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Early last year, children’s hospitals across New York City had to pivot to deal with a catastrophic COVID-19 outbreak. “We all had to quickly learn—or semi-learn—how to take care of adults,” says Betsy Herold, a paediatric infectious-disease physician who heads a virology laboratory at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The reason: while hospitals across the city were bursting with patients, paediatric wards were relatively quiet. Children were somehow protected from the worst of the disease....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Lacquer was a popular form of decoration and protective covering in ancient China. It was used to colour and beautify screens, furniture, bowls, cups, sculpture, musical instruments, and coffins, where it could be carved, incised, and inlaid to show off scenes from nature, mythology, and literature. Time-consuming to produce, Chinese lacquerware became highly sought after by those who could afford it and by neighbouring cultures....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Plato (428/427-348-347 BCE), whose dialogues on Truth, Good and Beauty have significantly shaped western thought and religion, wrote and taught under a nickname. His real name was Aristocles which means “the best glory”(from the ancient Greek aristos – best – and kleos – glory). His father, Ariston, claimed descent from the great mythological hero Cadmus, founder of Thebes, slayer of monsters, and so-called “inventor of letters” for bringing the Phoenician alphabet to Greece while his mother, Perictione, was descended from the family of the great Athenian politician, philosopher, and lawgiver Solon (c....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. From the early days of the Roman Republic through the volatile reigns of such ignoble emperors as Caligula, Nero, and Commodus, the Roman Empire continued to expand, stretching its borders to encompass the entire Mediterranean Sea as well as expanding northward to Gaul and Britain. History records the exploits of the heroes as well as the tirades of the emperors....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Spartan women had more rights and enjoyed greater autonomy than women in any other Greek city-state of the Classical Period (5th-4th centuries BCE). Women could inherit property, own land, make business transactions, and were better educated than women in ancient Greece in general. Unlike Athens, where women were considered second-class citizens, Spartan women were said to rule their men....

Former Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart takes pride in his brain. Large, anatomically realistic 3-D animations representing the inner workings of his gray and white matter have graced video screens at several science and technology conferences. These “Glass Brain” visualizations use imaging and advanced computing systems to depict in colorful detail the fiber pathways that make Hart’s brain tick. The researchers behind the project hope it will also form the basis of a new type of tool for the diagnosis and treatment of neurological disorders....

Every star that now shines will one day die, but some stars live far longer than others. Our 4.6-billion-year-old sun will shrivel into a white dwarf in 7.8 billion years. Now astronomers say a dim red star south of the constellation Orion will outlive any other yet examined. “It actually will live for much longer than the current age of the universe—for literally trillions of years,” says Sergio Dieterich, an astronomer at Georgia State University....

For cocaine users, a rolled up $20 bill may be the most convenient tool for snorting the powder form of the drug. Or so it would seem from a new analysis of 234 banknotes from 18 U.S. cities that found cocaine on 90 percent of the bills tested. Perhaps that’s not surprising given that the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy reports that more than 2 million Americans used cocaine in 2007, which has been linked to ill effects ranging from debilitating addiction to heart attacks....

Scientists and mathematicians often describe facts, theories and proofs as “beautiful,” even using aesthetics to help guide their work. Their criteria might seem opaque to nonexperts, but new research finds that novices can consistently assess a proof’s beauty or ugliness. A mathematician and a psychologist analyzed responses from about 200 online participants for each of three experiments in their study, published in August in Cognition. Most had attended college but had not studied math beyond university calculus....

Sony’s Walkman portable audio cassette player in 1979 improved on the transistor radio by allowing people to take their preferred music wherever they went (engineer Nobutoshi Kihara supposedly invented the device so that Sony co-chairman Akio Morita could listen to operas during long flights). But the digital revolution in personal audio technology was another two decades in the making and had implications beyond both the personal and audio. Portable music went digital in the 1980s with the rise of devices built around CDs, mini discs and digital audiotape....

