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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. Carsulae in Umbria, central Italy, was founded c. 300 BCE and only became a prosperous urban centre after it was connected by the Via Flaminia towards the end of the 3rd century BCE. It was granted the status of municipium and acquired a range of impressive civic buildings, including a theatre, amphitheatre, forum, temples, and baths....

SAN FRANCISCO — The sound of icebergs breaking apart in the ocean could make the seas a noisier place. In turn, whales and other cetaceans could have a harder time hearing other animals’ calls in the din when icebergs are calving, new research suggests. Scientists generally agree that the North Atlantic has become noisier in the last 30 years, with commercial shipping traffic and storms the main culprits. “Recent reports have said that especially near port of calls in industrial countries, noise levels rose about 10 decibels in the last 30 to 40 years,” said study co-author Haru Matsumoto, an acoustic engineer at Oregon State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration....

Gary Nabhan and I are bumping along in a rental car down a two-track dirt road that follows the edge of Sonoita Creek’s floodplain, some 29 kilometers north of the Arizona–Mexico border. Nabhan—an ethnobiologist, conservation biologist and agroecologist at the University of Arizona and author of more than 30 books on food, farming and nature—tells me how extraordinary this borderlands region is for pollinators: native bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, even nectar-feeding bats....

The center of the U.S. saw earthquakes two centuries ago that were powerful enough to briefly reverse the flow of the Mississippi River. But unlike Californians, who must live with the specter of “the big one,” Midwesterners may have already seen the last of them. New research suggests the crack in the earth behind the Mississippi Valley events may actually be shutting down. If so, geoscientists will need to rethink how earthquakes work....

How much legal weight should actions in the virtual world carry back in the real one? For most people, the answer might be “none,” but as online communities conduct actual financial transactions and draw in more participants, some legal experts think that it may be time to extend brick-and-mortar jurisprudence into the virtual realm. By some estimates, about 100 million users worldwide populate online communities. Second Life, the creation of Linden Lab in San Francisco, provides its active-user base of one million with a real-time experience on their personal computer, in which they use digital characters called avatars to wander around castles, deserted islands and other fantastic 3-D environments....

Most people avoid spending time in lightning-prone locales. But this month, scientists are heading to an area of Venezuela that sees more lightning strikes than anywhere else in the world, to test a system designed to forecast strike frequency up to three months in advance. They are going to the right place: the region around Lake Maracaibo in northern Venezuela, which normally surpasses 200 strikes per square kilometre each year. The researchers—led by Ángel Muñoz, a climate scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey—will monitor atmospheric conditions and lightning strikes there for the next 3 years, collecting data for 72-hour periods every 3 months....

Nearly 40 years after surgeons first operated on fetuses to cure devastating abnormalities, researchers have taken the first step toward curing genetic disease before birth via genome editing: scientists reported on Monday that they used the genome editing technique CRISPR to alter the DNA of laboratory mice in the womb, eliminating an often-fatal liver disease before the animals had even been born. The research, by a team at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), is a very early proof of concept....

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity is making strides toward bringing its rock-boring drill back online. On Oct. 17, Curiosity pressed its drill against a Martian rock for the first time since December 2016, as part of a test designed to help assess the feasibility of a new drilling technique, mission team members said. That technique involves using Curiosity’s 7-foot-long (2.1 meters) robotic arm to push the extended drill bit into rock, without the aid of two stabilizing posts....

Examine a bottle of Palmolive dishwasher soap or Tide laundry detergent and try to figure out what chemicals they use to break down grease or produce suds. Stuck? You’re not alone. Those chemicals aren’t listed. That concerns some consumers, public health advocates and scientists, who say some of these chemicals may be bad for human health and the environment. “I want a clean home but I’m worried about the toxic health impacts of the cleaners,” says Barbara Weir of East Islip, N....

I was so intrigued by Betty’s ability that I wanted to find out if other blind people could readily make useful illustrations–and if these drawings would be anything like the pictures sighted individuals use. In addition, I hoped to discover whether the blind could interpret the symbols commonly used by sighted people. To bring the blind into the flat, graphical world of the sighted, I turned to a number of tools, including models, wire displays and, most often, raised-line drawing kits, made available by the Swedish Organization for the Blind....

