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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 Crusades were a series of military campaigns organised by Christian powers in order to retake Jerusalem and the Holy Land back from Muslim control. There would be eight officially sanctioned crusades between 1095 CE and 1270 CE and many more unofficial ones. Each campaign met with varying successes and failures but, ultimately, the wider objective of keeping Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Christian hands failed....

Have you heard the one about the United States producing oil from tar sands? Some joke, huh? The fight over the Keystone XL Pipeline — which would bring as much as830,000 barrels of tar sands-derived oil per dayfrom Canada toU.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast— has been a bitter and ongoing one. (On Wednesday the pipeline project, which had received an environmental clean bill of health from the State Department earlier this month, hit a legal snag withthe ruling by District Court Judge Stephanie F....

In the middle hills and Terai belt of eastern Nepal, a village spent a rare government donation – about $3,000 – to build a well that local leaders hoped would relieve the community from acute water stress. But they lacked an understanding of regional groundwater trends, and within three months, the tap dried up. Meanwhile, in Uganda’s “cattle corridor,” herders have to trek increasingly far for food and water, sometimes coming into violent contact with other communities in a country beset by drought and violence....

Researchers have long assumed that humans were the only animals that could dance—even our close primate relatives cannot keep a steady beat or be taught to move to a rhythm. But new evidence shows that birds can dance, revealing that the mysterious ability could be a by-product of vocal learning. Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute, Adena Schachner of Harvard University and their colleagues studied several birds, among them a cockatoo that dances to the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody....

Biofabrication companies are increasingly excited about the prospect of using fungi to produce sturdy, sustainable alternatives to plastic and leather. But a new finding suggests that Indigenous Americans were already making “mycotextiles” at least a century ago. The study, published in Mycologia, confirmed the fungal origin of two wall pockets crafted by a Tlingit woman in Alaska in 1903. Some historical mycotextile use has also been reported in Europe, but “that I know of, this is the first documentation of the use of this material anywhere in North America,” says Nancy Turner, an ethnobotanist at the University of Victoria, who was not involved in the study....

In the last U.S. presidential election, Russian hackers penetrated Illinois’s voter-registration database, viewing voters’ addresses and parts of their social security numbers. Election results were not affected, but the attack put intruders in the position to alter voter data, according to a report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The incursion was part of hacking attempts against all 50 states, and intruders will try even more vigorously in 2020, yet experts say Congress is doing little to improve defenses....

COPENHAGEN – The top U.S. climate negotiator stressed today that the next international global warming agreement must include major commitments from a suite of fast-growing countries; otherwise, greenhouse gas emissions will go up too fast to solve the problem. “If you care about the science – and we do – there’s no way to solve this problem by giving the major developing countries a pass,” State Department envoy Todd Stern told reporters during the third day of U....

For most animals, the milkweed plant is far from appetizing: It contains nasty toxins called cardenolides that can make the creatures vomit and, should they ingest enough, cause their hearts to beat out of control. Yet some insects appear entirely unfazed by the powerful poison. The monarch butterfly’s colorful caterpillars, for example, devour milkweed with gusto—in fact, it is the only thing they ever eat. They can tolerate this food source because of a peculiarity in a crucial protein in their bodies, a sodium pump, that the cardenolide toxins usually interfere with....

Although we know early Mars was wetter, warmer and more habitable than today’s freeze-dried desert world, researchers have yet to find direct proof that life ever graced its surface. If Mars did once host life, key questions remain: How did such life impact the planet, and where could we find evidence for its past existence? A new study considering these mysteries finds that a plausible Martian biosphere could have been instrumental for tipping the planet into its current inhospitable state....

Within just three years since the discovery of its gene-editing potential, the new technique Crispr has become the hottest, and most controversial, development in genomics research. And now it’s more than just a science – it’s big business too. First discovered in bacteria, Crispr (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is a genome-editing tool that can target specific genes in any organism based on RNA–DNA base pairing and then precisely cut the gene through the activities of the enzyme known as Crispr-associated protein 9 or Cas9....

