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The last time anyone in a big city saw a dark and stormy night was when winds knocked out the power grid. Storm clouds looming over skyscrapers now glow orange with light pollution instead of providing the cover of darkness, a new study confirms. “In a modern world, you would have to say it’s a bright and stormy night,” said Frank Hölker, a study co-author and ecologist at Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, Germany....

Key concepts Gravity Meteors Plate tectonics From National Science Education Standards: Earth’s history Introduction The surface of the moon is full of jagged craters. This rough surface comes from millions of years of collisions with rocks—called meteors—that crash into its surface. Why doesn’t Earth’s surface look like that? Earth’s surface does have some evidence of meteorites, such as the massive Meteor Crater site in Arizona. That crater is about 4,000 feet (1,219 meters) across and about 570 feet (174 meters) deep....

Male Antechinus stuartii–a brown, mouse-size, insect-eating marsupial with bigger eyes but the same hairless tail as a rat–have a short and desperate life. Heading into the Australian winter, roughly 10 months after birth, the small creatures stop producing sperm and enter an intense, two-week mating season with a finite store of the means to pass on their own genes. Over the course of that season, the marsupial mice engage in mating sessions of five to 14 hours and, of course, copulate with as many females as possible....

Biologists are racing to secure a visit to a newly revealed region of the Southern Ocean as soon as it is safe to sail there. One of the largest icebergs ever recorded broke free from the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula in July. As it moves away into the Weddell Sea, it will expose 5,800 square kilometres of sea floor that have been shielded by ice for up to 120,000 years....

On Friday evening (Oct. 18), the moon will undergo an eclipse of minor importance — a “penumbral” lunar eclipse. For nearly four hours on Friday, at least some part of the southern portion of the moon will be within Earth’s pale penumbra, our planet’s faint outer shadow. Penumbral lunar eclipses are rather subtle events that are usually difficult to detect unless at least 70 percent of the moon’s diameter shaded. So the penumbra may be marginally detectable over the moon’s southernmost limb for just a short period centered on the time of the deepest phase/greatest eclipse (7:50 p....

In a 2004 episode of South Park, the scamps think of themselves as warriors in an anime fantasy. Within that context, Cartman believes he has the power of invisibility—provided he removes all his clothing. He then tiptoes naked out of his constructed reality and into an auction before a large, shocked audience. His delusion is broken when the auctioneer says to him, “Kid, what the hell do you think you’re doing?...

The throaty, melodic groans of a cello playing Bach fill the darkened space of a music hall. Each rich note reaches the audience via sound waves that radiate from the body of the instrument like ripples created by a pebble plunked into a still pond.* Some waves hit listeners’ ears directly; others reflect off of the walls and ceiling, reverberating and surrounding the audience with sound. The best concert halls are built to showcase the performers’ skill, but evaluating their acoustics can be a challenge, because the quality of sound is subjective....

APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY, Laurel, Md.—Etched by canyons, crinkled by mountains, and cleansed of craters, the surface of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, are unexpectedly dynamic, according to the first high-resolution images downloaded by the New Horizons team this morning. Mission scientists describe the findings as almost paradoxical, because the two worlds had been thought too small to sustain the internal heat that drives geologic activity on Earth, and they do not experience the tidal heating that drives such activity elsewhere in the outer solar system....

Researchers who study obesity can calculate calories, measure weight and, over time, convincingly link the two. That straightforward equation supports a sim­ple argument for altering the built environ­ment to get children moving. But could a less clinical connection with nature be equally important? Across the nation, researchers, environmentalists and political leaders are sounding the alarm over a nonmedical condition dubbed “nature-deficit disorder.” In a popular 2006 book, Last Child in the Woods, journalist Richard Louv coined the term, which he defined as a critical disconnect between children and nature....

On April 30, 2018, the Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō crater on Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano suddenly collapsed—marking the starting point for its largest eruption in at least 200 years. The lava lake inside another crater drained into the ground. Roughly 60,000 earthquakes struck the region. New fissures ripped open along the volcano’s slopes and poured approximately one billion cubic yards of lava over streets and neighborhoods—enough to destroy 716 dwellings and to build 875 acres of new land....

