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Solar panels are becoming an increasingly common sight on rooftops. These panels are made up of photovoltaic cells, which absorb the photons from sunlight and energize electrons in the cell’s material, creating electricity. The current maximum efficiency of commercial photovoltaic cells is, however, about 20 percent. This low efficiency results from the fact that only photons with a certain amount of energy—that is to say, only part of the solar spectrum—can sufficiently energize the electrons to form the current; other photons are essentially wasted....

A major manufacturer of power-generation equipment announced plans today to build a small nuclear reactor that company officials touted as a “potential game changer for the global nuclear market.” Babcock & Wilcox Co.’s 125-megawatt reactor would be significantly smaller than the average 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor and is aimed at plugging a major “market gap,” CEO Brandon Bethards said at a Washington press conference. The new reactor might come online as early as 2018....

OSLO (Reuters) - Norway wants to let oil and gas companies drill in Arctic seas that were frozen as recently as the 1980s even though some climate experts say it is too early to trust global warming to keep the ice away. Russia is also showing new interest in the Arctic despite high costs in a region where governments are struggling to set safety rules after BP’s 2010 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst offshore spill in U....

Protons have a constant spin that is an intrinsic particle property like mass or charge. Yet where this spin comes from is such a mystery it’s dubbed the “proton spin crisis.” Initially physicists thought a proton’s spin was the sum of the spins of its three constituent quarks. But a 1987 experiment showed that quarks can account for only a small portion of a proton’s spin, raising the question of where the rest arises....

In September, the Florida State University football team made a visit to a Tallahassee middle school that would become famous. At lunchtime, student-athlete Travis Rudolph noticed sixth grader Bo Paske eating alone, so he joined Bo for the meal. Bo, who has autism, often sat by himself in the lunchroom. The world took note of the athlete’s gesture after his mother’s Facebook post about it went viral. “This is one day I didn’t have to worry if my sweet boy ate lunch alone, because he sat across from someone who is a hero in many eyes,” she wrote....

A lot of things can impact the quality of the air you breathe, and they can come from places on far away or right on your block. For example, pollution spewed by factories in the Ohio River Valley does not stay there; instead, it often blows across swathes of Northeastern states. Wildfires blazing in California can send soot and gases aloft that eventually spread continent-wide. And, in the meantime, local emissions from cars and industry can foul the air and lead to smog, a sky-obscuring haze that makes it hard to breathe....

In the dark heart of the Perseus galaxy cluster, 300 million light-years from Earth, a supermassive black hole has been singing the same note for 2.5 billion years. Its tone registers 57 octaves below middle C and, according to scientists at NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Center, is a resounding B-flat. Yet, how is this possible in the vacuum of space? Sound requires a medium, such as water or air, to travel. Here on Earth a sound wave moves from its origin by causing the surrounding air molecules to vibrate....

Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer. W. W. Norton (2018) The Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger has long been recognized as a pioneer in the study of autism. He was even seen as a hero, saving children with the condition from the Nazi killing programme by emphasizing their intelligence. However, it is now indisputable that Asperger collaborated in the murder of children with disabilities under the Third Reich....

By Julie Steenhuysen The Salt Lake County health department in Utah said on Friday that an elderly resident who had been infected with the Zika virus while traveling to an area with active transmission of the virus died late last month. The exact cause of death is not known, the health department said in a press release. The resident had an undisclosed health condition and had tested positive for the Zika virus....

An international team of scientists has found that a strange type of bacteria can turn light into fuel in incredibly dim environments. Similar bacteria could someday help humans colonize Mars and expand our search for life on other planets, researchers said in a statement released with the new work. Organisms called cyanobacteria absorb sunlight to create energy, releasing oxygen in the process. But until now, researchers thought these bacteria could absorb only specific, higher-energy wavelengths of light....

A late-season flurry of flames is sweeping Southern California, driven by high-speed winds surging down the mountains toward the coast. The Bond Fire, which ignited Thursday, has burned more than 7,000 acres and was 50% contained as of last night. Authorities warn that a combination of strong winds and warm, dry weather could increase the risk of more blazes this week. Strong, dry winds are common in Southern California during the fall and winter months....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Semiramis is the semi-divine Warrior-Queen of Assyria, whose reign is most clearly documented by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (l. 90-30 BCE) in his great work Bibliotheca Historica (“Historical Library”) written over thirty years, most probably between 60-30 BCE. Diodorus drew on the works of earlier authors, such as Ctesias of Cnidus (l....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In August of 410 CE Alaric the Gothic king accomplished something that had not been done in over eight centuries: he and his army entered the gates of imperial Rome and sacked the city. Although the city and, for a time, the Roman Empire would survive, the plundering left an indelible mark that could not be erased....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Ramesses II (The Great, 1279-1213 BCE) ruled Egypt for 67 years and, today, the Egyptian landscape still bears testimony to the prosperity of his reign in the many temples and monuments he had built in honor of his conquests and accomplishments. There is virtually no ancient site in Egypt which does not mention the name of Ramesses II and his account of his victory at The Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BCE is legendary....

When space shuttle Atlantis rolled to a stop in 2011, it did not mark, as some worried, the end of human spaceflight. Rather, as the extinction of the dinosaurs allowed early mammals to flourish, retiring the shuttle signaled the opening of far grander opportunities for space exploration. Led by dozens of ambitious private companies, we are entering the early stages of the dispersal of Earth life into the solar system at large....

Apple has deleted the claim that its map app is the “most powerful mapping service ever.” After CEO Tim Cook’s rare apology for Apple’s beleaguered map application, the company has retreated on claims that the app was the “most powerful mapping service ever.” Apple’s Web site had formerly boasted that, “Designed by Apple from the ground up, Maps give you turn-by-turn spoken directions, interactive 3D views, and the stunning Flyover feature....

That means, as the social networking company wrote in an August 1 Facebook post (naturally) releasing the data on energy use, that “one person’s Facebook use for all of 2011 had roughly the same carbon footprint as one medium latte. Or three large bananas. Or a couple of glasses of wine.” That’s 269 grams of CO2 per “active user,” and another invisible impact of the computing cloud. That makes the Internet a larger emitter of greenhouse gases—230 million metric tons—than all the countries of Scandinavia put together....

By Janelle WeaverPrejudice may seem inescapable, but scientists now report the first group of people who seem not to form racial stereotypes.Children with a neurodevelopmental disorder called Williams syndrome (WS) are overly friendly because they do not fear strangers. Now, a study shows that these children also do not develop negative attitudes about other ethnic groups, even though they show patterns of gender stereotyping found in other children. “This is the first evidence that different forms of stereotypes are biologically dissociable,” says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, director of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, who led the study published April 12 in Current Biology....

It was a failure to denounce a crime against humanity. In July, Ani Zonneveld, president of Muslims for Progressive Values, asked Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota to make a statement concerning women and girls victimized by female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C). Instead of educating the audience and pledging to improve legal protections against it, Omar, a Somali-American Muslim woman, pointed out that she had spoken against the practice elsewhere and excoriated Zonneveld for making the request simply because of Omar’s religion—ignoring the fact that Zonneveld is herself a follower of Islam....

A new microbial fuel cell creates energy during wastewater treatment and also vastly reduces the amount of sludge produced. Israel-based company, Emefcy, named as a play on the acronym for microbial fuel cell (MFC), starts with the same principle as most wastewater treatment—water is aerated so bacteria in the liquid break down organic material in a closed series of containers known as a bioreactor. “We didn’t invent anything scientifically new,” says Ely Cohen, vice president of marketing and business development for the four-year-old company....