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Parallel universes are always fun to contemplate. So please mount the No. 42 bus with me to a world in which Tim Cook is still COO of Apple and Steve Wozniak is calling the shots. Here’s what would be happening: Apple and Google would be deep and loving partners and would share all their knowledge in one vast openfest. The iPhone would have all the finest parts of Android, and Android phones would finally enjoy a little magical, revolutionary taste....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Law of Associations was adopted by the French Parliament on 3 July 1901 to limit the influence of Catholic teaching orders as the first step toward the formal separation of church and state that would follow in 1905. Of 16,904 religious teaching institutions, almost 14,000 were closed....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The involvement of France in the American War of Independence (1775-1783) was not only significant in the progress of the war itself but also as a critical moment for France. Whereas French intervention in the war would help turn the tide in favor of the Americans, the debt it incurred would contribute to the later French Revolution (1789-1799)....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Veni, vidi, vici! This was the simple message the Roman commander Julius Caesar sent to the Senate in Rome after a resounding victory in the east against King Pharnaces of Pontus - a message that demonstrated both arrogance as well as great military competence. “I came, I saw, I conquered!...

Rain forests and tundra, deserts and savannas, mountaintops and undersea reefs. No spot on the planet is too remote for the movement that has changed the face of leisure travel. Ecotourism, in all its various guises—green tourism, sustainable tourism, adventure travel—has gained traction as enthusiasts seek to experience the earth’s wonders while treading lightly on them. Lately a new subset of this boom has emerged. “Voluntourism” ramps the ecological impulse up a notch, providing ways for vacationers to help save the world’s sustainable resources....

From Nature magazine A billionaire Internet mogul has awarded a record US$27 million to nine physicists for their work on fundamental theory. Yuri Milner, who has made his fortune investing in social-media companies, announced the new Fundamental Physics Prize this morning. The winners work on difficult problems ranging from the Universe’s early inflation to string theory (see box). At $3 million a head, the new prize dwarfs the Nobel Prize, which this year is valued at around SEK8 million ($1....

In 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell therapy for a form of acute lymphoblastic lymphoma, a blood cancer. The FDA’s then Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said, “We’re now entering a new frontier in medical innovation with the ability to reprogram a patient’s own cells to attack a deadly cancer.” Five CAR-T cell therapies have now been approved by the FDA, while many more are in trials and development....

We recently celebrated our daughter’s marriage, a life-affirming ritual made all the more joyous by being able to reunite with extended family and friends following an endless COVID-induced hiatus. The wedding took place just a few weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had established a constitutional right to abortion for about 50 years. The near coincidence of the two events left us shaken. It underlined yet again something that we had discussed repeatedly over the decades every time a news report announced another challenge to abortion: Our lives would have been unalterably different if we had not had access to abortion services....

Some of the richest biodiversity that resides in a sprawling archipelago nearly midway between Norway’s northern coast and the North Pole is ripe for inspection, not with high-powered binoculars, however, but with the exacting imagery afforded by the lens of a magnifying glass. The Svalbard Islands are home to polar bears, whales and walruses. Yet equally consequential in the island ecosystem are more than 1,100 species of invertebrates, including beetles, wasps, flies, moths, springtails, mites, aphids and spiders, that eke out a living in Svalbard’s soil, streams, and even on its glaciers....

Is the newest droid in the “Star Wars” universe the future of modern robotics? In the recently released film “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” the droid L3-37, also known as L3 or Elthree, showcased a unique set of traits among “Star Wars” robots. The intelligent pilot droid is always changing, improving and repairing itself with found scraps from other bots. L3 is also one of the first bots in the “Star Wars” franchise to bring feminine programming to a major role....

By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - For a small group of advanced cancer patients, using an online tool for learning about end-of-life medical decisions and developing an advance directive document did not lead to psychological distress, according to a new study. “One thing we noticed is that many patients with advanced cancer had not had these conversations,” said lead author Dr. Michael J. Green of the humanities and medicine departments at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pennsylvania....

