Posts

Terrorism is as old as history and almost certainly older. In 68 B.C., for instance, the Roman city of Ostia, a vital port for one of the world’s earliest superpowers, was set on fire by a band of thugs. They destroyed the consular war fleet and, rather embarrassingly, kidnapped two leading senators. Panic ensued—the same panic that has now been recapitulated down the centuries, courtesy of such terror groups as the Irish Republican Army, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the African National Congress, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, al Qaeda and, most recently, ISIS....

This article is adapted from one that originally appeared in Gehirn & Geist. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan achieved a stunning ascent from humble origins to the pinnacle of power. As a working-class teen, he sold sesame bread along Istanbul’s waterfront and dreamed of being a professional soccer player. By age 40, though, he had become the city’s mayor. Less than a decade later he was elected prime minister of Turkey....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Phoenicians, based on a narrow coastal strip of the Levant, put their excellent seafaring skills to good use and created a network of colonies and trade centres across the ancient Mediterranean. Their major trade routes were by sea to the Greek islands, across southern Europe, down the Atlantic coast of Africa, and up to ancient Britain....

▪ Prion infections, such as mad cow disease, may incubate without symptoms for years. A technique that amplifies tiny amounts of prions in the blood successfully diagnosed infected hamsters within 20 days after exposure to prions and three months before symptoms appeared. Science, July 7 ▪ A radar system emits signals that appear as noise to other devices, thus enabling it to escape detection. Properly tuned, the stealth radar can also image objects behind walls....

California regulators have released the country’s first comprehensive, mandatory emissions trading system for greenhouse gases. The California Air Resources Board issued a preliminary design last week detailing how approximately 2.7 billion allowances will be distributed to emitters in their effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 – an amount anywhere between 18 million and 27 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent. The system will cover 85 percent of the state’s industrial emissions by the time it ends in 2020....

Cities in California and Massachusetts are advancing what has become the newest trend in the local fight against climate change: bans on natural gas hookups in new buildings. In July, Berkeley, Calif., outlawed them. A handful of other California communities soon followed. Then, last week, Brookline, Mass., took up the cause. In a 200-3 vote at a town meeting—the form of citizen government employed by many New England towns—Brookline residents approved a plan to block gas hookups in new homes and in major renovations....

By Barbara LewisBRUSSELS (Reuters) - Once a clear environmental leader, the European Union is likely to set a more cautious tone for the global debate on a U.N. climate deal when it unveils a new chunk of green energy law early next year.Warsaw talks starting on Monday assemble almost 200 nations to prepare for a U.N. global pact, to be sealed in 2015, by extracting new promises on emissions cuts.The EU draft law should make the European Union the first major bloc to outline binding environment and energy targets for 2030....

Sleepwalkers do the strangest things. Many accounts attest to a somnambulist leaving their house clad only in underpants, or rising to cook a meal and returning to bed without so much as tasting it. A stern warning is frequently tacked onto these tales: waking a sleepwalker could kill them. The chances of killing a sleepwalker due to the shock of sudden awakening, however, is about as likely as somebody expiring from a dream about dying....

For all the flack the U.N. climate talks have taken over the past 20 years, one major achievement will be on display as the next round of negotiations open in Peru today. Climate change has been inextricably linked to social justice. The key questions that face the delegates as they meet in Lima are no longer simply about carbon emissions targets and timetables, but also about people and human rights. One mark of that shift is the $9....

As Earth enters the Anthropocene epoch, its biodiversity wobbles on the precipice of disaster—and island species have been hit especially hard. About 80 percent of recorded extinctions have occurred on islands and 40 percent of the world’s endangered and threatened species are island dwellers. Researchers say the leading cause of these extinctions is invasive rodents—rats and mice that stowed away on ships, then quickly populated islands where they have no natural predators and often find a buffet of things like eggs and baby wildlife....

