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“Speakers of some languages seem to rattle away at high speed like machine-guns, while other languages sound rather slow and plodding,” wrote linguist Peter Roach in 1998. A few months ago re­searchers systematically quantified Roach’s observation and offered a sur­prising explanation. Last year, in an issue of the journal Language, François Pel­legrino and his colleagues at the Univer­sity of Lyon in France published their analysis of the speech of 59 people read­ing the same 20 texts aloud in seven languages....

A prominent astrophysicist has pinned down a real location for Superman’s fictional home planet of Krypton. Krypton is found 27.1 light-years from Earth, in the southern constellation Corvus (The Crow), says Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York City. The planet orbits the red dwarf star LHS 2520, which is cooler and smaller than our sun. Tyson performed the celestial sleuthing at the request of DC Comics, which wanted to run a story about Superman’s search for his home planet....

One of the world’s deepest earthquakes was also a rare supersonic quake, upending ideas about where these unusual earthquakes strike. Only six supersonic (or supershear) earthquakes have ever been identified, all in the last 15 years. Until now, they all showed similar features, occurring relatively near the Earth’s surface and on the same kind of fault. But last year, a remarkably super-fast and super-deep earthquake hit below Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, breaking the pattern....

All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare wrote, and physicists tend to think that way, too. Their stage happens to be space itself, and to them, space sometimes seems like a mere backdrop to the action of the forces and fields that inhabit it. Space, the conventional thinking goes, is not made up of anything at all. Scientists have begun to question this convention, however. Space—or rather, in the language of general relativity, spacetime—may actually be composed of tiny chunks of information....

“Intuition, huh?” My co-worker eyed the sketches for this issue’s cover story sitting on my looks-like-a-bomb-hit-it desk. Then she beamed with approval: “I depend on that for everything!” Don’t we all? Yet it is startling to realize just how little focused, conscious attention we apply to the everyday decisions that ultimately shape the course of our existence. Cross the street or not? Trust the stranger or no? Many of our snap judgments work out well, but sometimes our hunches lead us astray....

What if your brain knew something but couldn’t tell you? New research suggests that this is exactly what may be behind two rather curious conditions. Most of us are familiar with people who are tune deaf – these are the people who not only cannot sing in tune but are also unaware of that fact. Individuals with severe forms of this condition, known as amusia, are unable to detect whether particular notes within a melody are out of tune or out of key....

As COVID-19 vaccines became widely available in the U.S. this year, some people who had put life plans on hold earlier in the pandemic decided not to wait any longer. One of them was Scientific American senior health editor Tanya Lewis, who got married in August. But in the weeks leading up to the wedding day, infections of the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2, had started to rise again nationwide. So the wedding was held outdoors and limited to fewer than 40 guests, with all the adults confirming they were vaccinated—and Lewis handed out over-the-counter antigen tests for the coronavirus just before the ceremony, then asked guests to take them....

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 Greeks are often credited with building the foundations upon which all western cultures are built, and this impressive accolade stems from their innovative contributions to a wide range of human activities, from sports to medicine, architecture to democracy. Like any other culture before or since, the Greeks learnt from the past, adapted good ideas they came across when they met other cultures, and developed their own brand new ideas....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Hatshepsut, whose name means “Foremost of Noble Women” or “First Among Noble Women” (royal name, Ma’at-ka-re, translated as “spirit of harmony and truth”) was the fifth ruler of the 18th Dynasty ( ruled1479-1458 BCE). She was the daughter of Thuthmose I and Queen Ahmose and, as was common in Egyptian royal houses, married her half-brother Thuthmose II....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Column of Marcus Aurelius and Faustina which stands in Piazza Colonna in Rome is thought to have been erected by Commodus in memory of his father and mother sometime around 180 CE. The column was inspired by its more famous predecessor Trajan’s Column which was set up, also in Rome, in 113 CE....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. EDIT TEST To call Polybius our best guide to Hellenistic history might be misleading for a few reasons. Firstly, Polybius’ Histories are by no means perfect; for a start, as they have come down to us they are incomplete. To term it ’the best’ implies all sorts of qualities, which his Histories might not necessarily possess, such as being the most accurate, objective, detailed and broadest source of the period....

