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On a cool day in late May, researcher Pamela Templer hikes through New Hampshire’s White Mountains with ease, dodging an odd low-hanging branch as leaves and sticks crunch underfoot. Although she’s in the middle of a national forest, Templer’s destination looks decidedly unnatural. A cabin full of controllers and wiring sits plopped amid the trees. Newly erected power lines march up to the forest’s edge. And a sign with a lightning-bolt graphic warning reads “Research Area: Do Not Walk Beyond This Sign....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Dialogue of Pessimism (c. 1000 BCE) is a Babylonian poem featuring a master and his slave in ten exchanges during which the master proposes an action, and the slave gives reasons for and against its pursuit. The piece has been interpreted as an existential statement, satire, a theodicy, and social commentary....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Metsamor, which is located 32 km (20 mi) west of Yerevan, Armenia is one of the most interesting archaeological sites in the Caucasus. While first settled and founded as a Bronze Age city, people continuously inhabited Metsamor through Urartian rule until the early Modern Era, making it an especially rich archaeological site....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The metalworkers of ancient Korea were highly skilled artists and some of their finest surviving works are the large bronze bells cast for use in Buddhist temples and monasteries. Both the Unified Silla kingdom and Goryeo kingdom produced bells, but perhaps the most famous example is the 19-ton Emille Bell from Bongdeoksa which is considered one of the national treasures of Korea....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Goguryeo (Koguryo) ruled northern Korea during the Three Kingdoms period from the 1st century BCE to 7th century CE, and the best evidence of the kingdom’s prosperity and artistry can be found in the many surviving tombs of the period. The murals inside many of the tombs are an invaluable insight into the ceremonies, warfare, architecture, and daily life of ancient Korea....

As the summer approaches and more families hit the road, many will take for granted the stability of the bridges that get them where they’re going. Keeping the 600,000 bridges in the U.S. safe is no small challenge. That’s why engineers are beginning to fit some of the most-traversed structures with sensors that can alert them to potential problems. The collapse of Minneapolis’s I-35 bridge across the Mississippi river in August 2007 served as a wake-up call to many....

OSLO (Reuters) - Eleven European Union nations breached ceilings for air pollution in 2012 despite plans to avert health-damaging smog of the sort that choked Paris this month, the European Environment Agency (EEA) said on Monday. The number rose from 10 in 2011, with the addition of Malta to the list of states above national limits set for at least one of four pollutants from sources including industry and cars. “Air pollution is still a very real problem,” EEA executive director Hans Bruyninckx said in a statement of the national limits that had been meant to be achieved by 2010, pointing to high pollution across parts of western Europe this month....

In my Scientific American column this month I railed against software companies’ attitude that we, the public, are willing to serve as their unpaid beta testers. In an age when they can update software over the Internet, why should they knock themselves out cleaning up the code in time for version 1.0? That said, writing perfect software is probably impossible. I’m often told that no software is completely bug-free. Maybe, then, we should have some empathy for the companies who put out huge, ambitious, million-code-line software monsters that turn out to have show-stopping bugs....

Could fat be in the brain of the beholder? A new study shows that signals in the brain that warn appetite-modulating neurons of excess fat stores can be suppressed, making the brain unaware of the body’s condition. The result: the body becomes completely ignorant about its own makeup and thus makes no attempt to increase energy expenditure or reduce appetite to help shave flab. The new findings—published in this week’s Cell Metabolism—could give hope to the 90 million obese people in the U....

For those with diabetes or prediabetes, managing blood sugar levels is a critically important part of preventing the progression of this disease and avoiding serious complications. But even for healthy people, keeping your blood sugar in a healthy range can help reduce the risk of obesity and the risk of developing diabetes. How do you avoid high blood sugar? Up until recently, advice for managing your blood sugar has focused on the nutritional composition of foods....

The House today passed a measure by a whopping 414-to-1 margin that would prohibit health insurers from canceling or denying coverage or hiking premiums based on a genetic predisposition to a specific disease. The legislation, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), also bars employers from using genetic information to hire, fire, promote or make any other employment-related decisions. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) was the lone dissenter. The measure, which unanimously passed the Senate last week, now goes to President Bush, who is expected to sign it into law....

