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Between bouts of eating this Thanksgiving weekend you might want to head outside and toss a football, shoot some hoops or kick a soccer ball around to get a little exercise. If the weather’s nasty (or if you live in Buffalo) perhaps Ping Pong or a game of pool will do. Can’t get any people in your house off the couch? Ask a robot. Of course “a robot that plays soccer” could mean anything from a little cube 15 centimeters high that pushes a tiny ball on a tabletop field, to supersize automatons....

Key Concepts Sound Frequency Pitch Hearing Introduction Ever wonder why some adults experience trouble with hearing as they get older? Hearing loss tends to become more severe as we age. But does hearing loss cause everything to sound uniformly softer or do certain sounds become harder to hear than others? Some security companies recently began manufacturing machines designed to emit an annoying sound that prevents teenagers from loitering outside stores and shops....

The coronavirus pandemic has the potential to permanently boost the popularity of telecommuting, say workplace experts—a societal shift that would have a profound impact on U.S. climate emissions. Due to the outbreak, millions more Americans are doing their jobs from home. And thanks to advances in technology—and a little nudge from widespread stay-at-home orders—the temporary fix could become much more commonplace. The shift in lifestyle would represent a major climate victory, said Harriet Tregoning, a former senior official in the Obama administration at the Department of Housing and Urban Development....

If she makes it through the nomination process, Judge Sonia Sotomayor would not only be the first Hispanic to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, she would also be the first member with type 1 diabetes. At age 8, Sotomayor was diagnosed with the chronic condition, which reduces her life expectancy by five to 10 years relative to her peers. And because the disease also puts individuals at risk of cardiovascular problems, kidney failure, nerve damage and even blindness, there has been some concern about ability to fulfill her role as a justice....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. King Mithridates VI of Pontus, also known as Mithradates VI Eupator Dionysus and Mithridates the Great (135–63 BCE, r. 120-63 BCE) was a dogged Roman foe for much of his life. In 88 BCE, he orchestrated the mass killing of up to 150,000 Roman and Italian noncombatants in a single day, if the number of victims Plutarch gave is to be believed, and over the course of decades, he was embroiled in intermittent, bitter conflicts with the Roman Republic....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant is a literary work from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt (2040-1782 BCE) which illustrates the value society placed on the concept of justice and equality under the law. In the story, a peasant named Khun-Anup is beaten and robbed by Nemtynakht, a wealthy landowner, who then tells him there is no use in complaining to the authorities because no one will listen to a poor man....

Considering its tumultuous nature, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) exhibits a surprisingly ordered magnetic field, astronomers have discovered. The observations, detailed today in the journal Science, have resulted in the most detailed map yet of another galaxy’s magnetism and provide a starting point for determining the magnetism of most of the local universe. The LMC is the Milky Way galaxy’s closest neighbor and, as a result, feels the effects of our galaxy’s gravity....

The popular idea that chemistry is now conceptually understood and that all we have to do is use it is false. Sure, most of the products we use in our daily lives were made possible by modern chemistry. But producing useful compounds is far from all chemists do. In fact, many of the most pressing problems of modernity—from making cars cleaner to altering the fate of living cells—are, at heart, problems in chemistry and will require chemists to solve them....

For Duffy, that encounter with the porcupinefish (Diodon hystrix) brought to life a concept that had long been simmering in the back of his head: that the health of an ecosystem may depend not only on the number of species present, but also on the diversity of their traits. This idea, which goes by the name of functional-trait ecology, had been part of his lab work for years but had always felt academic and abstract, says Duffy, now director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network in Washington DC....

Mind-controlled prosthetic limbs have been a reality for a few years, but researchers have not found ways to give the people who use them the same, smooth motor control that people have over their natural limbs. Now, a team of researchers says the members have solved part of the problem of smooth motor control by connecting an artificial limb to a different part of the brain. Previous designs for mind-controlled prostheses linked the artificial limb to either the person’s motor cortex or the individual’s premotor cortex, which both translate signals from the brain to the limbs....

Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It’s True? by Charles Seife Viking, 2014 Modern technology, especially the World Wide Web, has profoundly altered how people find and interpret information, journalist Seife argues, and even how we interact with the world around us. “We now live in a world where the real and the virtual can no longer be disentangled,” he writes, illustrating his case with stories of Web hoaxes and viral falsehoods that have fooled experts, journalists and the public alike....

SAN FRANCISCO—Voters have turned back an effort to suspend California’s efforts to tackle climate change, a wide-reaching program ranging from a cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gas emissions to energy efficiency standards for televisions. In 2006 California passed a law—the Global Warming Solutions Act (Assembly Bill 32)—that pledged the state to reduce its greenhouse gas emission levels back to 1990 levels by 2020. That’s reducing to 427 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted per year; current emissions in the state are roughly 525 million metric tons of greenhouse gases and have been projected to exceed 600 million metric tons by 2020 without such efforts....

By Janet FangA study of sexually scrambled chickens suggests that sex in birds is determined in a radically different way from that in mammals.Researchers studied three chickens that appeared to be literally half-male and half-female, and found that nearly every cell in their bodies–from wattle to toe–has an inherent sex identity. This cell-by-cell sex orientation contrasts sharply with the situation in mammals, in which organism-wide sex identity is established through hormones....

As winter retreats northward across the nation, gardeners are cleaning tools and turning attention to spring planting. But climate change is adding a new wrinkle, and now a standard reference – the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Plant Hardiness Zone Map – is about to make very clear how much rising temperatures have shifted planting zones northward. The guide, last updated in 1990, shows where various species can be expected to thrive....

Outnumbering our human cells by about 10 to one, the many minuscule microbes that live in and on our bodies are a big part of crucial everyday functions. The lion’s share live in the intestinal tract, where they help fend off bad bacteria and aid in digesting our dinners. But as scientists use genetics to uncover what microbes are actually present and what they’re doing in there, they are discovering that the bugs play an even larger role in human health than previously suspected—and perhaps at times exerting more influence than human genes themselves....

In 2008 americans spent more than $14 billion on heartburn treatments called proton pump inhibitors—such as Nexium, Prevacid and Protonix—making them second only to lipid regulators as the best-selling drug class in the country. But recent research suggests that the popularity of these drugs in part results from unnecessary prescriptions that may be putting millions of people at risk. Long-term use has been linked to withdrawal symptoms, an increased risk of bacterial infection, hip fracture and even possibly nutritional deficiencies....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. In Coningsby, a Benjamin Disraeli novel published in 1844, a character impressed with the technological spirit of the age remarks, “I see cities peopled with machines. Certainly Manchester is the most wonderful city of modern times.” Today, of course, Manchester is mainly associated with urban decline. There is a simple economic explanation for this, and one that can help guide cities and nations as they prepare for another technological revolution....

Sweat streamed down my back, thorny shrubs cut my arms, and we were losing them again. The wild chimpanzees my colleagues and I had been following for nearly five hours had stopped their grunting, hooting and screeching. Usually these calls helped us follow the animals through Uganda’s Kibale Forest. For three large males to quiet abruptly surely meant trouble. Suddenly, as we approached a small clearing, we spotted them standing below a massive fig tree and looking up at a troop of red colobus monkeys eating and playing in the treetop....

For years, analysts at the Alaska Earthquake Center, while tracking about 100 temblors a day in the most seismically active U.S. state, have dutifully filtered out some of the Earth-shaking events that trip the sensors. The analysts would mark these distinctive readings with the letter, “G,” for “glacier.” The readings, considered a curious by-product of the effort to track earthquakes, were from calving glaciers. Some registered as high as magnitude 3....

OK, we know Microsoft’s tablet OS isn’t popular. So, what’s next? First, a look at the short, checkered past of RT, which rolled out on October 26, 2012. Vendors wary. Very wary: Hewlett-Packard, the No.1 PC maker, never participated in RT. Neither did Toshiba. Samsung made a weak attempt at one tablet that never launched in the U.S. Then pulled out. Asus eventually gave up. Acer eventually threw in the towel too – at least for now....