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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. The Christmas holiday has gathered around it customs and traditions for over two millennia, some of which even pre-date the Christian festival itself. From gift-giving to the sumptuous spread of a Christmas dinner table, this article traces the history of the celebrations from Roman times to the Victorian era when our modern take on the holiday was firmly established in both deed and literature....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Greek philosopher Plato (l. c. 428-348 BCE), in Book II of his Republic, addresses the problem of how one knows that one’s beliefs are true. His line of thought raises questions such as, ‘How do you know whether your most deeply-held beliefs are valid or simply the result of your upbringing, culture, environment, and religion?...

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Antisthenes (c. 445-365 BCE) was a Greek philosopher who founded the Cynic School of Athens. He was a follower of Socrates and appears in Plato’s Phaedo as one of those present at Socrates’ death. He is one of the primary interlocutors in Xenophon’s works Memorabilia and Symposium. Antisthenes, like Crito, was among the older students of Socrates’, and Charles Kahn writes that he was regarded as Socrates’ most important follower....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. It was all very well pocketing other people’s valuables and roistering at rum parties, but life on a pirate ship involved a surprising amount of hard work. Pirates were first and foremost sailors and in the Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730), a pirate ship required a great deal of skill to operate and constant maintenance to keep afloat....

The United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter is now winging its way to Mars after launching successfully from the Tanegashima Space Center near Minamitane, Japan. The probe, built by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) together with US partners, is the first interplanetary mission from any Arab state. The car-sized, US$200-million craft lifted into Earth’s orbit on a Mitsubishi H-IIA rocket at 6:58 a.m. local time on 20 July. After the launch, a second stage of the rocket fired, putting the craft on its Mars trajectory....

View the Surveillance Slide Show When traveling to London, be sure to smile: the city is home to at least half of a million surveillance cameras—if you count video systems at banks, supermarkets and other commercial locations, according to The New York Times. And motorists with obnoxious vanity license plates, take heed: New York City has plans to install cameras that will snap a photo of every plate that enters the borough of Manhattan....

Editor’s note: This Q&A is a part of a survey conducted by Scientific American of executives at companies engaged in developing and implementing non–fossil fuel energy technologies. What technical obstacles currently most curtail the growth of solar power? What are the prospects for overcoming them in the near future and the longer-term? Right now, homeowners and business owners interested in solar systems are concerned about two things—performance and reliability—as these factors play an important role in a system’s return on investment....

When the weather cools, cold-blooded animals slow down, which should be good news for their potential prey. But the colorful chameleon, which can unfurl a tongue twice its body length in 0.07 second, does not lose much speed in unleashing its weapon. To find out why, Christopher Anderson and Stephen Deban of the University of South Florida tested chameleons under different conditions, discovering that if temperatures dropped 10 degrees Celsius, tongue snaps slowed only by about 10 to 19 percent....

One of the most astounding archaeological discoveries of the 20th century is arguably the life-size terra-cotta army buried alongside China’s first emperor. Now, scientists have figured out how the bronze triggers for the crossbows of the 8,000 terra-cotta warriors were manufactured. Teams of craftspeople worked in small groups to produce the bronze pieces in batches for the tomb of ancient Emperor Qin Shi Huang, according to a new study detailed in the March issue of the journal Antiquity....

Weight gain is usually blamed on poor diet and a lack of exercise. But the marmosets and macaques living at a Madison, Wis., laboratory have followed the same diet and exercise regimens since 1982. Still, they grew heavier with each passing decade, leading David B. Allison, a biostatistician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, to believe that environmental factors may be at play. He and his colleagues studied weight changes in 20,000 animals, including primates and rodents used for research, domestic cats and dogs, and urban feral rats....

As a virus travels from person to person it evolves and, sometimes, it becomes a better and more efficient killer. But researchers still do not know if that is what happened with the Ebola virus currently circulating in west Africa. So far there is no indication that this strain is inherently more virulent or more transmissible than when Ebola appeared in other areas of Africa in the past. But that question has not been truly answered by the science....

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazinewww.nature.com/newsThe world’s leading candidate for a malaria vaccine has cleared another hoop on the way to widespread use, proponents say. But the vaccine’s low efficacy against severe forms of the disease have disappointed some experts. The latest findings from a Phase III clinical trial in thousands of African children appear today in the New England Journal of Medicine.This vaccine against the Plasmodium falciparum parasite–called RTS,S/AS01 and funded by GlaxoSmithKline and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative–has carried the hopes of many since rising to the fore in the race to develop a malaria vaccine....

Two middle-aged men who live thousands of miles apart in the U.S. and have never met each other may have a common trait: a propensity to absorb iron so well that this seeming benefit can actually become unhealthy, potentially causing multiple-organ damage and even death. Someone with this condition, called hereditary hemochromatosis, often has it because each of his parents passed on to him the same mutation in a specific gene, an error that originated long ago in a single individual in Europe....

When physicist Bill Foster was contemplating a congressional run in his Illinois home district, he got some helpful advice from others who had made the jump from science to politics. He was told, he says, that he should branch out from science policy and “bring a scientific view to the full range of issues.” Foster, 52, who spent 22 years as a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As the effects of climate change rapidly alter communities, economies and natural systems, the need to advance new solutions to what may be the most pressing biological challenge of our time has never been more urgent. One important part of the puzzle involves unlocking the natural genetic diversity of plants to identify those species and populations best able to cope with changing conditions....

Negotiating an international agreement to fight climate change is hard enough. But for the past several years, scientists have warned that verifying whether countries meet their pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions could be even harder. Current U.N. rules require countries to submit national emissions inventories. But the data are self-reported and not required annually from all countries, and there is not always independent information to verify it. The issue, politically sensitive for many nations, was a bone of contention for the United States and China at U....

Last sum­mer a team of researchers from the Massa­chusetts Institute of Technology set out to better understand the effects of yogurt on obesity. They were following up on the results of a long-term study from the Harvard School of Public Health that had suggested yogurt, more than any other food, helped to prevent age-related weight gain. The M.I.T. team, led by cancer biologist Susan Erdman and evolutionary geneticist Eric Alm, wanted to replicate the work in mice....

Autism in Film For many years, if you wanted to rent a movie about autism, you had only one choice: Rain Man. Although it never hurts to revisit such a classic, in recent years there has been a virtual explosion of movies featuring autistic characters very different from Rain Man’s savant. The most recent and critically acclaimed of these films, The Black Balloon (NeoClassics Films, 2008), is a story of two teenage brothers, one of whom is severely autistic....

One way to get legislators to pay more attention to climate change is to put emotional messages in front of them. The national organization 1Sky has convened an unusual team, built on mothers and their kids, to appear at more than 500 congressional district offices and almost 500 climate change rallies across the country. In June, 1Sky turned up the heat even further when it delivered more than 130 banners and images made by mothers, children and other family members to 175 House and Senate offices....

By Kerri SmithNew species might arise as a result of single rare events, rather than through the gradual accumulation of many small changes over time, according to a study of thousands of species and their evolutionary family trees.This contradicts a widely accepted theory of how speciation occurs: that species are continually changing to keep pace with their environment, and that new species emerge as these changes accrue. Known as the ‘Red Queen’ hypothesis, it is named after the character in Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There who tells a surprised Alice: “Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place....