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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. Thanks to their favoured position in life and the labour of the peasants on their estates, nobles in an English medieval castle had plenty of leisure hours which could be frittered away by eating, drinking, dancing, playing games like chess, or reading romantic stories of daring-do. Other ways to pass the time and impress one’s peers were hunting in the local forest or deer park, falconry, jousting, needlework, composing poetry, playing music, and watching professional acrobats, jugglers, and jesters....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The great Hindu god Shiva has many guises and many representations in art, but perhaps the most familiar is as a dancing figure within a circle of fire, that is as Shiva Nataraja, Lord of the Dance. It is an image seen in museums, temples, restaurants, and esoteric shops across the world, and it is wonderfully rich in iconography and hidden meaning....

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The U.S. Midwest endured another frigid morning on Friday and another spell of sub-zero (Fahrenheit) temperatures is forecast for early next week, but temperatures should moderate after that, an agricultural meteorologist said. “Once we get past middle of next week, we do begin to see things moderate. By the middle of the month, it looks like it will be not nearly as cold,” said Kyle Tapley, a meteorologist with MDA Weather Services....

Headlines, health experts and policy makers rarely talk about COVID and Asian American disparities. Yet reports show that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) suffer from disproportionately high COVID death rates and hospitalizations. To make matters worse, their suffering remains largely overlooked in a form of invisible but deadly racial bias. In an analysis of 50 million U.S. patients, Asians were most likely to die from COVID and to be hospitalized compared to white patients, according to a September 2020 report from Kaiser Family Foundation and Epic Health Research Network....

Raphael Azeredo, head of Brazil’s delegation to U.N. climate negotiations, said he believes Rousseff’s June 30 visit to Washington, D.C., is too soon to expect the country’s full contribution to a December deal in Paris. Still, he said, Rousseff will offer key nuggets about Brazil’s plan as well as a “strong declaration” with Obama about the urgency of tackling climate change. “It will not be ready by then,” Azeredo said of Brazil’s intended nationally determined contribution (INDC) to the Paris agreement....

NASA’s latest rover on Mars depends on a sandwich of semiconducting material that can turn heat into electricity. In the case of Curiosity, the steady radioactive decay of plutonium 238 warms such thermoelectric material and turns roughly 4 percent of that heat into a steady flow of electrons. A similar radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility is still working after decades, as are the RTGs in the two Voyager spacecraft launched 35 years ago; such enduring reliability is the main reason NASA employed the inefficient technology....

To deliver significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, a new proposal from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency foresees a growing role for natural gas. But will there be enough of it at affordable prices? The U.S. Energy Information Administration and industry sources say there’s plenty that can be extracted at a reasonable price. But some experts question those estimates or say that, at least, the nation shouldn’t bank on them. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, coupled with horizontal drilling, has unlocked large gas deposits in shale rock, which had been long recognized but weren’t profitable to extract until about a decade ago....

Gravity waves spread through space and time like ripples on a pond, warping the fabric of the universe as they pass. The largest waves emanate from the most cataclysmic events in the universe: stellar explosions, mergers of black holes, and the violent first moments of cosmological history. Or so the venerable theory of general relativity goes—although many predictions of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity have been proved, only indirect evidence for gravity waves has been found....

“The fact that this database is published to the public, it is not just a criminal offense, it is a national offense,” says Lorenzo Cordova Vianello, president of the Mexican National Electoral Institute, the body that organizes federal elections in Mexico. In a statement issued Friday, the Institute says it has filed a criminal complaint about the case with Mexico’s Special Prosecutor’s Office for Electoral Crimes (FEPADE) and has notified the national cyber police....

Doctors agree that when it comes to feeding your baby, breast is best. Most research has focused on health advantages to the infant and, more recently, on physiological and psychological benefits for the mother. Now research highlights a mechanism by which nursing may influence the mother-infant bond: it seems the brain of a breast-feeding mother is especially receptive to signals from her baby. Graduate student Pilyoung Kim and her colleagues at Yale University’s Child Study Center used functional MRI to scan the brains of 20 women while exposing them to their baby’s cry or image....

Blocking Sound with Holes Anyone kept awake by a neighbor’s television may be surprised to learn that a few holes drilled through a wall could lower the volume on sound. Francisco Meseguer of the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain and his colleagues placed a series of 20-centimeter-thick aluminum plates in a tank of water and found that perforated plates could diminish ultrasound waves passing through by up to another 10 decibels as compared with solid plates....

Ah, glorious springtime. It brings flowers, warmer temperatures—and for many, incessant sneezes and sniffles. Everybody curses allergies as annoying at best, and some allergic reactions—such as anaphylaxis, which rapidly lowers blood pressure and closes the airways—can be fatal. But a handful of researchers now propose that allergies may actually have evolved to protect us. Runny noses, coughs and itchy rashes keep toxic chemicals out of our bodies, they argue, and persuade us to steer clear of dangerous environments....

Key concepts Biology Taste Food preferences Age Introduction Have you ever wondered if people of all ages love sour foods, or if age correlates with this preference? There are a lot of different kinds of sour candies and drinks you may have seen advertised before, some having only a mild sour flavor and others that are truly mouth-puckering! In this activity you will investigate if there is a difference between the sour preferences of kids and adults....

As ice caps melt and sea levels rise, islands around the world could eventually become completely submerged, like real-world cities of Atlantis. Scientists have determined that the tides could consume low-lying islands in the next 50 to 150 years. But they’ll become uninhabitable well before they’re underwater, and that day might not be in the too distant future. A study by the U.S. Geological Survey released yesterday finds that the two northwestern Hawaiian atolls of Midway and Laysan and Pacific islands like them could become inundated and unfit to live on during this century....

Images of inhumanity and atrocity are burned into our memories. Jewish men, women and children being herded into gas chambers. Entire villages destroyed by rampaging gangs in Rwanda. The systematic use of rape and the destruction of communities as part of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. The massacre at My Lai in South Vietnam, the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and most recently, the carnage wrought by suicide bombers in Baghdad, Jerusalem, London and Madrid....

The US House of Representatives is wading into the debate over whether human embryos should be modified to introduce heritable changes. Its fiscal year 2016 spending bill for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would prohibit the agency from spending money to evaluate research or clinical applications for such products. In an unusual twist, the bill—introduced on June 17—would also direct the FDA to create a committee that includes religious experts to review a forthcoming report from the US Institute of Medicine (IOM)....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The traditional house of ancient and medieval Japan (1185-1606 CE) is one of the most distinctive contributions that country has made to world architecture. While the rich and powerful might have lived in castles and villas, and the poor lived in rustic country houses or cramped suburban quarters, a large number of medieval Japanese in-between lived in what became the quintessential Japanese home....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Proslogion (Latin for Address or Discourse; the title was chosen because it is written in the form of a prayer addressed to God) is a book written by the medieval theologian St. Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033-1109). It is of great significance in the history of philosophy, mainly because of the proof of God’s existence that Anselm gives in Chapters Two and Three of the work....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In November 1532 CE, Francisco Pizarro led a group of about 160 conquistadors into the Inca city of Cajamarca. The illiterate and illegitimate son of an Extremaduran nobleman and an impoverished woman, Pizarro had spent his entire life on a quest to become wealthy and be remembered....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Solomonic Dynasty ruled Ethiopia from the 1270s to the 1970s, and the 14th-century work, the Kebra Nagast (The Glory of the Kings) famously tells of how the dynasty of Ethiopian kings descended from King Solomon himself. The descent from Solomon meant very different things at different times, but the Solomonic succession has remained in the Ethiopian cultural landscape for centuries....