Visitors to YouTube, which now boasts the Internet’s second-largest search engine, have uploaded hundreds of millions of videos since its launch in early 2005. For most people YouTube (Google bought the video-sharing site for $1.65 billion in late 2006) is a valuable outlet for sharing personal videos, catching up on college lectures, consulting “how-to” clips and absorbing pop-culture nuggets like “Weird Al” Yankovic’s parody of Lady Gaga. Until recently, however, the tens of millions of deaf and hearing-impaired (in the U....

An international team of scientists has determined the itinerary of the seasonal flu, paving the way for better monitoring and more effective vaccines. The researchers report in Science that they sussed out the bug’s travel plans by studying 13,000 samples of the virus collected from every continent (except Antarctica) over the past five years. Among their findings: seasonal flu originates in eastern and Southeast Asia. The result broadens previous hypotheses that such viruses emerged in China or exclusively in tropical regions....

EDITOR’S NOTE: We now know that a single-celled sporozoan of the Plasmodium genus causes malaria. It was discovered to be a parasite in 1880, by Alphonse Laveran, a French army surgeon in Algeria, and its transmission by the mosquito was first demonstrated in 1897 by Ronald Ross, a British officer in the Indian Medical Service. This article was published in these pages on July 20, 1861. As you read this article you sense the struggle to understand the parts of the puzzle of this disease (and other diseases transmitted also by mosquitoes and bad hygiene)....

Coronavirus cases in the U.S. have been plummeting since their recent peak in mid-September, and practically everyone has grown tired of COVID precautions. But cases plateaued in early November, and winter is coming. Experts warn it is not safe to let down our guard just yet. Some western states, such as Alaska, Colorado and North Dakota, have become COVID hotspots as colder weather moves activities indoors, suggesting another national surge may be ahead....

Doctors today performed an autopsy on Jett Travolta, the 16-year-old son of actors John Travolta and Kelly Preston, who died Friday. The results were not immediately released, but family attorney Michael Ossi told TMZ that the teen died after suffering a seizure and hitting his head on a bathtub or toilet seat in the family’s home in the Bahamas, where they were spending the holidays. Preston said six years ago that Jett became very ill at age two and was diagnosed with Kawasaki syndrome, a rare inflammatory condition most common in young children....

Toddlers with autism are oblivious to the social information in the eyes, but don’t actively avoid meeting another person’s gaze, according to a new study. The findings support one side of a long-standing debate: Do children with autism tend not to look others in the eye because they are uninterested or because they find eye contact unpleasant? “This question about why do we see reduced eye contact in autism has been around for a long time,” says study leader Warren Jones, director of research at the Marcus Autism Center in Atlanta, Georgia....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The great temples and monuments of ancient Egypt continue to fascinate and amaze people in the modern day. The sheer size and scope of structures like the Great Pyramid at Giza or the Temple of Amun at Karnak or the Colossi of Memnon are literally awe-inspiring and naturally encourage questions regarding how they were built....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Throughout ancient Korea’s history Buddhist monks were a particularly important element of state and religious affairs. From the 4th century CE onwards, in the Three Kingdoms period, they were members of a select section of society which travelled and studied abroad, especially in China. Consequently, they were largely responsible for transmitting elements of Chinese culture into Korea and spreading the religious ideas they had acquired from studying under the great Chinese masters....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435-356 BCE) was a hedonistic Greek philosopher who taught that the meaning of life was pleasure and that the pursuit of pleasure, therefore, was the most noble path one could pursue. Along with Plato, Xenophon, Antisthenes, and others, he was one of the followers of Socrates....

In September 2000 the world’s leaders, assembled at the United Nations, adopted the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as shared commitments to fighting extreme poverty, hunger and disease through 2015. Halfway to the target date, there are heartening examples of dramatic progress, such as the 91 percent reduction in measles deaths in Africa and new inroads against malaria. Overall, the gains remain too slow, especially in Africa. Yet specific and accelerated investments in the poor countries can still deliver the MDGs on schedule....