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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. The threshing floors of the Bible were outdoor stone floors, usually circular in fashion, used by farmers to process the grain of their crops. For the larger community, like watermills of the recent past, they could be gathering places bustling with commercial and communal activity. Threshing floors served several purposes:...

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Regional, inter-regional and international trade was a common feature of the Roman world. A mix of state control and a free market approach ensured goods produced in one location could be exported far and wide. Cereals, wine and olive oil, in particular, were exported in huge quantities whilst in the other direction came significant imports of precious metals, marble, and spices....

Himalayan glaciers have been the subject of intense debate amid growing concern that melting ice could imperil a wide swath of South Asia that relies on groundwater from the “Third Pole.” Scientists have struggled to improve their understanding of the glaciers’ fate using satellite data and limited ground measurements, bumping up against the limits of the region’s extreme topography and political barriers. The picture that has emerged is complex, with wide variation among ice in the Himalayas, Hindu Kush and Tibetan Plateau....

By Keith Wallis SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A fire-ravaged ship loaded with hazardous chemicals has become a maritime football in the north Pacific, with Japan and South Korea unwilling to give it refuge even though they risk a wider environmental disaster if it sinks. The plight of the Maritime Maisie, a chemical tanker which has spent seven weeks being towed in waters between the two Asian neighbors, highlights the lack of global consensus on designating ports as safe-havens for ships in distress....

Research Report by Climate Central Alaska, the great northern frontier of America, is being reshaped by climate change. While rising temperatures are altering its character and landscape, they are also bringing the ravages of wildfires. In the past 60 years, Alaska has warmed more than twice as fast as the rest of the country, with average temperatures up by nearly 3°F. By 2050, temperatures are projected to climb an additional 2-4 degrees, with the Arctic region seeing the most dramatic increases....

By Ewen Callaway Biologists have constructed a programmable genetic “circuit” that can rewire cells to respond on demand to just about any signal desired. One version of the circuit makes human cells susceptible to an antiviral drug–but only if they are making abnormal amounts of a protein implicated in cancer.The technique could have a wide range of uses, for example coaxing stem cells to transform into different tissues once inside the body or making plants activate a defense program in response to low nutrients....

Does the language we speak influence the way we think? Scientists have fiercely debated this question for more than a century. A July 1 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences bolsters the case against language’s influence by showing that people with different native tongues organize events in the same order—even if that order is different from the one dictated by their native grammar. Psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago asked Chinese, English, Spanish and Turkish speakers to describe activities by using only their hands....

My own field studies have provided considerable evidence that obtaining adequate nutrition in the canopy–where primates evolved–is, in fact, quite difficult. This research, combined with complementary work by others, has led to another realization as well: the strategies that early primates adopted to cope with the dietary challenges of the arboreal environment profoundly influenced the evolutionary trajectory of the primate order, particularly that of the anthropoids (monkeys, apes and humans)....

Prepare yourself for this year’s upcoming fire season: It is going to be a mild one. At least, that is what state and federal officials said in a briefing yesterday at the Department of Agriculture. So far this year, about 1.3 million acres have burned – average for this time of year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). NIFC, which does not have a director of its own, coordinates the firefighting efforts of eight organizations and federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and U....

The sugars we eat may influence how our brains decide whether we should put our forks down or go back for second helpings, according to a new study. The findings suggest that fructose—a sugar found in fruits as well as in sweetened products such as soda—does not trigger the brain’s satiation signal in the same way as glucose, a sugar that’s the main fuel source for most of our bodies’ cells....

The Hubble Space Telescope is back. The iconic scope resumed normal operations Friday (Oct. 26) after a three-week hiatus caused by issues with two orientation-maintaining gyroscopes, NASA officials announced in an update Saturday (Oct. 27). Hubble’s first bounce-back science work, which wrapped up early Saturday morning, involved infrared-light observations of the star-forming galaxy DSF2237B-1-IR with the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, NASA officials added. [The Hubble Space Telescope’s Most Amazing Discoveries] Hubble’s troubles began Oct....

Hurricane Ian may have destroyed the financial security of thousands of Florida retirees whose life savings were invested in houses and condos lost to the storm’s winds and flooding. Post-storm modeling from the analytics firm CoreLogic Inc. found that nearly 800,000 Florida homes saw hurricane force winds during the storm, with roughly 600,000 experiencing winds powerful enough to flatten a house. The storm also had a disproportionate impact on older residents in some of the hardest-hit areas of the state, such as Lee and Collier counties, where nearly one in three residents is above age 65....

Feast and Famine The special issue on obesity [“Feast and Famine”] did not adequately address the skepticism that has developed concerning health research. Too often we have been encouraged to, say, increase our consumption of broccoli or oatmeal, only to then be told that the initial claims were faulty or exaggerated. These inconsistencies often arise from the misapplication of the basic principles of scientific methodology. There is a chronic failure to select unbiased samples, to identify appropriate control groups, to employ reliable statistical techniques and to recognize that correlation does not necessarily imply cause....

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain is a well-known critic of frivolous government spending otherwise known as pork: those pricey projects that legislators routinely—and surreptitiously—slip into appropriations packages to benefit their own districts and bring them coveted votes. But scientists charge that an important study of grizzly bear DNA has gotten caught in the crosshairs as the veteran Arizona lawmaker attempts to showcase his creds as a crusader against wasteful government spending....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. After a decade-long journey by the New Horizons spacecraft through our solar system, we can finally add Pluto and its main moon Charon to the roster of large icy bodies whose landscapes we have seen. And it was worth the wait. The first detailed images are surprising, showing a remarkable lack of impact craters on both Pluto and Charon....

SAN FRANCISCO—Just days before the fifth anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, California officials on Thursday released a new map of the state’s tsunami hazard, which details how an event could affect 350,000 people who live along the coast and cause tens of billions of dollars of damage. A red line separates possible disaster from safety—the line past which you would have to run to be safe from an inundation....

After the deafening roar of a thunderstorm, an eerie silence descends. Then the blackened sky over Joplin, Mo., releases the tentacles of an enormous, screaming multiple-vortex tornado. Winds exceeding 200 miles per hour tear a devastating path three quarters of a mile wide for six miles through the town, destroying schools, a hospital, businesses and homes and claiming roughly 160 lives. Nearly 20 minutes before the twister struck on the Sunday evening of May 22, 2011, government forecasters had issued a warning....

You know you’ve been with your spouse a long time when you feel as if you have developed a sixth sense for his emotions—you can just feel when he is upset. It turns out you may actually be smelling his state of mind, according to a study reported this past June in the journal Social Neuroscience. The researchers tested the ability of par­ticipants to identify, via body odor, their partner’s or a stranger’s chemosensory emotional cues—chemical compounds released by the body that have no noticeable odor but nonetheless transmit information about emotional states....

In 1866 S. Weir Mitchell, the foremost American neurologist of his time, published his first account of phantom limbs, not in a scientific journal but in the Atlantic Monthly, as an anonymously written short story. In his tale, The Case of George Dedlow, the protagonist loses an arm to amputation during the Civil War. Later, he awakens in the hospital after, unbeknownst to him, both his legs have also been amputated....

Probing a blue abyss can be an abysmal recipe for the blues. For every 10 joules of energy that our greenhouse gas pollution traps here on Earth, about 9 of them end up in an ocean. There, the effects of global warming bite into fisheries, ecosystems and ice. But those effects are largely imperceptible to humans—as invisible to a landlubber as an albatross chomping on a baited hook at the end of a long line....