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Some astronomers are questioning the existence of what might be the most Earth-like planet yet found outside the solar system, based on a reexamination of archival data. Kepler 452 b was discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope and announced in 2015. At the time it seemed like everything astronomers had hoped for in an Earth analogue: slightly larger and more massive than our planet, and in a habitable 385-day orbit around a star remarkably similar to our sun....

Remember The Fly movies? A visionary researcher attempts to build a Star Trek-like transporter. But human bits mix with bits of the fly that happen to be in the machine. Result: flyman or manfly depending on your point of view. I actually prefer the great Vincent Price effort of 1958, in which a cheesy fly head is perched on a human body. And the fly’s body carries a tiny human head that squeaks, “Help me!...

In March, Twitter put its foot down: users who repeatedly spread false information about COVID-19 vaccines will have their accounts suspended or shut down. It was a new front in a high-stakes battle over misinformation that could help to determine how many people get vaccinated, and how swiftly the pandemic ends. The battle is also being fought in computer-science and sociology labs across the United States, where scientists who track the spread of false information on social media honed their skills during the US presidential election last year....

OUR ABILITY to perceive visual scenes effortlessly depends on intelligent deployment of built-in knowledge about the external world. The key word here is “intelligent,” which raises the questions: Just how smart is the visual system? What is its IQ? For example, does the visual system know the laws of physics? Does it use inductive logic only (as many suspect), or can it perform deductions as well? How does it deal with paradoxes, conflicts or incomplete information?...

U.S. deaths from Alzheimer’s disease rose by more than 50 percent from 1999 to 2014, and rates are expected to continue to rise, reflecting the nation’s aging population and increasing life expectancy, American researchers said on Thursday. In addition, a larger proportion of people with Alzheimer’s are dying at home rather than a medical facility, according to the report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Alzheimer’s is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for 3....

The sea sloshing beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa just might be the best incubator for extraterrestrial life in our solar system. And yet it is concealed by the moon’s frozen outer shell—presenting a challenge for astrobiologists who would love nothing more than to peer inside. Luckily they can catch a partial glimpse by analyzing the flavor of the surface. And the results are salty. A new study published this week in Science Advances suggests that sodium chloride—the stuff of table salt—exists on Europa’s surface....

MALTA—Contagion, a film released earlier this month, depicts a gruesome outbreak of an exotic and deadly new virus. In the real world, a not-so foreign infection is circulating among animals every day of every year. If it picks up just a handful of certain mutations, it could start spreading among people, with a mortality rate as high as 60 percent. What is this potent virus? The flu. Although the 2009 pandemic of influenza A H1N1 ended up being relatively mild—killing about one in 10,000 people who came down with it—it still claimed more than 14,000 lives across the globe....

After a bad sunburn even the feeling of clothing brushing against the skin can be unbearable. The phenomenon in which normally unremarkable sensations become painful is called allodynia. Now researchers have pinpointed the tiny protein on nerve endings, called Piezo2, which triggers those painful sensations in mice and humans. The results were published last week in two complementary papers in Science Translational Medicine. Allodynia is a daily symptom for millions of people with chronic pain conditions, including inflammatory pain such as that caused by osteoarthritis as well as from nerve damage related to diabetes or chemotherapy....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Ghost stories have existed for thousands of years, often in similar forms and frequently dealing with the same themes, in many of the most ancient cultures. The writer H.P. Lovecraft once wrote, “As may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, the horror-tale is as old as human thought and speech themselves....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The ancient Celts produced magnificent bronze shields in Iron Age Britain which were most likely for ceremonial purposes and display. Several fine examples have miraculously survived as evidence of the imagination, skill, and artistry of Celtic craftworkers. The outstanding example is the Battersea Shield, now in the British Museum, but there are several other complete bronze shields and bosses which amply illustrate that the Celts commonly decorated shields whether they were intended for battle, display, or as votive offerings....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The ancient Near East was home to a multitude of civilizations, across Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Levant, each with unique views on medicine, conception, and women’s role in society. Attitudes towards contraception and abortion varied according to these beliefs. Both the oldest medical literature on performing abortions and the first known law against abortion come from the Near East....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The First Battle of Newbury on 20 September 1643 was a major engagement between Royalist and Parliamentarian armies during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651). The Royalist forces loyal to Charles I of England (r. 1625-1649) were led by Prince Rupert (l. 1619-1682) and faced an army led by the Earl of Essex....

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 interview, Ancient History Encyclopedia is speaking with Wendy Orr, the rather prolific author of numerous books who has recently published the book Swallow’s Dance. It is a book of historical fiction set in the Bronze Age Aegean that we think is going to be of great interest to our readers here at Ancient History Encyclopedia....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Women in ancient Persia had more rights and greater freedom than any other ancient civilization including, according to some scholars, even ancient Egypt which is famous for its respect for the feminine principle in religion as well as daily life. Persian history was an oral tradition, however, until the Sassanian Empire (224-651 CE) and so most of what is known of ancient Persian culture comes from the Greeks whose historians usually present the Persians unfavorably....

Rufus Porter distributed the first issue of his Scientific American with a prospectus touting the periodical as being for “those who delight in the development of those beauties of Nature, which consists in the laws of Mechanics, Chemistry, and other branches of Natural Philosophy.” He promised a paper that would instruct while it amused its reader. An eccentric character, Porter was an avid inventor who viewed scientific knowledge as a way of increasing one’s practical knowledge, and, subsequently, one’s social class....

Investigators combing through the wreckage of derailed Amtrak train 188 announced Wednesday that they planned to look at track conditions, signals, mechanics and human performance in assessing the cause of accident that killed at least seven and injured more than 200 riders. But a lack of safety updates to Amtrak’s trains and railroad infrastructure—because of dwindling federal funding—could also have been a major factor, say several experts. Federal funding for the Northeast Corridor, the track on which the derailment occurred, is only a little more than half of what the government’s Infrastructure and Operations Advisory Commission report had recommended in September 2014....

By Ross Adkin and Gopal Sharma KATHMANDU, May 12 (Reuters) - A fresh 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck Nepal on Tuesday, killing more than two dozen people in the Himalayan country and neighbouring states, as many buildings already weakened by a much bigger quake last month were brought down. The earthquake was centred 68 kilometres (42 miles) west of the town of Namche Bazaar, close to Mount Everest and the border with Tibet, the U....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineWhen it comes to discovering nuclear isotopes, retired physicist Gottfried Münzenberg is top, with 222. His colleague Hans Geissel, from the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, is next with 211. Then comes Francis Aston, the British chemist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with 207.These provisional rankings have been assembled by Michael Thoennessen, a physicist at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University in East Lansing....

Despite being separated by thousands of kilometers, Martian soils from Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum have proved broadly similar in parts–rich in chlorine and sulfur. Recent high-precision measurements have shown that phosphorus–the critical energy carrier in all known forms of Earth life–is equally abundant in such patches of Martian dirt. And the only explanation for such similar soils in disparate locations is a large, acidic ocean, according to a new paper published today in the November issue of Geology....

Taking a person’s temperature is no sweat: slip a thermometer under their tongue, say, and watch the reading climb to somewhere in the vicinity of 98 degrees Fahrenheit. But that single number actually results from each of the 30 trillion or so cells in the human body generating its own heat. The dispersal of that heat sets an overall body temperature, with different types of cells contributing to varying degrees. To really understand how living things regulate their body’s temperature, researchers must look to individual cells....