despite what you see on television, a verdict of “not guilty by reason of insanity” is exceedingly rare. Most defendants with mental illnesses end up incarcerated—studies reveal that fully half of all prisoners have at least one mental disorder. That is one million people in the U.S. alone, and the prison system does very little to successfully treat them. As a result, the recidivism rate among released convicts is especially high for those with serious disorders....

The ability to concentrate on a task is a prized skill—the secret to success, many claim. But recent research suggests that intense focus on a problem does not always usher the fastest progress or, at least, such focus is not always sufficient for the necessary brainstorm. Insights often occur subconsciously while the mind wanders, reports Josie Glausiusz in the March/April Scientific American MIND. Albert Einstein, for example, came up with his theory of relativity only after letting his thoughts stray from the mathematics itself....

Oil spills kill a lot of wildlife quickly, but their long-term effects are hard to establish because to compare the situation before and after a disaster, a study would need to have been already up and running before the disaster occurred. Fortunately, this was precisely the case for a Spanish team of researchers. Back in 1994, marine biologist Álvaro Barros and his colleagues at Spain’s University of Vigo started looking at the reproductive activity of 18 colonies of a diving bird known as the European shag (Phalacrocorax aristotelis)....

In South Carolina a grieving mother whose son died by suicide hands out stickers to young people. The sticker bears the words “Jackson Matters and So Do You.” To be important to others—to matter—has become more than just a truism. “You Matter” is the tagline of the National Suicide Prevention hotline. And the phrase “Black Lives Matter” calls attention to the exclusionary racism to which more than one in eight Americans is exposed....

From the sidewalk there’s almost no evidence that behind the walls of the energy-from-waste plant in Alexandria, Va., an incinerator is burning garbage at more than 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit and providing electricity to thousands of homes. “Everything that the resident puts out on the street in a trash can comes here,” said Bryan Donnelly, the facility manager. At his location, that amounts to about 350,000 tons of municipal waste per year....

The first horses in North America would not have been able to hold their own in the Triple Crown. At just about 5.6 kilograms the Sifrhippus sandrae hoofed onto the scene some 56 million years ago about the size of a small dog. But then a funny thing happened. In the next 130,000 years during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, these small equines got even smaller, reaching the tiny size of 3....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine Medical geneticists are giving genome sequencing its first big test in the clinic by applying it to some of their most baffling cases. By the end of this year, hundreds of children with unexplained forms of intellectual disability and developmental delay will have had their genomes decoded as part of the first large-scale, national clinical sequencing projects. These programs, which were discussed last month at a rare-diseases conference hosted by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, UK, aim to provide a genetic diagnosis that could end years of uncertainty about a child’s disability....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. This is the second part of a series on computer viruses. And if you haven’t listened to the first one, go check out Anatomy of a Virus now, because what I’m about to say will make a whole lot more sense if you do! In my last episode, I mentioned that when you suspect you have a virus, the best fix is to turn off your computer completely....

Charles J. Limb might have been a jazz saxophonist. He grew up in a musical family and showed early signs of talent. He idolized John Coltrane and, as a student at Harvard, directed a jazz band. Although he ultimately went to medical school, he chose his specialty (otolaryngology) in part because of his musical interest. As a hearing specialist and surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, he performs cochlear implants in patients to restore hearing and enable the deaf to appreciate music....

Why is the universe being ripped apart? It’s a question that has plagued astronomers since the discovery in the 1990s that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The story is only further complicated by new observations of distant exploding stars that cast doubt on the leading explanation, called the cosmological constant. Whatever is causing the universe’s acceleration has been named dark energy, but its origins remain mysterious. Back when Albert Einstein was formulating his general theory of relativity he added a repulsive force to his equations called the cosmological constant, which was meant, at the time, to cause the theory to predict a static universe....