Millions of printed circuit boards from discarded electronics are tossed into landfills every year. In addition to the volume of waste, the material can leech chemicals into the soil. As an alternative, researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China are finding various ways to reuse the panels, including as an additive in asphalt. Xu Zhenming and his colleagues stripped the boards of all components, pulverized the remains into a powder and used an electrostatic separator to remove fine bits of any remaining metals, leaving a pulp of glass fibers and resin....

Scientists estimate that 3 to 6 percent of the population may be unable to count objects quickly. By isolating the brain’s counting region, they are figuring out just how people calculate the number of items present. The problem in identifying the precise region is that counting typically involves language, and the language areas also come online when the brain enumerates. To keep them offline during experiments, postdoctoral researcher Fulvia Castelli of the California Institute of Technology used colors....

The consequences of a magnitude-7.8 earthquake that struck New Zealand on 14 November 2016 are still rippling through the country. The quake, which killed two people and caused billions of dollars of damage, ruptured a complex set of geological faults near the surface. It also triggered slow-motion movement as deep as 40 kilometres in Earth’s crust, some of which continues to this day, scientists report. That deep ‘slow slip’ is worrying, because it adds to the risk of another big quake....

As the 10th anniversary of the busiest hurricane season on record approaches, forecasters and government officials are preparing for the start of the 2015 season. But unlike the 2005 season, which saw an unprecedented 28 storms—including one of the worst, Hurricane Katrina—this season is expected to see fewer than the average number of hurricanes. The El Niño flourishing in the tropical Pacific will be the main force keeping a lid on storm development in the Atlantic Ocean basin, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecasters said Wednesday with the release of their seasonal hurricane outlook....

The universe is a complex and intricate place. We can move easily through air and yet not through a wall. The sun transmutes one element to another, bathing our planet in warmth and light. Radio waves have carried a man’s voice to Earth from the surface of the moon, whereas gamma rays can inflict fatal damage on our DNA. On the face of it, these disparate phenomena have nothing to do with one another, but physicists have uncovered a handful of principles that fuse into a theory of sublime simplicity to explain all this and much more....

Proteins are biotechnology’s raw crude. For much of its 30-year history, the industry has struggled to come up with a steady source of supply, squeezing the maximum out of these large-molecule commodities from cell lines isolated from hamster ovaries and the like. In the late 1990s–with the advent of a new class of protein-based drugs, monoclonal antibodies–demand sometimes outstripped supply. For decades, the scientists who created recombinant erythropoietin to rejuvenate red blood cells and monoclonal antibodies to combat cancer have sought out alternative forms of manufacture....

A specific, credible but unconfirmed terrorist threat to residents of New York City and Washington, D.C., was brought to the public’s attention Thursday evening, just three days before the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on those two cities. In the past decade such alerts from government and public safety officials have been all too common as home-grown and international terrorists alike have attempted to use a variety of methods to inflict widespread damage on the U....

Poachers across Africa killed more than 24,000 elephants and 1,300 rhinos in 2015 alone—but animals are not the only victims of the illegal wildlife trade. An estimated 1,000 rangers have been killed in the line of duty over the past decade, and that figure will likely grow: 82 percent of the 570 rangers the World Wildlife Fund recently surveyed in 12 African countries said that they have faced life-threatening circumstances. The so-called war on poaching also takes a psychological toll—one that experts are only beginning to recognize....

Roughly a year after Brazilian doctors and researchers first suspected a link between a spate of alarming birth defects and the Zika virus, a cadre of potential vaccines are now headed for testing in humans. The flurry of action—at breakneck speed compared with most vaccine development—shows how a health emergency and a guaranteed global market can prod this process to move a lot faster than usual, with streamlined approvals and millions of dollars in government support....

In cartoons glowing goo signals that there is bad stuff in the water. Now life imitates art: A French biotechnology company has created a transgenic tadpole that fluoresces when it encounters chemical contaminants in water that disrupt thyroid functioning. The test promises to shine a light on a class of endocrine-disrupting pollutants, which pollution regulators have in their crosshairs. This month France-based WatchFrog begins its first high-profile trial to test effluent from a hospital near Paris under the auspices of the ministries of environment and industry....