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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. Buddhism was introduced to ancient Japan via Korea in the 6th century CE with various sects following in subsequent centuries via China. It was readily accepted by both the elite and ordinary populace because it confirmed the political and economic status quo, offered a welcoming reassurance to the mystery of the afterlife, and complemented existing Shinto beliefs....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation is the first-hand account of the voyage of the ship Mayflower, founding of Plymouth Colony in modern-day Massachusetts, and the further colonization of the region of the United States now known as New England, written between 1630-1651 CE and covering the period 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 concept of the afterlife changed in different eras of Egypt’s very long history, but for the most part, it was imagined as a paradise where one lived eternally. To the Egyptians, their country was the most perfect place which had been created by the gods for human happiness....

Editor’s note: The original online version of this story was previously posted. Over the next five years at least half a million tons of carbon dioxide will be injected into rock deep underneath the Mountaineer power plant near New Haven, W.Va. Although that is less than 0.00001 percent of global emissions of the greenhouse gas and less than 2 percent of the plant’s own CO2 output, the sequestration, which began in September, marks the first commercial demonstration of the only available technological fix for the carbon problem of coal-fired power plants, one that many coal facilities around the world hope to emulate....

The idea of hidden worlds ruled by odd laws of physics sounds like something out of science fiction. Recently, however, scientists observed a hidden, flattened world within a real material built to perfectly conduct electricity. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, researchers reported that electrons in a three-dimensional material behaved as if only two dimensions of space exist. Our lives happen along three spatial dimensions: depth, width and height....

Spurred by mounting scientific evidence, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is initiating a new effort to examine whether low doses of hormone-mimicking chemicals are harming human health and whether chemical testing should be overhauled. The EPA, responding to a report by a group of 12 scientists published in March, is collaborating with other federal agencies to assess whether the traces of chemicals found in food, cosmetics, pesticides and plastics affect human development and reproduction....

Scientists have developed a new technique to predict the behavior of wildfires, using high-resolution satellite imagery to periodically check and revise computer simulations. The work, which was carried out in collaboration by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., and the University of Maryland, appeared yesterday in an online issue of the Geophysical Research Letters. Wildfire behavior is, as a general rule, notoriously unpredictable. A small blaze can smolder for days before flaring up in force, and once going, it tends to travel wherever the wind blows....

The Bush administration and a consortium of tech companies Tuesday vowed to drive down government and corporate data center energy use by 10 percent by 2011, saving about 10 billion kilowatt-hours, or roughly the amount of energy consumed by one million U.S. households annually. The forests of monolithic computer servers that comprise today’s data centers have grown into an indispensable component of modern life, crunching volumes of information and ensuring that Google or Yahoo search engine results are delivered in mere seconds....

Fourteen years ago, University of Washington researcher Daniel Jaffe installed an air pollution monitor on a mountainside outside Eugene, Ore. His intention was to measure pollution levels, with a particular focus on tracking emissions from China that drift into the United States in the spring. But in recent years, the monitor has unexpectedly produced a second and more urgent data set: tracking fine particle pollution from wildfires in the western United States....

Based on its long-term orbit, Earth should be heading into an ice age. But instead of continuing to cool—as it had been for at least the past 2,000 years—the Arctic has started to warm. And the reason is humans’ impact on the composition of the atmosphere, new research suggests. To look at this trend, geologist Darrell Kaufman of Northern Arizona University and a consortium of colleagues reconstructed Arctic temperatures decade by decade over the past two millennia by pulling sediment cores from the bottoms of 14 Arctic lakes—backed up by records in tree rings and ice cores....

Do the smartest presidents make the best presidents? This question invariably emerges as a topic of spirited debate when the U.S. presidential election approaches. In 2004, former New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines asked, “Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush?” Citing Bush’s and Kerry’s scores on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery—an IQ-like test that the military uses to determine whether a recruit is qualified for enlistment—the conservative pundit Steve Sailer countered that there was no doubt that, in fact, Bush had the higher IQ....

Researchers have discovered more than 200 previously unknown viruses in a category whose members cause illnesses such as influenza and haemorrhagic fevers. The scientists also traced the origins of these RNA viruses back hundreds of millions of years to when most modern animals started to appear. The findings1, published online in Nature on 4 April, could help scientists to identify the RNA viruses that might infect people in the future, says Mya Breitbart, an environmental virologist at the University of South Florida in St Petersburg....

Scientific American presents Everyday Einstein by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Hi, I’m Dr. Sabrina Stierwalt, the Everyday Einstein, here with Quick and Dirty Tips to help you make sense of science. This coming week is a holiday here in the United States in which we celebrate the life and accomplishments of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, a civil rights activist who played an important role in ending segregation....

Lyme disease may surge this year in the northeastern United States and is already spreading into Canada from a confluence of factors including acorns, mice and the climate.The illness is transmitted from mice and deer to humans via bites from the black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis, usually in forested areas. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Lyme disease is the most commonly reported vector-borne illness in the United States....

Unlike their elephant cousins, woolly mammoths were creatures of the cold, with long hairy coats, thick layers of fat and small ears that kept heat loss to a minimum. For the first time, scientists have comprehensively catalogued the hundreds of genetic mutations that gave rise to these differences. The research reveals how woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) evolved from the ancestor they share with Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). It could even serve as a recipe for engineering elephants that are able to survive in Siberia....

The German doctors realized they had to do something drastic or their seven-year-old patient would die. The boy had escaped war-ravaged Syria with his parents, and a rare genetic disease had left him with raw, blistering sores over 80 percent of his body. His doctors in a children’s burn unit tried everything they could to treat his illness, called junctional epidermolysis bullosa—even grafting some skin from his father to see if it would heal the child’s wounds....

Name: Christopher P. Kenaley Title: Postdoctoral research associate, University of Washington Location: Seattle I work on deepwater fishes—species that live anywhere below 200 to 3,000 meters deep in the ocean. The ones that I study, loosejaw dragonfishes, dwell about a kilometer down, in an area called the midwater zone. They have no skin between the two bones that form their lower jaw. This is unique to vertebrates. You might look at this animal and think, “How on earth could it possibly consume anything?...

Neanderthals and humans lived together in Europe for thousands of years, concludes a timeline based on radiocarbon dates from 40 key sites across Europe. The results, published today in Nature, may help to end a century-old deadlock over the demise of the Neanderthals and their relationship to humans. The researchers used 196 radiocarbon dates of organic remains to show that Neanderthals disappeared from Europe around 40,000 years ago, but still long after humans arrived in the continent....

Karen Sokoloff finds a certain satisfaction in picking lice off a person’s scalp, smoothing olive oil into the hair strands and carefully pulling a metal comb through them to catch the stragglers. It’s a good thing she enjoys it: Sokoloff co-founded LiceDoctors, one of a handful of national chains of lice pickers, and business is booming, in part because conventional treatments have become largely ineffective. For decades people have turned to special over-the-counter shampoos containing plant-derived insecticides known as pyrethrins or their synthetic counterparts, called pyrethroids, to treat cases of head lice....

Revoking California’s Clean Air Act waiver would let greenhouse gas emissions soar and electric vehicle sales plummet, new research shows. The analysis by the economic consulting firm Rhodium Group examined the climate impact of the Trump administration’s planned rollback of Obama-era clean car standards. The rollback has two main components. It would freeze fuel economy standards at 2020 levels through 2026, allowing cars to travel much shorter distances on one tank of gas, and would revoke California’s Clean Air Act waiver for greenhouse gases, which lets the state set tougher emissions rules than those of the federal government....