Do you want to hear the most epic story ever? A long time ago the atoms in your body were spread across trillions of kilometers of otherwise empty space. Billions of years in the past there was no hint that they would eventually come to be configured as your eyes, your skin, your hair, your bones or the 86 billion neurons of your brain. Many of these atoms came from deep inside a star—perhaps several stars, themselves separated by many more trillions of kilometers....

If you spend much time with children, you’re bound to wonder how young human beings can possibly learn so much so quickly. Philosophers, going all the way back to Plato, have wondered, too, but they’ve never found a satisfying answer. My five-year-old grandson, Augie, has learned about plants, animals and clocks, not to mention dinosaurs and spaceships. He also can figure out what other people want and how they think and feel....

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine – Most days Nikolay Ossienko patrols the forests surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, clearing brush and dead trees from the grid of fuel breaks that crisscross the 1,000-square-mile area. But on hot July afternoons, when black thunderheads loom on the horizon, he climbs a rusty ladder 75 feet up a rickety fire tower. When he spots smoke, he radios the six other towers to pinpoint the location, then trucks off to the blaze....

Snakes slither, sidewind and have even been known to launch themselves from one tree to another. Now scientists have discovered another, rather startling form of serpentine movement: brown tree snakes on the island of Guam were observed tying their bodies into the shape of a lasso—and hitching themselves up smooth metal poles. This “lasso locomotion” is a slow, strenuous process. But researchers say it probably allows snakes to climb wider, smoother trees than they would otherwise be able to scale and to snag prey that might otherwise be out of reach....

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has awarded the 2014 Abel Prize to Russian-born mathematical physicist Yakov Sinai of Princeton University in New Jersey. The award cites his “fundamental contributions to dynamical systems, ergodic theory, and mathematical physics”. Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who presented the award today, says that Sinai has worked on questions relating to real physical systems “with the soul of a mathematician”....

The White House laid out its policy priorities for a second Trump term yesterday, and climate change wasn’t on the agenda. In fact, the word “climate” didn’t appear at all in the 138-page main budget document, which asked Congress for a total of $4.8 trillion to fund the president’s priorities across the federal government in fiscal 2021. That figure would mean a slight increase in federal spending overall compared with the status quo and would enable the Trump administration to grow the military to include the U....

Ever since 2012, when astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope first spied inconclusive hints of watery plumes emanating from the subsurface ocean of Jupiter’s large, icy moon Europa, space scientists have fiercely debated the claim. Previous estimates had suggested the moon’s crust might be tens if not hundreds of kilometers thick—too thick, that is, to allow direct exploration of its potentially life-friendly ocean anytime soon. A plume venting some of Europa’s ocean water into space where it could be sampled by an orbiting spacecraft would change the whole equation—it seemed, in short, too good to be true....

When it comes to treatments for Ebola, there has been a nearly four-decade-long drought. Nothing in the medical arsenal attacks the virus directly. For the most part, patients receive only supportive care, offered at a minimum level if too few health-care workers struggle to keep too many patients alive. The current extraordinary outbreak in West Africa provides, really for the first time, a chance to change that. This, the largest outbreak on record, presents an opportunity to test some therapies in the hopes that those caring for future Ebola patients will never again despair at the fact that the best they can offer is a bed, fluids, nutrition and human kindness....

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mayors of 21 cities in Florida on Friday called on the moderators of next week’s presidential debates in Miami to ask candidates how they would deal with rising sea levels caused by climate change, a concern of the state’s coastal communities. “It would be unconscionable for these issues of grave concern for the people of Florida to not be addressed in the upcoming debate you will be hosting in the state,” the mayors wrote in an letter to CNN, The Washington Post, Univision and the other media outlets hosting the Democratic and Republican debates on March 9 and March 10 in Miami....