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Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen announced Dec. 13 that he is teaming up again with aerospace design mogul Burt Rutan to develop what the pair is calling a revolutionary approach to private space travel for cargo satellites, and eventually people. The billionaire investor and philanthropist unveiled the new company Stratolaunch Systems, which aims to create airport-like operations for space travel. The company, headquartered in Huntsville, Ala., will use a gargantuan twin-boom aircraft to launch a rocket and space capsule on missions to send commercial and government payloads, and ultimately paying passengers, into orbit....

Prozac (fluoxetine) and similar antidepressants are among the most prescribed drugs in the United States, but scientists still don’t know exactly how they work. Now one piece of that puzzle—the structure of a protein targeted by several widely used antidepressants—has been solved. The finding, reported on April 6 in Nature, could enable the development of better, more-targeted depression drugs. But it may come too late for drug companies, many of which have abandoned the search for depression treatments....

Screaming woke Lanz Ellingsworth. The piercing cries were loud, they were shrill — and they were coming from his daughter’s bedroom. At 8:30 p.m., Ellingsworth and his wife had tucked their youngest, Lindsay, in for the night. They read her a bedtime story, kissed her on both cheeks and crept out of the room. Six hours later, their little girl was a mass of quivering agony. In the middle of the night Lindsay had shifted slightly in her sleep....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). For 30 years, Gerald Joyce has been trying to create life. As a graduate student in the 1980s, he studied how the first RNA molecules—chemical cousins to DNA that can both store and transmit genetic information—might have assembled themselves out of simpler units, a process that many scientists believe led to the first living things. Unfortunately, he had a problem. At a chemical level, a deep bias permeates all of biology....

SAN DIEGO—For more than 30 years, scientists have understood the link between rising carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. But it wasn’t until the middle of the last decade that they realized CO2 emissions could alter the chemistry of the world’s oceans to devastating effect. Now they’re making up for lost time, researchers said this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Richard Feely, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said his agency is preparing to release its first ocean acidification research plan....

The universe is big in both space and time and, for much of humankind’s history, was beyond the reach of our instruments and our minds. That changed dramatically in the 20th century. The advances were driven equally by powerful ideas—from Einstein’s general relativity to modern theories of the elementary particles—and powerful instruments—from the 100- and 200-inch reflectors that George Ellery Hale built, which took us beyond our Milky Way galaxy, to the Hubble Space Telescope, which has taken us back to the birth of galaxies....

Many of the world’s largest earthquakes take place at subduction zones where tectonic plates collide, forcing one under the other. When pressure builds and the plates slip past one another, an earthquake results. The severity of that earthquake depends on how far and how widely each plate slips. In most cases, the plates slide past one another just a few inches every year. But sometimes they slide tens of feet, along hundreds of miles....

By Susan HeaveyWASHINGTON (Reuters) - The first winter snowfall of the season slowed U.S. government operations on Tuesday but did not bring them to a standstill, with Congress, the Supreme Court and financial regulators meeting for business as usual.Commutes were lighter as snow that started around the morning rush hour shuttered most federal agencies, canceled events and postponed hearings across the capital.But little accumulation and mostly clear roads left parts of official Washington still catching up from a two-week shutdown in October, including U....

One of the biggest black holes ever found sits in a cosmic backwater, like a towering skyscraper in a small town. Astronomers have spotted a supermassive black hole containing 17 billion times the mass of the sun—only slightly smaller than the heftiest known black hole, which weighs in at a maximum of 21 billion solar masses—at the center of the galaxy NGC 1600. That’s a surprise, because NGC 1600, which lies 200 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus, belongs to an average-size galaxy group, and the monster black holes discovered to date tend to be found in dense clusters of galaxies....

It seems that weekly we hear about some professional athlete who sullies himself and his sport through abuse of steroids. The melodrama unfolds, careers and statistics are brought low and asterisked, and everyone bemoans another fallen competitor. Yet there are millions of cases of steroid use that occur daily with barely a second thought: Millions of women take birth control pills, blithely unaware that their effects may be subtly seeping into and modulating brain structure and activity....

