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What looks like a soap bubble is actually a 3-D simulation of a supernova—or rather a failed attempt at a supernova. Cosmic explosions mark the death of massive stars and are some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe, but they are not all-or-nothing events: some supernovae halt before they ever take off, as a new supercomputer simulation detailed in the Astrophysical Journal Letters shows. The simulation modeled a class of supernovae that start from fast-spinning, highly magnetized stars....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Apocalypse (Greek: apokalypsis, an “unveiling of secrets”) is not an event, but a text that contains prophesies concerning God’s future intervention, and apocalypticism is a reference for attitudes and worldviews in biblical and non-canonical texts that share concepts in the belief that the God of Israel will intervene in human history one more time to address perceived ills of society....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Myth of Etana is the story of the Sumerian antediluvian King of Kish who ascends to heaven on an eagle to request the Plant of Birth from the gods so that he might have a son. Etana is named as the first king of Kish in the Sumerian King List (composed c....

By Anne Harding NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Giving girls younger than 15 two doses of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, at least six months apart, will probably provide adequate protection against cervical cancer while also being cost-effective, according to new findings published online January 7 in the BMJ. “Our study shows that if this protection from two doses lasts at least 20 years, then the additional benefit of giving a third dose is likely to be very small,” Mark Jit, of Public Health England in London, the first author of the new study, told Reuters Health....

In 1963 some 200,000 Indians in West Bengal and Assam faced imminent starvation. A few years later drought caused severe food shortages in the nearby state of Bihar. Against a backdrop of such reports, biologist Paul Ehrlich speculated in his 1968 book The Population Bomb that, within just a few years, hundreds of millions would starve to death, as inexorable population growth outstripped limited resources. This neo-Malthusian scenario never came to pass....

SpaceX has done it again. The private spaceflight company landed its Falcon 9 rocket for the sixth time in the last eight months early Sunday morning (Aug. 14), pulling off the feat during the successful launch of the JCSAT-16 commercial communications satellite. The two-stage Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 1:26 a.m. EDT (0526 GMT) Sunday, carrying JCSAT-16 toward a distant geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO)....

By Anna PetherickOccasionally, researchers stumble across something extraordinary in a system that has been studied for decades.Ryan Kerney of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, did just that while looking closely at a clutch of emerald-green balls – embryos of the spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum). He noticed that their bright green colour comes from within the embryos themselves, as well as from the jelly capsule that encases them.This viridescence is caused by the single-celled alga Oophilia amblystomatis....

Sudden fungal outbreaks have long been routine among plants, and more recently, animals. A recent outbreak among humans in the Pacific Northwest raises the disturbing prospect that we are not immune either. The mystery of this outbreak’s origins is detailed in “Strange Fungi Now Stalk Healthy People” in the December issue of Scientific American. The outbreak is ongoing but, in spite of appearances, Cryptococcus gattii doesn’t exist to plague us. The fungus prefers to live in soil and on trees, where it subsists quite happily on decaying matter....

THE BRAIN ABHORS ambiguity, yet we are curiously attracted to it. Many famous visual illusions exploit ambiguity to titillate the senses. Resolving uncertainties creates a pleasant jolt in your brain, similar to the one you experience in the “eureka!” moment of solving a problem. Such observations led German physicist, psychologist and ophthalmologist Hermann von Helmholtz to point out that perception has a good deal in common with intellectual problem solving. More recently, the idea has been revived and championed eloquently by neuropsychologist Richard L....

SUNGAI NGIHIS, Indonesia—At dawn, Peter Ellis leads a group of environmentalists heading into the tropical forests near this remote village on the island of Borneo. They drive for hours. They climb mountains and cross rivers. And finally, their eyes lock on what they are looking for—loggers. But this encounter does not turn into an environmentalists-versus-loggers fight, which happens more often than not. Instead, the environmentalists shake hands with the loggers, greet each other by first name, and walk into the forest together to learn how to cut down trees....

