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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. On 1 November 2015 CE, at the annual dinner hosted by the British Guild of Travel Writers at the Savoy Hotel in London, it was announced that the Tucume Museum in northern Peru had won the prestigious award for the Best Wider World Tourism Project. Hilary Bradt explains why she nominated Tucume for this award....

German researchers say they have hit on a way to safeguard the world’s population of endangered Asian elephants: safely freeze the animals’ sperm. Elephants are notoriously tricky to breed in zoos, with high rates of miscarriages and infant mortality. Artificial insemination almost always fails because fresh sperm rarely survives the procedure intact. Suzan Murray, head veterinarian at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., says an effective cryopreservation technique would “revolutionize our ability to breed and maintain elephants in zoos....

Defending against viruses is one of the thorniest problems in medicine. Vaccines have been a major success story but can still only fend off a fraction of known viruses. They work by “teaching” our immune system to recognize a specific virus so it can mount an effective immune response if it spots that invader in future. Another approach is the use of antivirals, which prevent viruses from replicating and can be used to treat a current infection if administered quickly....

Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to recreate the complex neural codes that the brain uses to navigate through space. The feat demonstrates how powerful AI algorithms can assist conventional neuroscience research to test theories about the brain’s workings—but the approach is not going to put neuroscientists out of work just yet, say the researchers. The computer program, details of which were published in Nature on 9 May1, was developed by neuroscientists at University College London (UCL) and AI researchers at the London-based Google company DeepMind....

Another day, another rumor about Apple’s plans to launch a “lite” version of its iPhone. Apple could be planning to launch two versions of an “iPhone Lite,” claims a report out of China that was discovered by Phone Arena on Friday. The report, which included images claiming to show Apple’s plans, indicates that one of the handsets is codenamed “iPhone Zenvo,” while the other comes with the name, “iPhone Zagato/Bertone.”...

Advances in energy storage could help make wind and solar power a mainstay of our electricity system by taking root not only in the Great Plains and the Mojave Desert but also Park Avenue high-rises and urban data centers. Some of the most compelling needs for storing energy like digital bits are now coming from businesses and utilities in cities, turning them into a crucial proving ground for a technology many consider vital for the electricity grid of the future....

Editor’s Note: For Scientific American’s complete coverage of the Costa Concordia disaster see links at the end of this story. After more than two and a half years and $1 billion, the capsized cruise ship Costa Concordia is about to set sail again, although it won’t be under its own power. The move could not come too soon, because the risk that it will damage the environment is much higher now than when the ship originally crashed near the Tuscan island of Giglio in January 2012....

Inequities big and small can lead people to believe that life is indeed not fair. But how humans respond to unfair situations depends on the social circumstances: inequality among friends and family, for instance, is less disturbing than it is among strangers. The results of a new study indicate that the same is true for chimpanzees, a finding that sheds light on how our sense of fairness evolved. In the fall of 2003 Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta determined that capuchin monkeys don’t like being subjected to treatment they deem unjust....

SKIN SO BACTERIAL Skin hosts many more bacteria than previously thought. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health’s new Human Microbiome Project sequenced genes from skin samples from healthy volunteers and found bacteria that hailed from 19 different phyla and 205 genera and that possessed more than 112,000 individual gene sequences. Previous studies of skin cultures supposed that just one type of bacteria, Staphylococcus, was the main resident. The scientists aim to establish a bacterial baseline so as to better treat skin diseases, such as acne or eczema, where bacterial populations might be out of balance....

Sakhr Software, a company that builds automatic language translators, recently unveiled a prototype smart phone application that transforms spoken English phrases into spoken Arabic, and vice versa, in near real time. The technology isn’t quite ready for your next trip to Cairo, but thanks to recent advances in machine-translation techniques, plus the advent of higher-fidelity microphones and increasing processing power in smart phones, this mobile technology could soon allow two people speaking different languages to have basic conversations....

