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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. The agoge was the ancient Spartan education program, which trained male youths in the art of war. The word means “raising” in the sense of raising livestock from youth toward a specific purpose. The program was first instituted by the lawgiver Lycurgus (l. 9th century BCE) and was integral to Sparta’s military strength and political power....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Religion and superstition went hand in hand in Colonial America, and one’s belief in the first confirmed the validity of the second. The colonists’ worldview was completely informed by religion and so everything that happened - good or bad - was open to a supernatural interpretation. The Anglican settlers who established Jamestown Colony of Virginia in 1607 and the Puritans who settled the New England Colonies 1620-1630 were Protestant Christians who believed deeply in God, the reality of the unseen world of angels and devils and understood, based upon their interpretation of the Bible, that everything – large or small – happened for a reason: either God’s will or the devil’s wiles....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

In journalism, there’s what you call your dog-bites-man situation. Which is anything too common and expected to be a good story (unless the dog is one of those Resident Evil hellhounds, or the man is Cesar Millan). An example of a dog-bites-man science story is yet another confirmation of Einstein and relativity. Then there’s your more compelling man-bites-dog scenario. Which is something out of the ordinary (unless the man is competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi, and the dog is a Nathan’s Famous with mustard and sauerkraut)....

As the Arctic warms and transforms, many of its most iconic, frozen features are dissolving away. Glaciers are melting and trickling into the sea. Sea ice is giving way to open ocean. Permafrost is thawing and turning to mush. And the snow that caps the extraordinary Arctic environment is increasingly turning to rain. The gradual shift to a rainy climate isn’t unexpected. But new research now suggests that this transformation may happen faster than earlier studies had predicted....

Whether we are drinking in a scene, picture or vista, our eyeballs dart about wildly to take in different features of the view. Previous research determined that eyeballs fix their gaze on a particular spot for one third to a couple of seconds; in between glances they dart around for up to 50 milliseconds. During this shift in attention vision is suppressed and a patch of momentary blindness occurs. So, with all this frantic movement (not to mention temporary blindness), how is our brain able to piece together a complete, detailed, uninterrupted picture of the world?...

“Today we are learning the language with which God created life.” President Bill Clinton made this remark on the White House lawn on June 2000 to recognize the decoding of the first human genome. As much as anything else, rapid DNA sequencing technology created in large part by geneticist Craig Venter and his colleagues galvanized the research community into finishing the project faster than originally expected. More than 11 years later, however, gene sequencing technology has failed to deliver on its promise to revolutionize preventative medicine, and Venter is not happy about it....

By Gopal Sharma and Sanjeev Miglani KATHMANDU, April 27 (Reuters) - Thousands of desperate Nepalese spent another night in the open in the early hours of Monday, terrorised by strong aftershocks that continued to shake the country two days after a massive quake struck, killing almost 2,500 people. Across the capital, Kathmandu, and beyond, exhausted families whose homes were either flattened or at risk of collapse laid mattresses out on streets and erected tents to shelter from rain....

For decades, earthquake experts dreamed of being able to divine the time and place of the worlds next disastrous shock. But by the early 1990s the behavior of quake-prone faults had proved so complex that they were forced to conclude that the planets largest tremors are isolated, random and utterly unpredictable. Most seismologists now assume that once a major earthquake and its expected aftershocks do their damage, the fault will remain quiet until stresses in Earth’s crust have time to rebuild, typically over hundreds or thousands of years....

The U.S. Supreme Court is a busy place this time of year. So when the justices announced that, starting March 26, they would hear six hours of arguments on the health care reform law—the most time it has dedicated to any one case in decades—the gravitas of the issue became clear to all. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is perhaps the most profound change to health care since Medicaid was instituted in 1965....

Digital subscriptions, though, are quite different. Companies care a lot about who uses them and how many are doing so at once. And no wonder: A digital subscription is really just a username and password. Without some software restrictions by Netflix, you could, in theory, share your password with everyone you know. And pretty soon Netflix would go out of business. All right, so unlimited password sharing is unworkable. The question, though, is, What’s the right approach to preventing it?...

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazineGalileo, the largest program ever launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) will enter its latest phase with the launch of two navigation satellites on 20 October. They will join two test satellites already in orbit, allowing the first tests of the Galileo network, a rival to the US Global Positioning System (GPS).Scientists in Europe are following the program’s progress closely, hoping that the satellite constellation will enable new or improved research....

Ships powered by algae and planes flying on weeds: that’s part of the future the U.S. Navy hopes to bring to fruition. This week, the seagoing branch of the military purchased 40,000 gallons of jet fuel derived from camelina—a weedy relative of canola—and 20,055 gallons of algae-derived diesellike fuel for ships. “The intent is for these fuels to be drop-in replacements,” although initially they will be blended with their conventional counterparts, says Jeanne Binder, research and development program manager at the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC), the U....

OSLO, Aug 27 (Reuters) - New roads long enough to girdle the Earth 600 times are expected to be built by 2050 and better planning is needed to protect the environment while also raising food production, a study showed on Wednesday. The study in the journal Nature showed that roads can aid farmers, especially in developing nations where food production is held back by a lack of access to markets or to fertilisers and other technologies....

An unmanned SpaceX cargo mission crashed back to Earth today (June 28), marking the third failure of a resupply flight to the International Space Station in the past eight months. SpaceX’s robotic Dragon capsule blasted off atop the company’s two-stage Falcon 9 rocket as planned today at 10:21 a.m. EDT (1421 GMT) from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, headed for the orbiting lab. But something went wrong about two minutes into the flight, and the rocket broke apart, raining debris out of the sky....

The stone slabs of England’s Stonehenge may have been more than just a spectacular sight to the ancient people who built the structure; they likely created an acoustic environment unlike anything they normally experienced, new research hints. “As they walk inside they would have perceived the sound environment around them had changed in some way,“said researcher Bruno Fazenda, a professor at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom. “They would have been stricken by it, they would say, ‘This is different....

The U.S. used to be a powerhouse in manufacturing. In the past quarter of a century we have relinquished this leadership position, in large part because we made a decision—consciously or unconsciously—that the service and financial sectors are sufficient to sustain our economy. But they are not. Service jobs pay little. The financial industry makes nothing of value and therefore cannot maintain, let alone raise, the nation’s standard of living....

Tree rings may be the newest aid in piecing together the frequency of hurricanes over the centuries. Researchers have matched individual rings to documented stormy seasons going back to the 1860s and to presumed active seasons occurring up to a century earlier. If validated, this proxy record would help climatologists understand natural variations in storm frequency, although it would probably not shed light on the controversial issue of changes in hurricane strength....

Jeffrey Hovis, a science and operations officer with the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service in Charleston, WV, explains. Update: In the original version of this article, the author referred to air holding water. As several readers pointed out, this was a technically inaccurate simplification. Following is a more detailed explanation. The air that we breathe is made up of numerous gases, including water vapor. The term humidity generally refers to the amount of this water vapor in the atmosphere....

In case you missed the news, a team of physicists reported in September that the tiny subatomic particles known as neutrinos could violate the cosmic speed limit set by Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The researchers, working on an experiment called OPERA, beamed neutrinos through the earth’s crust, from CERN, the laboratory for particle physics near Geneva, to Gran Sasso National Laboratory in L’Aquila, Italy, an underground physics lab. According to the scientists’ estimates, the neutrinos arrived at their destination around 60 nanoseconds quicker than the speed of light....