Any parent of a young child can walk you through the various inducements that characterize the morning get-out-the-door routine—from stating the facts (“If we are late, the school gate will be locked”) to outright bribery (“Cookies right now if you put your shoes on”). Every day we persuade and are persuaded. But it’s not easy to win someone over to your point of view, and attempts to do so can backfire—even when the facts are on your side....

Easter Island was once home to lush palm forests. Over time, however, the humans who settled there depleted the island’s resources, leading to wars among clans that doomed the population. Their legacy, the giant stone sculptures called moai, have drawn intense interest and fascination ever since Europeans discovered them in 1722. One theory posits that the early Polynesians who settled on the island, also known as Rapa Nui, cut down trees for logs to roll the statues from their quarries to their overlook positions....

When Steve Cole was a postdoc, he had an unusual hobby: matching art buyers with artists that they might like. The task made looking at art, something he had always loved, even more enjoyable. “There was an extra layer of purpose. I loved the ability to help artists I thought were great to find an appreciative audience,” he says. At the time, it was nothing more than a quirky sideline. But his latest findings have caused Cole — now a professor at the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the University of California, Los Angeles — to wonder whether the exhilaration and sense of purpose that he felt during that period might have done more than help him to find homes for unloved pieces of art....

Editor’s note: We celebrate Scientific American’s 165th anniversary on August 28 with this reproduction of what amounts to the cover story. Interestingly, the story states that passengers would comfortably be “flying” at 30 to 40 miles per hour; contrast that with the last line of the “Morse’s Telegraph” story in the same issue, which described railroad cars as “slow and tedious.” There is, perhaps, no mechanical subject, in which improvement has advanced so rapidly, within the last ten years, as that of railroad passenger cars....

NASA’s Juno probe has snapped its first image of Jupiter since going into orbit around the giant planet last week. Juno captured the photo — which show Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot, some of its cloud belts and the three big Jovian moons Europa, Ganymede and Io — with its visible-light JunoCam instrument on Sunday (July 10). At the time, Juno was about 2.7 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) from Jupiter, NASA officials said....

On Wednesday, March 10, I had the pleasure of making love with Scientific American’s editor in chief, Mariette DiChristina—in front of a large audience, no less. Hey, calm down. We didn’t make love with each other. We did something even better. We showed about a hundred smart, skeptical New Yorkers that we could, fairly easily and on demand, increase the love that people feel toward each other—people who are already in love, people who are just friends, and even total strangers....

Hi, I’m Dr. Sabrina Stierwalt, the Everyday Einstein, here with Quick and Dirty Tips to help you make sense of science. This coming week is a holiday here in the United States in which we celebrate the life and accomplishments of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, a civil rights activist who played an important role in ending segregation. In his commencement address at Oberlin College in 1965, MLK said: “Through our scientific and technological genius, we’ve made of this world a neighborhood....

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World by Shelley Emling, published on October 13 by Palgrave Macmillan (Scientific American is a Macmillan publication). The Fossil Hunter chronicles the work of Mary Anning, a woman born in 1799 in Lyme Regis on the south coast of England, who discovered the first documented dinosaur skeleton. In the following passage from the chapter entitled “A Long-Necked Beauty” Anning first discovers the skeleton of a previously unknown dinosaur type....

Insect outbreaks—increasingly responsible for creating post-apocalyptic swaths of forest in the West—do not add fuel to forest fires. In fact, a new study finds, they seem to do the opposite, in turn reducing the severity of forest blazes. Researchers from the University of Vermont and Oregon State University used spatial models and statistical analyses to map 81 fires as well as insect outbreaks over a 25-year period in Oregon and Washington state....

As Libya’s civil war continues to disrupt its contribution to the world’s oil supply, the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) has taken action. The IEA, which counts the U.S. among its members, announced on June 23 that it will release 60 million barrels of oil from various governments’ strategic reserves, spread out over a 30-day period. The U.S. Department of Energy is supplying 30 million barrels, half the total amount, from its 727-million-barrel Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR)....