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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. In the following excerpt from his Library of History, Book XVI, chapter 14, the historian Diodorus Siculus (1st century BCE) chronicles the famous Battle of Chaeronia of 338 BCE, in which Phillip II of Macedon, his son Alexander and their allies defeated the Greek forces of Athens and Thebes resulting in the unification of the Greek city-states under Macedonian rule....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The striking turquoise mask now in the British Museum in London is thought to represent Xiuhtecuhtli, the Aztec god of fire, and dates to the final century of the Aztec empire, c. 1400-1521 CE. It is made from hundreds of small pieces of turquoise glued onto a cedar wood base and was meant to be either worn by a god impersonator in religious ceremonies or worn by an effigy of the god....

Put this in the radical rumor file. Apple has decided to delay the iPhone 5S in order to switch to a larger screen size, say Asia-sourced reports. Apple will delay the release of the iPhone 5S in order to give it time to make a switch to a larger screen size, according to a report from BrightWire News, citing sources at suppliers. Commercial Times, via Bloomberg, is also reporting the rumor....

Editor’s Note: Microbiologist Carl R. Woese, a recipient of the Crafoord Prize, Leeuwenhoek Medal, and a National Medal of Science, died December 30, 2012, at the age of 84. This story was originally published in the June 1981 issue of Scientific American. Early natural philosophers held that life on the earth is fundamentally dichotomous: all living things are either animals or plants. When microorganisms were discovered, they were di­vided in the same way....

In Baltimore, violence has become a near-daily occurrence. In 2015, for example, this city of more than 620,000 people saw 344 homicides. But by tackling violence as a public health issue, Baltimore is forging a new model for how to keep citizens safe. In 2007 the city launched its Safe Streets program, modeled after the Cure Violence program in Chicago. Targeting high-risk youth, Safe Streets hires “violence interrupters” to mediate conflict before it has the chance to escalate into violence....

This story is a supplement to the feature “The Migration History of Humans: DNA Study Traces Human Origins Across the Continents” which was printed in the July 2008 issue of Scientific American. In their quest for a more in-depth picture of human origins, geneticists need more samples from indigenous populations the world over. “There’s a need for greater resolution in the data,” says Marcus W. Feldman of Stanford University and a co-author of a recent whole-genome comparative analysis....

In March researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture received a shipment of what they thought was a relatively harmless strain of animal flu from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was, in fact, highly pathogenic H5N1 flu virus. Months later the researchers only began to suspect something was amiss when their experiments yielded results that they didn’t expect and couldn’t explain. The CDC, it turns out, had sent the deadly samples inadvertently....

By Erwin SebaHOUSTON (Reuters) - A Chevron Corp pipeline exploded near a tiny Texas town south of Dallas on Thursday, shooting flames high in the air and prompting evacuations from nearby homes and a school district, but no injuries were reported, the company and emergency officials saidThe explosion south of Milford, Texas, was caused by a construction crew that accidentally drilled into a 10-inch liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) line, Tom Hemrick, director of Hill County Emergency Management, told KTVT-TV in Dallas....

A continuing series on what folks in the public sphere have said about climate change in recent days. On Tuesday, President Obama delivered the constitutionally required State of the Union address. Climate change was among the topics mentioned. Climate change is a fact. . —President Obama, January 28, 2014,State of the Union address The president says it’s a fact, but it’s not a fact here [in the Senate]. . —Sen. Tim Scott (R-S....

From Nature magazine Global warming is changing the location of Earth’s geographic poles, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, report that increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet — and to a lesser degree, ice loss in other parts of the globe — helped to shift the North Pole several centimeters east each year since 2005. “There was a big change,” says lead author Jianli Chen, a geophysicist....

Invisibility cloaks, once thought of as the province only of Harry Potter tales and Star Trek, have become reality in the past decade or so. Now scientists have developed an “unfeelability cloak,” a material that hides objects within it from being felt or touched. The researchers suggest that in the future such cloaks might find help protect objects from bumps and pokes that might otherwise harm them. Invisibility cloaks work by smoothly guiding light waves around objects so the waves ripple along their original trajectories as if nothing were there to block them....

