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Around 13,000 years ago North America had a more diverse mammal community than modern-day Africa. There were multiple horse species, camels, llamas and a now-extinct animal called Glyptodon, which looked something like a Volkswagen bug–size armadillo. Smilodon, a saber-toothed cat around the size of today’s African lion, skulked across the grasslands in search of ground sloths and mammoths. Seven-foot-long giant otters chowed down on massive trees. And such massive creatures were not just found in North America....

For decades now physicists have contemplated the idea of an entire shadow world of elementary particles, called supersymmetry. It would elegantly solve mysteries that the current Standard Model of particle physics leaves unexplained, such as what cosmic dark matter is. Now some are starting to wonder. The most powerful collider in history, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has yet to see any new phenomena that would betray an unseen level of reality....

David Gems’s life was turned upside down in 2006 by a group of worms that kept on living when they were supposed to die. As assistant director of the Institute of Healthy Aging at University College London, Gems regularly runs experiments on Caenorhabditis elegans, a roundworm that is often used to study the biology of aging. In this case, he was testing the idea that a buildup of cellular damage caused by oxidation—technically, the chemical removal of electrons from a molecule by highly reactive compounds, such as free radicals—is the main mechanism behind aging....

Here is a solution that requires only five swaps for 9 8 7 1 4 3 5 6 2 (1,9): 2 8 7 1 4 3 5 6 9 (2,7): 2 5 7 1 4 3 8 6 9 (2,4): 2 1 7 5 4 3 8 6 9 (3,8): 2 1 6 5 4 3 8 7 9 (3,6): 2 1 3 5 4 6 8 7 9...

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Commerce confirmed Patrick Gallagher as the 14th director of its National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Although the title may be new to Gallagher, NIST’s mission of developing measurement science, standards and technology isn’t. The 46-year-old physicist began his career in the organization’s NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) in 1993 to pursue studies in neutron and x-ray instrumentation; in 2004 he became NCNR’s director....

Microsoft on Tuesday asked the Obama administration to allow it to reveal details about how it responds to orders from the U.S. government for user account data. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, sent a strongly worded letter to Attorney General Eric Holder this afternoon saying there is “no longer a compelling government interest” in preventing companies “from sharing more information” about how they respond. That’s especially true, the letter said, when this information is likely to help “allay public concerns” about warrantless surveillance....

From its perch aboard the International Space Station, a NASA experiment has shown how future missions might navigate their way through deep space. Spacecraft could triangulate their location, in a sort of celestial Global Positioning System (GPS), using clockwork-like signals from distant dead stars. Last November, the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) spent a day and a half looking at a handful of pulsars—rapidly spinning stellar remnants that give off beams of powerful radiation as they rotate....

From Ukraine, Syria and Gaza to the centenary of the First World War in 2014, news junkies and students of history cannot help but wonder if war is a perpetual feature of civilization. German philosopher Immanuel Kant wondered as much in a 1795 essay entitled “Perpetual Peace,” concluding that citizens of a democratic republic are less likely to support their government in a war because “this would mean calling down on themselves all the miseries of war....

Think back to the last time that you beat a friend at a card game or outdid your previous record in a 5K race. Did you try to suppress your satisfaction so that others wouldn’t think you were conceited? In fact, new research suggests that pride, as long as it stems from a real success and doesn’t slide into know-it-all obnoxiousness or narcissism, not only pushes us to keep trying hard but actually makes others like us more....

(Reuters) - U.S. health officials have designated 35 hospitals nationwide as Ebola treatment centers and expects to name more in coming weeks deemed capable of treating patients while minimizing risk to staff, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday. The list includes those that have already treated patients with the virus, such as Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, and other prominent hospitals, including Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Mayo Clinic Hospital in Minnesota, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and New York-Presbyterian....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The sport known simply as the Ball Game was played by all the major Mesoamerican civilizations and the impressive stone courts became a feature of many cities. More than just a game, it could have a religious significance and featured in episodes of mythology. Contests even supplied candidates for human sacrifice and became literally a game of life or death....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Rites of Eleusis, or the Eleusinian Mysteries, were the secret rituals of the mystery school of Eleusis and were observed regularly from c. 1600 BCE - 392 CE. Exactly what this mystic ritual was no one knows; but why the ancient Greeks participated in it can be understood by the testimonials of the initiated....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. There are few places on earth where we can say that these stones, on which we are standing, are the same stones where feet rested centuries before. These places are important. We walk in the Roman Forum, we explore the ruins of the Flavian Amphitheatre, and we journey to the pyramids of Cairo....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Marduk Prophecy is an Assyrian document dating to between 713-612 BCE found in a building known as The House of the Exorcist adjacent to a temple in the city of Ashur. It relates the travels of the statue of the Babylonian god Marduk from his home city to the lands of the Hittites, Assyrians, and Elamites and prophesies its return at the hands of a strong Babylonian king....

Cystic fibrosis is caused by mutations in a single gene. For people born with two mutated copies of that gene, the prognosis is often grim. They can suffer from a variety of ailments, including reduced lung function and digestive problems. Many don’t live into adulthood. Mutations in single genes cause many other diseases such as Tay-Sachs disease or some types of muscular dystrophy; the prognoses for people born with these conditions are similarly bleak....

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) by Christian Rudder Crown, 2014 The unprecedented wave of personal data being collected by such sites as Facebook, Twitter and OkCupid raises privacy concerns and commercial hopes—as well as a unique opportunity for social science. OkCupid co-founder Rudder drills down into that last category via charts, graphs and intriguing analyses of human behavior gleaned from the wealth of social data now available....

DENVER—A weather drama is playing out in the forests of north-central Colorado as two record wildfires—supercharged as the result of climate change—meet the first large snowstorm of the winter. One possible outcome is that the snowstorm dampens the two fires so the 3,500 firefighters struggling to contain them can protect surrounding areas. Another is that the snow does little to help and the two fires merge in Rocky Mountain National Park and create a megafire in one of the West’s most popular recreational areas....

DNA tests have made it clear that innocent people have been sent to prison after a witness picked them out of a lineup. In fact, since 1989, more than 70 percent of 333 wrongful convictions in the U.S. have been influenced by misidentification from eyewitnesses. But researchers recently reported that the disdain for eyewitness identification is not always warranted. They found that if witnesses shown a lineup for the first time are asked to state their confidence in their choice, the identifications they are most confident of are much more likely to be of the suspect than of the innocent....

Kakuda, japan—In a recent spin-off of the classic Japanese animated series Mobile Suit Gundam, the depletion of fossil fuels has forced humanity to turn to space-based solar power generation as global conflicts rage over energy shortages. The sci-fi saga is set in the year 2307, but even now real Japanese scientists are working on the hardware needed to realize orbital generators as a form of clean, renewable energy, with plans to complete a prototype in about 20 years....

If you’re ever pursued by a colony of fire ants, it might occur to you to try to escape their painful, itchy stings by diving into the nearest body of water. Wrong move. It turns out that thousands of fire ants can easily self-assemble into a waterproof raft, which can float on water for months. A new study by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, published April 25 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides a mechanical analysis of the fire ant’s considerable raft-building talents....