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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. Love, sex, and marriage in ancient Rome were defined by the patriarchy. The head of the household was the father (the pater familias) who had complete control over the lives of his wife, children, and slaves. This paradigm was justified, in part, by one of the stories related to the foundational myth of Rome in which the demigods Romulus and Remus argue, Romulus kills Remus, and Romulus founds the city of Rome in 753 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 Protestant Reformation was a period of religious history marked by a great defining, debating, and divergence on what it meant to be an orthodox, faithful Christian. To this end, many theologians offered their own explanations of the fundamentals of the faith. The great reformed theologian, John Calvin (l....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Stave churches are the most famous medieval buildings in Norway and are admired for their unique architecture and beautiful decorations. They are named after the staves or masts that hold up the main structure of the church. Only 28 stave churches are still standing from over 1000 that were once scattered around the country....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The ancient Celtic pantheon consisted of over 400 gods and goddesses who represented everything from rivers to warfare. With perhaps the exception of Lugh, the Celtic gods were not universally worshipped across Iron Age Europe but were very often limited to only several regions or a specific area....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Mesoamerican Terminal Classic period (c. 800-925) saw one of the most dramatic civilization collapses in history. Within a century or so the flourishing Classic Maya civilization fell into a permanent decline when once-great cities were abandoned. In many cases, the ruined cities were reclaimed by the jungle and so disappeared from human memory for centuries....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Located at the crossroads of many ancient civilizations, Turkey is a haven for archaeology lovers. Over the centuries, a succession of empires and kingdoms – Hittite, Lydian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and, finally, Ottoman – ruled over Anatolia. The country’s unique cultural legacy, its remarkably beautiful landscape as well as the friendliness of its people make visiting Turkey a rewarding experience....

Nutrition researcher Kevin Hall strives to project a Zen-like state of equanimity. In his often contentious field, he says he is more bemused than frustrated by the tendency of other scientists to “cling to pet theories despite overwhelming evidence that they are mistaken.” Some of these experts, he tells me with a sly smile, “have a fascinating ability to rationalize away studies that don’t support their views.” Among those views is the idea that particular nutrients such as fats, carbs or sugars are to blame for our alarming obesity pandemic....

People in ‘Bama can see the light. And we’re not talking about Alabama offense coordinator Lane Kiffin turning down the NFL to stay in Tuscaloosa. Plunging atmospheric aerosol levels have spurred increased visibility over the past decade. A team of researchers led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently reported that visibility in Alabama has improved based on decreasing soot. The conclusion is based on findings that visibility over a national forest improved an estimated 3....

Treatment: Alzhemed Maker: Neurochem Stage: Phase III, scheduled for completion in January 2007. Why It Matters Since 1980 the number of people in the U.S. who have Alzheimer’s has doubled, to 4.5 million cases. By 2050, public health officials estimate, that amount could triple. According to Neil Buckholtz at the National Institute on Aging, the drugs currently employed against Alzheimer’s are targeted to its symptoms rather than the chemistry underlying its progression....

Amanda Gorman captured the world’s attention with her passionate delivery of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. For most viewers, this was probably the moment Gorman burst upon their consciousness. So, readers may be intrigued to know that in 2018, a year after she was honored as the first U.S. National Youth Poet Laureate, Gorman recorded a similarly passionate piece, “Earthrise,” that she wrote about the need for all of us to act boldly to lessen climate change....

THE BRAIN abhors ambiguity, yet we are curiously attracted to it. Many famous visual illusions exploit ambiguity to titillate the senses. Resolving uncertainties creates a pleasant jolt in your brain, similar to the one you experience in the “Eureka!” moment of solving a problem. Such observations led German physicist, psychologist and ophthalmologist Hermann von Helmholtz to point out that perception has a good deal in common with intellectual problem solving. More recently, the idea has been revived and championed eloquently by neuropsychologist Richard L....

Every year, the hearts of millions of Central and South Americans are quietly damaged by parasites. During the night, insects called kissing bugs emerge by the hundreds from hiding places in people’s mud and stick homes to bite their sleeping victims. The bugs defecate near the punctured skin and wriggling wormlike parasites in this poop may enter the wound and head for their victims’ hearts. There, in about a third of victims, they damage the organs for decades before causing potentially lethal heart disease....

Alaska is burning more than it has in the past 10,000 years. That’s the finding of research released yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study analyzed charcoal found in sediment cores from 14 lakes in the Yukon Flats region of the state to determine the frequency of past fires. Over the last 3,000 years, the average fire frequency in the area was about 10 fires per thousand years....

White children exposed to high levels of bisphenol A are five times more likely to be obese than children with low levels, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study by New York University scientists is the first to link the chemical to obesity in children. Previous research reported links in adults and animals. “This is a great example of a health study that is consistent with studies in animals, and it also confirms what we’ve seen in adult populations,” said Frederick vom Saal, a University of Missouri-Columbia professor who studies bisphenol A (BPA) but was not part of the new study....

Not far from milepost 200 on a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway near the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area is a humble water hole known in some biology circles as Slimy Log Pond. It was from this inauspicious pool that a water flea (Daphnia pulex) dubbed The Chosen One was plucked in 2000, and became the first crustacean to have its genome sequenced. Analysis of The Chosen One’s genome shows that this Lilliputian crustacean contains the most genes of any animal sequenced to date....

Carbon nanotubes would make ideal wires in advanced microchips, because electricity can flow through them more quickly than it can through silicon. But a method to easily integrate such tiny, sticky, floppy strands into circuits has proved elusive. Now scientists report the first simple, inexpensive technique for building large-scale networks of single-walled carbon nanotubes. The process, developed by Yael Hanein of Tel Aviv University and her colleagues, first involves growing nanotubes between catalytic spots on top of silicon pillars....

All things must come to an end, but we humans have an endless fascination with the inevitable. Our September 2010 special issue and our web exclusives explore some of those endings. Writers and filmmakers, of course, have been tackling apocalyptic themes for decades, at times using them to highlight emotional aspects of sacrifice, heroism and dedication, to varying degrees of success. The staff at Scientific American came up with a list of movies and books that show what human civilization would be like if it got short circuited by some sort of catastrophe....

By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - The reason why many doctors find electronic health records (EHR) difficult to use might be that the software wasn’t properly tested, researchers suggest. Current guidelines and industry standards suggest that new EHR software should be tested by at least 15 end users with a clinical background to make sure they are usable and safe before they get federal certification. But a new study finds that many certified products did not actually conduct this user testing, or did so without clinical testers....

Editor’s Note (1/21/20): On January 30, 2020, spacecraft controllers will transmit the final shutdown commands to NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, bringing the observatory’s 16-year mission to a close. This story from 2019 details the reasons for the shutdown, reflects on Spitzer’s legacy and discusses the gap in infrared astronomy that will persist until the debut of the observatory’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. In 2016 NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope observed a distant star called TRAPPIST-1 for 500 hours....

Can wind turbines help to get the U.S. economy spinning again? The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) is banking on the notion that they will at least help. With the $36.7 billion it received from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act last February, the agency is making historic investments in the energy industry. Not all of the money is going into building better turbines, of course. The agency is also putting big green toward a host of other emission-lowering projects, including better batteries ($2 billion), geothermal technologies ($400 million) and carbon capture and storage ($3....