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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. Principles of Confucianism were adopted by successive dynasties and kingdoms in ancient Korea, and the study of classic Confucian texts was an important part of education and entrance examinations for the state administration. Confucianism was practised side-by-side with the official state religion of Buddhism and, amongst the lower classes, with shamanism and animism....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Dogs have been an integral aspect of the human condition in virtually every world culture for thousands of years. Some of the greatest civilizations of the past have kept dogs as companions, for various chores, and featured dogs in their art, literature, and elevated them to important positions in religious belief and, among these, were the Persians....

A two-year-old can quickly link an object–whether a flashy rattle or a boring latch–to a word. Even a one-year-old can follow a parent’s gaze to an object and match it with a word being spoken. But although anecdotal evidence seems to show that babies younger than one year can learn words, it remains unclear whether they are in fact mastering language. Now a new study reveals that 10-month-old infants can link words and objects, but only if the object is already interesting to them....

In the absence of meat, common black beans are a primary source of protein, minerals and vitamins in much of the developing world. But beans are notoriously hard to digest, failing to freely release many of their nutrients in the gut. Now researchers have discovered that fermenting beans with two strands of common bacteria free up many more nutrients and make the legumes easier to digest. Marisela Granito and Glenda Alvarez of Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela have shown that fermenting beans–allowing natural bacterial cultures to develop and break down the raw food–reduces the number of indigestible compounds....

And then there were two: today China says it safely landed a spacecraft on Mars—for the first time in its history and in its first attempt—becoming the only other nation besides the U.S. to achieve such a feat. Its Zhurong rover, named after a god of fire from Chinese folklore, successfully touched down in Utopia Planitia around 7:18 P.M. EST as part of the Tianwen-1 mission, according to the China National Space Administration....

(Reuters Health) - Whether it’s colon cancer, breast cancer, or ovarian cancer, survival rates in the U.S. are lower for black people than for white people, three new studies show. All three were published in the journal Cancer. In one, Dr. Arica White from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, and her team looked at colon cancer survival rates in 2001-2003 and 2004-2009. Overall, the proportion of patients still alive five years after diagnosis improved slightly between those two periods, from 63....

A team of researchers from California and Japan has found that an essential amino acid plays a crucial role in the creation of blood stem cells—a discovery the scientists say could offer a potential alternative to chemotherapy and radiation in treating blood cancer patients. The amino acid valine, which people obtain by eating protein, appears key to the formation of blood stem cells. Mice deprived of the protein building block for two to four weeks stopped making new blood cells altogether, according to the new study, published Thursday in Science....

According to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll, 70 percent of evangelical Christians believe that living beings have always existed in their present form, compared with 32 percent of Protestants and 31 percent of Catholics. Politically, 60 percent of Republicans are creationists, whereas only 11 percent accept evolution, compared with 29 percent of Democrats who are creationists and 44 percent who accept evolution. A 2005 Harris Poll found that 63 percent of liberals but only 37 percent of conservatives believe that humans and apes have a common ancestry....

With Congress preparing to debate climate legislation, environmentalists and their allies are spending millions on ad campaigns aimed at building public support for a cap-and-trade bill and scoring early political points. While campaign-style advertising on legislative issues is nothing new, the ad buys are coming weeks before either chamber is likely to move a comprehensive bill to the floor. Both proponents and critics of the climate measure say the early ad blitz indicates that environmentalists know they have their work cut out for them in convincing the public and lawmakers to buy into the capping and trading of greenhouse gas emissions....

When your home computer is hacked, the things at risk are your identity, finances and other digital assets. A cyber attack that can take control of your car—especially while you’re driving—raises the stakes considerably. As carmakers transform their vehicles into networked computers on wheels, concern has grown about hacker attacks on automobile systems and the seriousness of the threat. Computer scientists have in recent years demonstrated the ability to remotely unlock car doors, start or stop an engine and even tamper with brakes....