For the first time, cosmologists have used the full power of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity to perform detailed calculations of the Universe’s evolution. The two groups’ techniques—which break with nearly a century of tradition—could help to settle a controversy over the accuracy of previous, simplified simulations, and could help researchers to interpret the results of astronomers’ increasingly precise observations. General relativity interprets gravity as the warping of space-time. Soon after Einstein proposed his theory in 1915, others realized that it had dramatic implications on the cosmic scale....

As Hurricane Sandy bears down on the East Coast, federal forecasters are warning that the massive storm could bring “life-threatening” storm surges, flooding, hurricane-force winds, heavy rain and even blizzardlike snowfall over an area stretching from the Carolinas to Canada, and west to Ohio. The slow-moving storm, a rare and powerful hybrid of hurricane and nor’easter fueled by an influx of Arctic air, is expected to make landfall in New Jersey later today....

We have all seen the horrors. The wreckage of a Paris concert hall where extremists turned a carefree Friday night into a bloodbath. “Jihadi John” mercilessly beheading a hostage. New York City’s fallen towers. Carnage left by suicide bombers. The perpetrators must be insane, we tell ourselves. Yet how could that be true? ISIS alone has tens of thousands of fighters. They cannot all be sadists and maniacs. No more so than were all 8....

Topography seems easy to explain when beholding jagged summits such as Colorado’s Rocky Mountains or California’s Sierra Nevada range. After all, these mountains mark spots where the continent grew thick during violent collisions with other tectonic plates: the land crumpled and heaved skyward, like the hood of a car buckling in a head-on crash. But surface-shaping geologic forces account for surprisingly little of the planet’s highs and lows. About half of North America’s elevation actually results from the planet’s internal heat....

By Laura Zuckerman SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - Idaho is planning to kill thousands of ravens to protect another bird whose eggs and chicks are among its prey, despite criticism that human development is a greater threat to the imperiled sage-grouse than the black-winged bird. Ravens, carrion birds often popularly depicted as omens of death or misfortune, will be killed by baiting them with poisoned chicken eggs, shooting them and destroying a number of their eggs and nests, Idaho wildlife managers said....

Microscopic Mass Murderer —Carrie Arnold Read how microbes may have triggered the largest extinction on Earth in this PNAS study. Know the Jargon —Rachel Nuwer Researchers have reexamined the physics of sneezes, as reported in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. Fastest Animal on Land? A Mite A southern Californian mite is the fastest animal on land—by body lengths per second, that is. Graphene’s Dark Side —Katherine Bourzac Environmental Engineering Science predicts the possible risks of graphene in our water supply....

Often mistaken for primitive plants such as moss (if they are even noticed in the first place), lichens are actually not plants at all. They are a group of versatile symbiotic life-forms that play crucial roles in myriad ecosystems, from rain forests to Arctic tundra. Though some do closely resemble moss, others look like little more than crusty orange stains, and still others branch out like corals. But the most impressive aspect of lichens is their interspecies teamwork—a relationship that climate change is threatening to disrupt, throwing their very survival into question....

By Mo Costandi of Nature magazineResearchers have come up with a way to help prevent recovering drug addicts from relapsing – without using other pharmaceuticals to help. The approach involves modifying addicts’ behavior by weakening their memory of drug taking, which relieves their cravings and might help to prevent relapse.Addicts tend to associate a drug’s effects with drug-taking equipment and a certain environment, which can make them vulnerable to relapse if they encounter those conditions....

Looking in the mirror and recognizing oneself was long thought to be an ability reserved for humans. Recently, however, researchers have found that other apes, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, seem to show signs of self-awareness, including recognizing and inspecting themselves in a mirror. Now one group of investigators claims that rhesus macaques have joined this elite group of self-aware animals. Luis Populin, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, noticed that the macaques in his lab were doing something strange....