Society is built on a foundation of cooperation, with lessons on its importance starting as early as Sesame Street. It may be tempting to look at our ability to cooperate—however imperfectly—as evidence that humans have transcended our baser instincts. But in her energetic analysis, psychologist Nichola Raihani recontextualizes cooperation within the framework of evolution and reveals the competition for survival that still bubbles below its surface. According to Raihani, cooperation is “not just about what we do, but who and what we are....

A wild mushroom eaten by foraging enthusiasts across Europe has been found to contain dangerous and potentially lethal toxins. Chinese scientists believe they have identified the mushroom toxins that cause rhabdomyolysis – a sometimes fatal disease that can irreparably damages the kidneys – that was first reported 15 years ago in France. However, the toxins were not isolated from the mushroom Tricholoma equestre that was thought to be responsible for the deaths, but from Tricholoma terreum, its close relative, highlighting the complexity of fungus toxicology....

HIV is a consummate trickster. Availed of a human body, it can thrive for years on end, foiling the immune system’s attempts to squelch it. All the while, it continues to infect host cells. Scientists have recognized for some time that a single protein on the virus’s outer membrane known as gp120 is responsible for much of this chicanery. New research is yielding fresh insights into how the protein operates....

As many as four out of every five pregnant women say that they suffer from “pregnancy brain”—deficits in memory and cognitive ability that arise during pregnancy, making women more forgetful and slow-witted. Yet studies on the phenomenon have generally not supported these claims: although some have found evidence of problems on certain types of tasks, others, including a recent paper published by researchers in Utah, have found no signs of cognitive problems at all....

I get goose bumps every time I see it. A paralyzed volunteer sits in a wheelchair while controlling a computer or robotic limb just with his or her thoughts—a demonstration of a brain-machine interface (BMI) in action. That happened in my laboratory in 2013, when Erik Sorto, a victim of a gunshot wound when he was 21 years old, used his thoughts alone to drink a beer without help for the first time in more than 10 years....

Unlike opiates such as heroin or prescription painkillers, there is no medication specifically approved to help curb cocaine consumption. Now, an experimental vaccine offers hope for a new approach, researchers say, that spurs on antibodies, which bind with cocaine molecules and apparently helps some addicts stop feeling the pleasurable effects of the drug—thus deconditioning them out of their dependency. Cocaine, both inhaled powder form and smoked “crack” cocaine, accounts for about one in three drug-related emergency room admissions, according to the U....

Edited by Dava Sobel A billion years ago —while here on Earth multicelled life was arising and spreading— in a galaxy far far away two spinning black holes danced ‘round one another, rippling the fabric of space and time. The ripples, called gravity waves sucked energy from the holes’ orbit, so The holes spiraled inward, eclipsing each other, toward a climactic collision: The holes, at half of light speed, collided catastrophically and merged in a brief, cataclysmic storm of writhing and twisting spacetime that brought the waves to crescendo....

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON, Sept 1 (Reuters) - One of the earliest big predators to prowl Earth’s primordial waters was a sea scorpion nearly 6 feet (1.7 meters) long whose body looked a bit like an ancient Greek warship. Scientists on Tuesday announced the discovery in northeastern Iowa of fossils of a large, active hunter called Pentecopterus decorahensis that lived 467 million years ago during the Ordovician Period. “Pentecopterus was an incredibly bizarre animal, with a long head that looked somewhat like the prow of a ship, a narrow body and massively enlarged limbs that it used to capture prey,” Yale University paleontologist James Lamsdell said....

Two volcanic islands recently born in the Red Sea have yielded stunning images, providing scientists with new insights about a little-known rift in Earth’s crust. Both islands emerged in the Zubair Archipelago, a small chain of volcanic islands, owned by Yemen, that rise from the Red Sea between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The first of the new islands, now called Sholan Island, appeared in December 2011. The second island, called Jadid, surfaced in September 2013....