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Key concepts Physics Materials Elastic Temperature Introduction Balloons are fun and come in a variety of sizes, colors and forms that make them well suited for decorations, water play, modeling and other creative activities. But balloons also have uses outside of recreation: monitoring weather, widening obstructed arteries and providing transportation are just a few examples. The first balloons were made of animal bladders or intestines. This made way for the latex, rubber and nylon fabric balloons we see today....

From Simons Science News As a young theorist in Moscow in 1982, Mikhail Shifman became enthralled with an elegant new theory called supersymmetry that attempted to incorporate the known elementary particles into a more complete inventory of the universe. “My papers from that time really radiate enthusiasm,” said Shifman, now a 63-year-old professor at the University of Minnesota. Over the decades, he and thousands of other physicists developed the supersymmetry hypothesis, confident that experiments would confirm it....

When I look up into the sky at night, I often wonder whether we humans are too preoccupied with ourselves. There is much more to the universe than meets the eye on earth. As an astrophysicist I have the privilege of being paid to think about it, and it puts things in perspective for me. There are things that I would otherwise be bothered by–my own death, for example. Everyone will die sometime, but when I see the universe as a whole, it gives me a sense of longevity....

By Edwin Cartlidge The bandwidth available to mobile phones, digital television and other communication technologies could be expanded enormously by exploiting the twistedness as well as wavelength of radio waves. That is the claim being made by a group of scientists in Italy and Sweden, who have shown how a radio beam can be twisted, and the resulting vortex detected with distant antennas. The simplest kind of electromagnetic beam has a plane wavefront, which means that the peaks or troughs of the beam can be connected by an imaginary plane at right angles to the beam’s direction of travel....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Roman legions of Syria served as a buffer, protecting the Roman Empire not only externally from such threats as Parthia and the Sasanian Empire but also internally during the Great Jewish Revolt of 66 CE and the Bar-Kochba Revolt (132-135 CE). Located south of Cappadocia and west of Mesopotamia, Syria became a Roman province in 64 BCE....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The gods of the Mesopotamian region were not uniform in name, power, provenance or status in the hierarchy. Mesopotamian culture varied from region to region and, because of this, Marduk should not be regarded as King of the Gods in the same way Zeus ruled in Greece. While Marduk was venerated highly in Babylon, Enlil held that place in Sumer....

Sleep should be the great equalizer. Whatever differences might divide us during the day, the nonconsciousness that comes with nighttime should be one thing we all have in common. It ain’t necessarily so. Scientists have now found significant differences exist in how people sleep in the U.S. depending on race, ethnicity and country of origin, suggesting genetic or cultural differences in shut-eye patterns. This line of research could help identify how these disparities might affect health and find better ways to improve sleep....

People have often sought solitude in the starry night sky, and it is an appropriate place for that. The night is dark because, in cosmic terms, our sun and its family of planets are very lonely. Neighboring stars are so far away that they look like mere specks of light, and more distant stars blur together into a feeble glow. Our fastest space probes will take tens of thousands of years to cross the distance to the nearest star....

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - About a quarter of India’s land is turning to desert and degradation of agricultural areas is becoming a severe problem, the environment minister said, potentially threatening food security in the world’s second most populous country. India occupies just 2 percent of the world’s territory but is home to 17 percent of its population, leading to over-use of land and excessive grazing. Along with changing rainfall patterns, these are the main causes of desertification....

The Martian author Andy Weir’s new book, Artemis, drops today. Rather than focusing on one man’s survival on an inhospitable planet hundreds of millions of kilometers away, the novel keeps readers a bit closer to home—a city called Artemis on the moon, where a few thousand people live and work in a network of domes built not far from the Apollo 11 landing site. Roughly 60 years from now the moon has become an off-world destination populated mostly by moneyed tourists and a colony of welders, metalworkers and life-support specialists who keep Artemis habitable....