Many recipes and procedures call for bringing water to a roiling boil—from making the perfect cup of tea to generating electric power. But the bubbles that denote the rapid transformation of water from a liquid to a vapor, otherwise known as steam, actually slow the process. The normal, microscopic imperfections—holes, gaps and voids—on the surfaces of everything from industrial boilers to pots and pans create pockets where air is trapped and liquid water can become steam....

CLEVELAND—Christian Republicans promoted a transition to clean energy here last night, about an hour after GOP delegates approved a party platform that disavows aggressive action on climate change and downplays renewable energy. The contrast isn’t new, said Angel Garcia, the national outreach director for Young Conservatives for Energy Reform, a group connected to the Christian Coalition of America. He and other organizers say they’re appealing to millennial party activists to support policies like long-term tax credits for wind and solar power, a national renewable portfolio standard and updated state laws that reward the use of distributed energy....

Researchers from the University of Rochester (U.R.) Medical Center say that with a single shot of human fetal stem cells they cured lab mice suffering from a nervous disorder that causes tremors, seizures and premature death. The scientists report today in the journal Cell Stem Cell that the finding could bring them closer to finding a treatment for incurable neurological conditions, such as Pelizaeus-Merzbacher’s disease and adrenoleukodystrophy, the mysterious, debilitating disorder portrayed in the 1992 film Lorenzo’s Oil....

Against a swirling montage of cosmic birth and destruction, and newsreel-style stills from his personal history, the celebrated inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil sits in silhouette, contemplating death. He broods over mortality’s toll in waste and pain, and the hopelessness and loss that people must experience in their last moments of life. “It’s such a profoundly sad, lonely feeling that I really can’t bear it,” he admits. Then, cheerfully, he adds, “So I go back to thinking about how I’m not going to die....

A master weaver in 18th-century Lyon, France, Jean-Charles Jacquard was able to fabricate no more than six inches of silk brocade a week. Even that production rate was feasible only with the aid of an apprentice to sit atop his wooden drawloom, raising individual warp threads by hand while the maître slid through brightly colored threads of weft. The unrelenting tedium of weaving a pattern line by line may explain why his son, Joseph-Marie, avoided it even before the French Revolution briefly put brocade out of fashion....

After months of debate, a shark cull has begun in Australia. Over the weekend a large tiger shark was caught by local fishers using a drum line (a weight with a baited hook on one end and a float on the other), shot four times in the head and dumped at sea. Colin Barnett, premier of the state of Western Australia (which comprises the western third of the nation), claims that killing any large shark that approaches the beach will make swimmers and surfers safer....

Timing can be everything when it comes to successfully expanding constitutional rights. Now, a study looking at how constitutions around the world have evolved has revealed patterns that could help people predict the best moment to introduce such changes. Amendments are generally introduced into a country’s constitution in a certain sequence, the authors report in a paper on the preprint server arXiv, and now under review at a journal. In addition, their computer analyses corroborate previously proposed ideas that the addition of some provisions is heavily influenced by the zeitgeist—the dominant social mores of the time—whereas the adoption of others reflects a country’s colonial history....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Schools are closed in most countries and everyone has to adapt to a new reality of online learning. It is not easy for students, teachers and parents alike. Learning and teaching from home require a different approach. Ancient History Encyclopedia is an organization that has been purely online for over ten years and many lessons from online working are transferrable to online education....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The trial and execution of Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), formerly the queen of France, was among the opening events of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution (1789-1799). Accused of a series of crimes that included conspiring with foreign powers against the security of France, Marie Antoinette was found guilty of high treason and executed on 16 October 1793....

September 1961 Nerve Cells Talking “So far we have said nothing about inhibition, even though it occurs throughout the nervous system and is one of the most curious modes of nervous activity. Inhibition takes place when a nerve impulse acts as a brake on the next cell, preventing it from becoming activated by excitatory messages that may be arriving along other channels at the same time. The impulse that travels along an inhibitory axon cannot be distinguished electrically from an impulse traveling in an excitatory axon....