Three years ago researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia made a shocking discovery: our guts can taste sugar. Just like the tongue, the intestines and pancreas have sweetness receptors that can sense glucose and fructose. With that knowledge, scientists at Elcelyx Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company in San Diego, developed a drug that targets the taste receptors. The drug, now in phase II clinical trials, is a modified version of metformin, the most commonly prescribed drug for treating type 2 diabetes....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Icons, that is images of holy persons, were an important part of the Byzantine Christian Church from the 3rd century CE onwards. Venerated in churches, public places, and private homes, they were often believed to have protective properties. The veneration of icons split the Church in the 8th and 9th century CE as two opposing camps developed - those for and those against their use in Christian worship - a situation which led to many icons being destroyed and the persecution of those who venerated them....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In this article, we interview the creators of Old World, the new upcoming game by Mohawk Games. We are here with Leyla Johnson, the head writer of the game and CEO, and Soren Johnson, who is the creative director. Jan (Ancient History Encyclopedia): Now, I have played Old World - great game, and I’m really enjoying it - so to start with, could introduce the game in your words and tell us what it is about....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Roman glassware includes some of the finest pieces of art ever produced in antiquity and the very best were valued higher than wares made with precious metals. However, plain glass vessels such as cups, bowls, plates, and bottles were also used as everyday containers, in particular, for storing and serving food and drinks....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. One of the central values of ancient Egyptian civilization, arguably the central value, was ma’at - the concept of harmony and balance in all aspects of one’s life. This ideal was the most important duty observed by the pharaoh who, as mediator between the gods and the people, was supposed to be a role model for how one lived a balanced life....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Energy Department on Wednesday unveiled a plan to offer up to $4 billion in loan aid to renewable energy projects, opening up another round of funding for a program that faced harsh political attacks over past government-backed failures. The draft plan would provide loan guarantees for innovative projects that limit or avoid greenhouse gas emissions. It will specifically focus on advanced electric grid technology and storage, biofuels that can be used in conventional vehicles, energy from waste products and energy efficiency improvements....

By Michael Taylor and Kanupriya Kapoor JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia’s promises to tackle the upcoming annual “haze” season with a $30 million fund and limited military equipment have been called into question by experts anticipating worse pollution levels than last year due to the El Nino weather pattern. Indonesia has failed in previous attempts to stop the regional haze, with last year giving the worst pollution readings since 1997. Outgoing Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was forced in mid-2013 to apologize to neighbors Singapore and Malaysia, which were blanketed in thick smog caused by forest fires in Indonesia....

1968 The Moon, Unveiled “In a corridor of the Boeing Space Center near Seattle there is a little sign that reads ‘5 for 5.’ The sign briefly summarizes the fact that all five Lunar Orbiter missions, which were primarily designed to make photographs of the moon from spacecraft in lunar orbit, were successful. The results included complete photographic coverage of the side of the moon that is visible from the earth and coverage of more than 99....

Our skin is crawling with Staphylococcus aureus, the bacterium responsible for most staph infections. Usually staph is harmless, but sometimes—if it breaks through the barrier of our skin or hitches a ride on our food—it can cause severe rashes, food poisoning and even death. For more than a century researchers and clinicians have attempted to find a way to vaccinate against staph infections to no avail. Now researchers point to one possible explanation: staph knows us all too well....

Can people ever lose their fingerprints? Science writer Katherine Harmon interviewed experts to hand over the answer: Fingerprints can indeed be removed, both intentionally and unintentionally. The May 2009 issue of the Annals of Oncology reported (online) a striking example of the latter case: a 62-year-old man from Singapore was detained while traveling to the U.S. because a routine fingerprint scan showed that he actually had none. The man, identified only as Mr....