The nation’s premier particle physics laboratory—Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill.—just got a new lease on life. The U.S. Senate yesterday passed legislation that provides $400 million for science programs, including $62.5 million to the Office of Science in the Department of Energy (DOE), which oversees Fermilab. The measure, passed by the House last week, now goes to President Bush, who has indicated he will sign it. Fermilab says the infusion will likely prevent layoffs in the works since December, when Congress slashed the lab’s 2008 budget from the $372 million requested by the DOE to $320 million, down $20 million from 2007....

Newly discovered painted scallops and cockleshells in Spain are the first hard evidence that Neandertals made jewelry. These findings suggest humanity’s closest extinct relatives might have been capable of symbolism after all. Body ornaments made of painted and pierced seashells dating back 70,000 to 120,000 years have been found in Africa and the Near East for decades, and they serve as signs of symbolic thought among the earliest modern humans. The absence of similar finds in Europe at that time, when it was Neandertal territory, has supported the notion that our early relatives lacked symbolism, a potential sign of mental inferiority that might help explain why Homo sapiens eventually replaced them....

A pinkish brown gel with the brittle consistency of astronaut ice cream and composed mostly of air has the ability to filter nearly all of the heavy metal mercury, a potent neurotoxin, out of drinking water. This new aerogel may also be able to efficiently harvest the energy in sunlight and rapidly purify hydrogen fuel, among other things, chemists report this week in Science. “We have a material that presents a very high surface area and the surface itself is made out of something with different reactivities than oxides,” says chemist Mercouri Kanatzidis of Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory, whose team discovered the gels....

On August 6, 1960, Hughes Research Laboratories scientist Theodore Maiman published a study in Nature (pdf) describing his experiments with “stimulated optical radiation in ruby.” (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) With this research, he took the laser—originally “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”—out of the realm of science fiction and created a tool that would change the world in ways few people could have conceived of at the time....

For decades physicists have sought signs of misbehaving particles—evidence of subtle cracks in the “Standard Model” of particle physics, the dominant theory describing the most fundamental building blocks of our universe. Although the Standard Model has proved strikingly accurate, scientists have long known some adjustments will be needed. Now, as a recent review paper in Nature documents, experimenters have started seeing suggestions of particles flouting the theory—but they’re not quite the violations theorists were looking for....

Air pollution may be a bigger health threat than previously believed, a 20-year study of residents of Los Angeles indicates. Researchers report that the contribution of particulate matter to chronic health problems may be as much as two to three times greater than current estimates. Michael Jerrett of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and his colleagues analyzed two decades of data collected from nearly 23,000 residents of 260 Los Angeles neighborhoods....

The fantastical arch shapes of sandstone formations have long been thought to be sculpted by wind and rain. But a team of researchers has now found that the shapes are inherent to the rock itself. “Erosion gets [excess] material out, but doesn’t make the shape,” says Jiri Bruthans, a hydrogeologist at Charles University in Prague, who led the research. Rather, erosion is merely a “tool” that works in combination with more fundamental factors embedded in the rock....

Some hotels and hotel chains take sustainability more seriously than others, but the industry as a whole has certainly become greener in recent years. Those little cards may seem like token environmentalism, but they can actually result in significant water, waste and cost reductions. The website Economically Sound reports that a 150-room hotel can conserve 72,000 gallons of water and 480 gallons of laundry soap every year by placing the cards in its guest rooms....

With a few notable exceptions—such as during the 1918 influenza pandemic, World War II and the HIV crisis—life expectancy in the U.S. has had a gradual upward trajectory over the past century. But that progress has steeply reversed in the past two years as COVID and other tragedies have cut millions of lives short. U.S. life expectancy fell by a total of 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021 to 76.1 years—the lowest it has been since 1996, according to provisional data recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)....

An untold amount of plastic pollution finds its way into the ocean every year. No one knows for sure what becomes of all that garbage. Much of it most likely erodes into microplastic, tiny flecks smaller than five millimeters in diameter, which can take up pollutants and are often ingested by marine animals, including fish and crustaceans. Unexpectedly, trillions of those particles end up in Arctic sea ice, according to a paper published in May in the scientific journal Earth’s Future....