Read part 1 of the series here. SARGENT, Ga. – The smokestacks, more than 800 feet tall, barely peek from behind the tall pines just across from Chester Allen’s farm, but to him the damage from Plant Yates’ coal is plain to see. “Dang-near everything rusts out early over here,” said Allen, as he walked with his dog, Bogey, past a rusty disc harrow on the farm where he’s lived for more than 30 years....

New estimates of infections by an antibiotic-resistant bacterium, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), have astounded experts, who had not considered it a major public health threat. Researchers conducted population-based surveillance at nine sites and extrapolated the 2005 data for the entire U.S. Recent fatal cases of invasive MRSA in children have also raised some concerns, although most deaths happened to people older than 65, and infections tended to occur at hospitals, rather than at schools and playgrounds....

People cherish diamonds for their beauty and the sense of status and permanence they convey to the wearer, but someday soon these most precious of stones may serve an even more practical purpose than filling out engagement rings and anniversary pendants: protecting smartphone displays from the chips and spider web–like cracks that develop after countless drops and hours of tapping and swiping. Unlike the nuggets mined from deep in Earth’s crust, display-screen diamonds would be grown in the lab of AKHAN Semiconductor, a company developing ways to use synthetic diamonds to enhance electronics....

There are no more woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos or giant ground sloths. Around 50,000 years ago the biggest land animals in the world began to disappear. The number-one suspect: Homo sapiens. Hunting combined with the burning of landscapes in places like Australia seem to be the main reason there are no more giant kangaroos, along with these other big animals. The lethal pairing of hunting and burning is just one of the ways humans have been changing the world for millennia....

Yoga seems to bestow mental benefits, such as a calmer, more relaxed mind. Now research by Chantal Villemure and Catherine Bushnell of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Bethesda, Md., may explain how. Using MRI scans, Villemure detected more gray matter—brain cells—in certain brain areas in people who regularly practiced yoga, as compared with control subjects. “We found that with more hours of practice per week, certain areas were more enlarged,” Villemure says, a finding that hints that yoga was a contributing factor to the brain gains....

TOKYO (Reuters) - The group that conducts Japan’s whaling says it expects to resume scientific whaling in the Antarctic after this year’s hunt was canceled following an order by an international court. Last month’s judgment by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered a halt to Japan’s decades-old program of “scientific whaling” in the Southern Ocean, a practice environmentalists condemn, but Tokyo said it would abide by the decision and has canceled the 2014-2015 hunt....

The Kepler spacecraft has hit an unexpected obstacle as it patiently watches the heavens for exoplanets: too many rowdy young stars. The orbiting probe detects small dips in the brightness of a star that occur when a planet crosses its face. But an analysis of some 2,500 of the tens of thousands of Sun-like stars detected in Kepler’s field of view has found that the stars themselves flicker more than predicted, with the largest number varying twice as much as the Sun....

Airborne power station: As a longtime resident of Seattle, Boeing engineer Brian J. Tillotson had often gazed up at the clouds and wondered how anyone living in such a sun-deprived place could ever hope to take advan­tage of solar power, the main offering of Boeing subsidiary Spectrolab. More than three years ago he came up with the answer: Why not build a power station above the clouds? The idea, described in Patent No....

Pluto has been slowly revealing itself to NASA’s New Horizons probe, which is speeding towards a July 14 close encounter with the dwarf planet. Here, Nature looks at how this distant world has come into view. Ready for a close-up By late May and early June, New Horizons was still roughly 50 million kilometres from Pluto—but it was capturing better images of the dwarf planet (below; center) and its large moon Charon (far right) than any telescope on the ground or in space ever had....

As our closest relatives, chimpanzees have played a role in science for nearly 80 years. Because they can contract infections such as HIV and hepatitis, they have proved valuable for biomedical research. This research has revealed another trait, however, that chimpanzees share with humans: vulnerability to psychological damage. Concerned by mounting evidence of lasting trauma in great apes, the European Union banned their use in research in 2010. And in January 2013, a National Institutes of Health report recommended that all but 50 of the nearly 700 chimps in NIH-supported labs be retired to sanctuaries....