Spain’s National Police Corps recently welcomed a new member: an artificial-intelligence tool called VeriPol. It is the first text-based system for ferreting out phony robbery reports—and it is astoundingly accurate, researchers say. When Miguel Camacho Collados worked as a police inspector in Granada several years ago, he became frustrated at how often his team had to deal with robbery complaints that turned out to be fake. “Many colleagues were wasting a lot of time investigating cases that had never occurred,” says Camacho Collados, now at Spain’s Ministry of Interior in Madrid....

Why is most of the ground brown? Steven Allison, an ecology researcher at the University of California, Irvine, provides this answer: Large amounts of carbon in inorganic forms absorb most visible wavelengths of light and give soils their characteristic dark brown shades. (When carbon inputs to the soil are low because of erosion or lack of plant growth, we see the red, yellow or gray hues of the underlying minerals.) The more interesting question then is: Why does soil have so much carbon?...

What are space and time? Where do they come from? Physicists have treated them as fundamental properties of the universe, but scientists are finding intriguing evidence that they could just be expressions of something even more fundamental. Author Adam Becker, in our cover story takes us on a romp through this mind-bending research that could potentially lead to a theory of everything. There are a lot of weird vertebrates in the world—zippy hummingbirds, absurdly long-necked giraffes, bipedal apes—but some of the strangest are salamanders....

When British mathematician Alan Turing conceived the notion of a universal programmable computing machine, the word computer typically referred not to an object but to a human being. It was 1936, and people with the job of computer, in modern terms, crunched numbers. Turings design for a machine that could do such work instead–one capable of computing any computable problem–set the stage for theoretical study of computation and remains a foundation for all of computer science....

CHICAGO – This largest of American lakefront cities has long relied on feats of engineering to keep its sewage away from Lake Michigan, its primary freshwater resource and recreational crown jewel. In 1900, the Sanitary District of Chicago reversed the Chicago River’s flow, sending wastewater from homes, businesses and streets west toward the Illinois and Mississippi rivers rather than continue to foul the city’s waterfront along what today is Lakeshore Drive....

TARBELA RESERVOIR, Pakistan – “I think, after terrorism, the biggest threat we have is the environmental decay.” Tariq Yousafzai, a water and environmental engineer with detailed knowledge of his country’s water infrastructure, sees evidence of climate change in the flood disaster that inundated one-fifth of his country. But a more immediate concern of his is the massive deforestation that has silted up the waterways and left Pakistan more vulnerable to storms than ever....

In 1799 about a hundred Aleut hunters working for a Russian-American trading group died in Alaska’s Peril Strait only two hours after eating black mussels collected there. Those who survived did so because they threw up after desperately consuming gunpowder, tobacco and alcohol to purge toxin from their bodies. This was the first recorded incidence of paralytic shellfish poisoning on the west coast of North America. The Aleuts were killed by natural poisons known as toxins produced by certain algae that were trapped in the mussels’ food-gathering filters....

They say elephants never forget, but their brainpower does not stop there. A new study suggests that pachyderms can distinguish threatening groups of people from those who mean them no harm. Researchers working in Kenya presented the animals with identical red garments worn for five days either by Maasai tribesmen, who slay elephants to prove their strength and daring, or by farmers of the Kamba tribe, who leave the pachyderms in peace....

By Toni Clarke WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Dr. Margaret Hamburg, who as commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for almost six years has overseen public health initiatives ranging from tobacco control and food safety to personalized medicine and drug approvals, is stepping down, the agency said on Thursday. Hamburg, 59, is one of the longest-serving FDA commissioners in the modern era. She was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U....

In “Lifting the Black Cloud,” Robin Henig surveys the search for new, improved antidepressants. Much research in the area involves laboratory mice and rats. Here, Henig explains how scientists determine whether a rodent is depressed. It’s hard to develop an animal model for depression. As Michael Kaplitt of Cornell Medical College puts it, “A mouse can’t tell you how it’s feeling.” Scientists have had to come up with proxy behaviors, actions that they interpret as “depressionlike,” to measure whether particular drugs or therapies are having an effect....