Near Granada, Spain, more than 28,000 metric tons of salt is now coursing through pipes at the Andasol 1 power plant. That salt will be used to solve a pressing if obvious problem for solar power: What do you do when the sun is not shining and at night? The answer: store sunlight as heat energy for such a rainy day. Part of a so-called parabolic trough solar-thermal power plant, the salts will soon help the facility light up the night—literally....

A deal that would create the largest clean-energy transmission project in the United States was announced yesterday, a $2.5 billion effort to build a high-voltage, direct-current (HVDC) power line that would take wind energy produced in Oklahoma’s windy Panhandle region to the Memphis, Tenn., area. From there it would be distributed by the Tennessee Valley Authority to other major power distribution systems in the South and Southeast. The project will be the nation’s first to take relatively cheap wind-generated electricity from a region where wind is abundant and carry it for 720 miles into a region where wind power is relatively scarce, explained Michael Skelly, president of Clean Line Energy Partners, a Houston-based company that has four other HVDC projects in the works....

The discovery of an unexpected chemical in Martian soil—one that is considered hazardous here on Earth—says little by itself about the possibility of life on Mars, NASA researchers announced this afternoon. They confirmed that Phoenix Mars Lander had found evidence in soil samples of perchlorate (ClO4), a highly reactive chemical that can occur naturally on this planet in areas such as Chile’s Atacama Desert, an extremely arid environment that researchers have studied as a proxy for Mars....

The genome of the Drosophila fruit fly is no longer a string of bases that mysteriously result in certain eye color, wingspan or musculature. A new method for reinserting DNA called P[acman] (P/ΦC31 artificial chromosome for manipulation) can open up about 99.9 percent of the Drosophila genetic code to inspection by geneticists. The research group, from Baylor College of Medicine, reveals its innovation in this week’s issue of Science. In the past, analyzing the structure and function of a genome has been a dicey process....

Parents, students and teachers often argue, with little evidence, about whether U.S. high schools begin too early in the morning. In the past three years, however, scientific studies have piled up, and they all lead to the same conclusion: a later start time improves learning. And the later the start, the better. Biological research shows that circadian rhythms shift during the teen years, pushing boys and girls to stay up later at night and sleep later into the morning....

Two decades ago, a group of researchers envisioned a violent storm ripping through the East Coast with such force that it would transform young people into climate activists, spark lawsuits and cause government leaders to turn on fossil fuel companies. They were only off by two years. They also worked for Shell Oil Co. In 1998, Shell researchers wrote an internal memo about future scenarios that could harm their business. They determined that “only a crisis can lead to a large-scale change in this world,” according to the memo, recently uncovered by De Correspondent with a trove of company documents....

The teeny, tiny carbon particles known as buckyballs did not harm healthy bacteria living in soil samples in a recent test. The result contrasts with prior studies in which buckyballs killed bacteria in lab dishes, suggesting that components of ordinary soil may counteract the potential dangers of some nanoparticles. “There was a bit of a fear it was going to have a major negative effect on soil,” says environmental microbiologist Ronald Turco of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind....

U.S. President Donald Trump will nominate meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier as his government’s top scientist. If confirmed by the Senate, Droegemeier would lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Trump, who took office 19 months ago, has gone longer without a top science adviser than any first-term president since at least 1976. “My initial reaction is, wow, they found someone,” says Kei Koizumi, visiting scholar at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and former assistant director of the OSTP under president Barack Obama....

The comets that come streaking through Earth’s neighborhood are visitors from frigid, distant regions in the outer solar system. The icy, dusty bodies formed there billions of years ago, far from the heat and radiation of the sun, so it was long thought that they comprised unsullied scraps left over from the solar system’s formation. But a new analysis of a particle from Comet Wild 2 indicates that the mote formed close to the sun and then migrated outward to be captured by the comet millions of years after the solar system began taking shape....