The American public is eager for dramatic change in U.S. energy policy, but Democratic efforts to sell their agenda on energy and climate change aren’t reaching voters, a prominent Democratic Party polling firm is warning. The strategy memo from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the think tank Third Way also warns that while few voters expect a national energy overhaul to be inexpensive, Democrats are susceptible to Republican arguments that energy proposals will be overly burdensome....

A small clinical trial has shown that researchers can use CRISPR gene editing to alter immune cells so that they will recognize mutated proteins specific to a person’s tumours. Those cells can then be safely set loose in the body to find and destroy their target. It is the first attempt to combine two hot areas in cancer research: gene editing to create personalized treatments, and engineering immune cells called T cells so as to better target tumours....

What if every visit to the museum was the equivalent of spending time at the philharmonic? For painter Wassily Kandinsky, that was the experience of painting: colors triggered sounds. Now a study from the University of California, San Diego, suggests that we are all born synesthetes like Kandinsky, with senses so joined that stimulating one reliably stimulates another. The work, published in the August issue of Psychological Science, has become the first experimental confir­mation of the infant-synesthesia hy­pothesis—which has existed, unproved, for almost 20 years....

Out of necessity, local school systems worldwide have reacted quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic by transitioning education for young people to a virtual setting. A screen with a grid of faces is replacing classrooms, exacerbating inequalities in attendance and engagement in math and science for students in minority-predominant and low-income communities. While countries like China, Denmark, Germany and Norway that are emerging from the first wave of the pandemic are reopening their schools in phases, most schools in the United States are closed through the academic year....

By Alphonso Toweh MONROVIA (Reuters) - A Liberian has died of Ebola in the first recorded case of the disease since a country at the heart of an epidemic that has killed more than 11,000 people was declared virus-free on May 9 after going 42 days without a new case. The body of a 17-year-old tested positive for Ebola in Margibi County and authorities have begun tracing people the victim may have come into contact with while infected, Deputy Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah said on Tuesday....

Where are you right now? Maybe you are at home, the office or a coffee shop—but such responses provide only a partial answer to the question at hand. Asked another way, what is the location of your “self” as you read this sentence? Like most people, you probably have a strong sense that your conscious self is housed within your physical body, regardless of your surroundings. But sometimes this spatial self-location goes awry....

Bioengineer Robert Langer has spent his career looking for the next not-so-big thing. He’s had much success thinking small, pioneering breakthroughs in nanoscale medicine to fight cancer, administer drugs with precision and replace damaged tissue. These and his various other achievements received recognition from across the Atlantic last week [on February 3] when Langer was awarded the £1-million (roughly $1.5-million) 2015 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Previous recipients of the prize include Tim Berners-Lee and other co-creators of the World Wide Web....

It was a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup moment in genetic evolution: The end of one gene fused to the beginning of another and, voilà, a new, composite gene was born. In most people the two-component gene does not work. But in a small percentage the gene functions and puts its possessors at increased risk for lupus and potentially other autoimmune diseases, in which the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues, says a team of researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham....

The world’s largest organization of physicists clarified its position on climate change last week, and it no longer believes, as it did in 2007, that the evidence for global warming is “incontrovertible.” Instead, the American Physical Society (APS) now states that climate change is a “critical issue that poses the risk of significant disruption around the globe.” It then discusses uncertainties inherent in climate science and the risk involved in not taking action in a draft statement that was released last week (see box for the 2007 and draft 2015 statements)....

A new look at the dwarf planet Makemake, one of the more recent additions to the known solar system, has pinned down some of the object’s most basic—and important—attributes. Astronomers took to observatories across South America in April 2011 to catch a rare glimpse of the dwarf planet—or at least its shadow—as Makemake (pronounced “mah-kee mah-kee”) crossed in front of a faint background star and dimmed the star for about a minute....