As much as half of the water in Earth’s oceans could be older than the Sun, a study has found. By reconstructing conditions in the disk of gas and dust in which the Solar System formed, scientists have concluded that the Earth and other planets must have inherited much of their water from the cloud of gas from which the Sun was born 4.6 billion years ago, instead of forming later....

Solar cells could be produced from materials other than silicon under a breakthrough that scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, say could dramatically reduce the price of solar technologies. Solar companies have been searching for some time for materials that are more efficient, cheaper to produce and use fewer raw materials than silicon. But tests of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) or related materials have failed so far to produce a winner....

Bedbugs are notoriously difficult to kill. Human-created pesticides often fail to conquer the evasive bloodsuckers, but could a new chemical gleaned from the bugs themselves help? Adding synthetic versions of the compound—a bedbug alarm pheromone—to a common nontoxic pest control agent nearly doubles the speed with which the agent kills, according to a study published last week in the Journal of Medical Entomology. Unlike their more attractive sex-drive chemical counterparts, natural alarm chemicals cause insects to scatter—in this case, right through a deadly dehydrating dust....

For decades researchers have focused their attacks against Alzheimer’s on two proteins, amyloid beta and tau. Their buildup in the brain often serves as a defining indicator of the disease. Get rid of the amyloid and tau, and patients should do better, the thinking goes. But drug trial after drug trial has failed to improve patients’ memory, agitation and anxiety. One trial of a drug that removes amyloid even seemed to make some patients worse....

Although scientists know the masses of the sun and Earth, it’s a different story for the galaxy. Mass estimates range widely: At the low end, some studies find that the galaxy is several hundred billion times as massive as the sun whereas the largest values exceed two trillion solar masses. Astronomers would have an easier task if the galaxy consisted solely of stars. But a huge halo of dark matter engulfs its starry disk and vastly outweighs it....

Dear EarthTalk: Summer’s going to be a scorcher this year, and I’d like to know how I can keep cool indoors without just running my energy-hogging air conditioners all the time. Any tips? – John McGovern, Cohasset, MA According to Harvey Sachs of the non-profit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, the movement of air over the skin is what’s key to keeping the body cool. So instead of turning on that A....

Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain Patricia S. Churchland W. W. Norton, 2013 ($26.95) When Galileo announced his observation of Jupiter’s moons, his discovery challenged a deeply entrenched way of thinking about our place in the universe. Modern neuroscience has kindled a similar revolution in the way we think about the brain. In Touching a Nerve, neurophilosopher Churchland argues that all things that we have traditionally ascribed to a higher power—morality, free will, the soul—are in fact products of the brain....

A survey of our galaxy’s center has turned up evidence of what may be a new class of astronomical object. According to results published today in the journal Nature, scientists have detected an unusual burst of radio waves emanating from near the galactic center with characteristics that are unlike those of previously detected radio bursts. Scott Hyman of Sweet Briar College and his colleagues analyzed data collected from years of monitoring the center of the Milky Way galaxy using the Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico....

(Credit: McAfee) Former US representative Anthony Weiner wasn’t the only one to get hooked on sexting – apparently, nearly half of all US adults’ smartphones contain sexy photos or texts. A new study released Tuesday by security software firm McAfee titled “Love, Relationships, and Technology” details just how many people send risque photos or intimate texts to people they know or strangers. McAfee online security expert Robert Siciliano wrote in a blog post that a number of adults share “private details about their lives, including those of an intimate nature such as nude photos and sexts – all of this on unsecured digital devices – now, that’s just asking for a social scandal....

It’s easy to overlook the snow flea: The millimeter-long insect could be mistaken for a flake of pepper on a white wintery landscape. But the little organism packs some powerful chemistry. Researchers led by Stefan Schulz at the Technical University, Braunschweig, in Germany, report that the snow flea, or Ceratophysella sigillata, produces polychlorinated compounds to repel predators (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed, 2015, DOI: 10.1002/anie.201501719). The family of defense compounds, including Sigillin A, is unique in that it is a new class of natural products that features a chemical scaffold that could find application in insect control....