On May 19 President Barack Obama announced a new federal gas mileage standard: by 2016 the nation’s entire car and light truck fleet should average 35.5 miles per gallon. Or just slightly less than the highway mileage I get in my 17-year-old Honda Civic. The increase in the mileage requirement is actually modest. “The automakers’ fleet average has been 27.5 mpg for years,” according to an automobile insurance expert I spoke to....
Many a seafood fan has parroted the popular idea that fish and crustaceans do not feel pain. New research, however, suggests that they may, revealing that their nervous system may be more complex than we thought—and our own awareness of pain may be much more evolutionarily ancient than suspected. [For more on pain, see the special section beginning here.] Joseph Garner of Purdue University and his colleagues in Norway report that the way goldfish respond to pain shows that these animals do experience pain consciously, rather than simply reacting with a reflex—such as when a person recoils after stepping on a tack (jerking away before he or she is aware of the sensation)....
The latest official U.S. life expectancy numbers paint a relatively grim picture for the nation. For the first time in a decade our death rate increased from the year before; 2015 saw roughly 86,000 more deaths than 2014, according to the new report. The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which released the numbers this week, found that in 2015 the death rate jumped 1.2 percent from 724.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2014 to 733....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Mostly dating from the period 880-612 BCE, these carved scenes are found on free-standing stelae and as panels cut on cliffs and rocks at distant places reached by the Assyrian kings during their campaigns. The most spectacular use of stone reliefs, however, was as panels which decorated the mud-brick walls in palaces and temples up to a height of 2....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The medieval Church informed the people’s religious imagination during the Middle Ages (c. 476-1500) and the world was therefore interpreted - even by heterodox Christians - through the Church’s lens. Ghosts – referred to as revenants – were no exception in that the Church defined such apparitions as souls in purgatory requiring human intervention to find eternal peace....
Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Multiple Fulbright Award-winning Duane Roller joins us to talk about his new book, Empire of the Black Sea. The first thorough analysis in English of the dynasty as a whole, Empire of the Black Sea chronicles each ruler of the Mithridatic kingdom and their complex relationships with the powers of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Tacitus (full name, Publius Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, ca. 56 – ca. 117 CE) was a Roman Senator and an important historian of the Roman Empire. In the following passages Tacitus gives an account of the Iceni Queen Boudicca’s revolt against Rome, 60-61 CE. Causes of Boudicca’s Revolt Chapter 31 Prasutagus, the late king of the Icenians, in the course of a long reign had amassed considerable wealth....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Despite allegedly founding Rome and being hailed a hero, Romulus’ legacy is complex and his biography is even disturbing at times. He was supposedly guilty of committing many terrible deeds that still make readers recoil, but according to legend, his transgressions often led to positive outcomes – at least from the Romans’ point of view....
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz yesterday laid out a case for stepping on the gas pedal for his department’s signature innovation initiative, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. “I think that it’s proved its worth,” Moniz said. He spoke yesterday at the annual ARPA-E summit outside Washington, D.C., after defending a budget increase for the program before the House Appropriations Committee earlier in the day (ClimateWire, March 1). ARPA-E funds technologies ranging from clothing that can cool or heat the body to robots that detect methane leaks, advancing ideas that may be too young or too wild for the private sector at a given point....
As Republicans look at ways to replace or repair the health law, many suggest shrinking the list of services insurers are required to offer in individual and small group plans would reduce costs and increase flexibility. That option came to the forefront last week when Seema Verma, who is slated to run the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in the Trump administration, noted at her confirmation hearing that coverage for maternity services should be optional in those health plans....
Mom’s ovaries could hold clues to some autism cases, new research suggests—and this time it’s not because of genetic vulnerabilities carried in her eggs. A new, large-scale study out of Sweden suggests that women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS)—an endocrine disorder that affects 5 to 10 percent of women of childbearing age—have an increased risk of giving birth to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The Karolinska Institute’s Renee Gardner, along with colleagues from Sweden and the U....
Chinese coal consumption surged for a 12th consecutive year in 2011, with the country burning 2.3 billion tons of the carbon-emitting mineral to run power plants, industrial boilers and other equipment to support its economic and population growth. In a simple but striking chart published on its website, the U.S. Energy Information Administration plotted China’s progress as the world’s dominant coal-consuming country, shooting past rival economies like the United States, India and Russia as well as regional powers such as Japan and South Korea....
The Earth’s tallest trees, California redwoods, rely on characteristic coastal fog to reach their towering heights—and that fog may be diminishing, according to new research. A study by climatologist James Johnstone and biologist Todd Dawson of the University of California, Berkeley, looked at a combination of weather station and airport data along the northern California coast where massive coastal redwood trees thrive. Because fog appears as a cloud that moves off the ocean and sits on the ground, airport monitors of the ceiling height of the clouds were particularly illuminating....
Researchers have discovered charcoal dating back almost 2,000 years in New Mexican ice caves—providing physical evidence that ancestral Puebloans used the ice deposits for drinking water during droughts. Scientists are working fast to sample cores from the deposits, which likely formed thousands of years ago. Rising global temperatures have made it warm enough that the ice is beginning to disappear from the sites at El Malpais National Monument. “Our wish is to try and find as much climate information as possible, because this ice is going away,” said Bogdan Onac, the lead researcher on the study....
Saying that the public is “understandably anxious and confused” about chemicals in their bodies and in their environment, President Obama’s top environmental official announced on Tuesday a new push to transform the way the nation regulates industrial compounds. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson called the nation’s 1976 toxics law “inordinately cumbersome and time-consuming." As a result, she said the Obama Administration will promote a new chemical law in Congress in the coming months that puts the responsibility on industry to prove that its compounds are safe....
A collaboration with Matter State Route 87, the thin band of pavement that approaches the mostly shuttered town of Coolidge, Ariz., cuts through some of the least hospitable land in the country. The valley of red and brown sand is interrupted occasionally by rock and saguaro cactus. It’s not unusual for summer temperatures to top 116 degrees. And there is almost no water; this part of Arizona receives less than nine inches of rainfall each year....
After the 2020 U.S. presidential election, handwriting analysis researcher Mara Merlino got a strange phone call. The person on the line seemed to seek her endorsement of a highly dubious report claiming signature discrepancies on ballots. Merlino, a psychology professor at Kentucky State University, asked some pointed questions. Learning, among other things, that the person involved in the signature verification was not a trained professional, she concluded that “everything about that report was bad and wrong....
When scientists want to know what life-forms live in deep water, they have to send submersibles or cast nets and grabs hung from long cables. These methods are expensive, however, and they offer only a hint of the biodiversity hidden far below the waves. “In the deep sea,” says John Bickham of Battelle Memorial Institute, “we’re back in the 1700s. We have no idea what’s out there.” On land, genetic methods revolutionized bacterial taxonomy and expanded the world’s count of mammal species....
Brain injuries afflict more than five million Americans, ranging from head trauma to stroke. Currently, there is no way to restore lost function or recapture what can be a profound shift in ability and even personality. But new research suggests that nanofibers can help induce neurons to reconnect and restore vision in the process, at least in hamsters. A team of neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and their colleagues at Hong Kong University purposefully wounded 53 newly born hamster pups....
Pregnant women exposed to higher levels of the chemical bisphenol A gave birth to baby boys with lower thyroid hormones, according to a new study published today. The study by University of California, Berkeley, scientists is the first to link the ubiquitous chemical – used in hard plastics, canned food liners and some paper receipts – to altered thyroid hormones in babies, and it adds to evidence that BPA may have some effects on fetuses....
