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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. One of Aristotle’s more famous quotes was, “All men naturally desire knowledge” (“πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοὺ εἰδέναι ὀρὲγονται φύσει”) (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1.980a.22). As a classical Greek philosopher, an ideology like this is required for producing many outstanding achievements. He was known as a philosopher, artist, and scientist. Greek-born, he started with humble beginnings by attending Plato’s academy; becoming one of the most widely known philosophers in human history....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. World History Encyclopedia is joined by Jennifer Saint, who is going to tell us all about her debut novel Ariadne. Kelly (WHE): Do you want to tell us a little bit about the book? Advertisement Jennifer Saint (author): The book is a retelling of the myth that we are all familiar with from childhood, Theseus and the Minotaur, and it is from the perspective of the woman who made that happen, the woman who saved the hero, Ariadne....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The people of Iron Age Britain were physically very similar to many modern Europeans and there is no reason to suppose that all Iron Age Britons had the same hair colour, eye colour or skin complexion. Iron Age Britons spoke one or more Celtic language, which probably spread to Britain through trade and contacts between people rather than by the invasion of large numbers of Celtic peoples into Britain....

T. J. Tabasco is something of a porcine goddess at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where her ruddy, taxidermied head looks down from the office wall of geneticist Lawrence Schook. Now she has been immortalized in this week’s Nature — not by name, but by the letters of her DNA. Scientists are salivating. For the past couple of decades they have been slowly teasing information from the pig genome, applying it to breed healthier and meatier pigs, and to try to create more faithful models of human disease....

There is, despite the name, nothing urban about Piper City, Ill. It is a farm town with a skyline of grain elevators, a tidy grid of pitch-roofed houses and, a few blocks beyond, endless fields: corn, soybean, corn, soybean, corn, corn, corn, perfectly level, perfectly square, no trees, no cows, no hedgerows, no bare land. In late August of 2013, a man named Joseph Spencer followed a corn-flanked county road northwest from Piper City until his GPS advised him to leave the road altogether and turn onto a gravel track....

One technology giant on the forefront of renewable energy implementation has come out on why it rolled back its research and development while another, which has been largely inactive on the sustainability front, has just announced a new goal of achieving 100 percent renewable energy use. “They are a huge part of the Internet,” he said. The company said that the fact that it hosts the data and servers of so many companies means it is efficient based on its very nature....

Key Concepts Biology Health Medicine Circulatory system Introduction Why is it important to eat healthily and get exercise? Doing these things keeps your blood flowing well through your circulatory system, which is key to staying healthy. The job of your circulation is to transport blood through your heart, veins and arteries to provide oxygen and nutrients to your body. If this blood flow doesn’t work properly, it can negatively impact health....

In an aging U.S. in which the younger generation starts work later, maintaining the labor force means that people need to work well past the age of 65. A team led by Kenneth G. Manton of Duke University argues that the nation should dramatically increase research to boost longevity of the workforce and to lower age-associated health costs. Using economic and demographic data, the group has calculated ideal amounts for the U....

For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling today’s bacteria. But then, more than 1.5 billion years ago, something remarkable happened: One of those primitive cells, belonging to a group known as the archaea, swallowed another, different one — a bacterium. Instead of being digested, the bacterium took up permanent residence within the other organism as what biologists call an endosymbiont....

More than half a billion years ago a spectacularly creative burst of biological innovation called the Cambrian explosion occurred. In a geologic “instant” of several million years, organisms developed strikingly new body shapes, new organs, and new predation strategies and defenses against them. Evolutionary biologists disagree about what triggered this prodigious wave of novelty, but a particularly compelling hypothesis, advanced by University of Oxford zoologist Andrew Parker, is that light was the trigger....

U.S. Off the California coast, scientists measured a blue whale’s heart rate for the first time, using a device attached to the animal’s skin by suction cup. The heart, likely weighing hundreds of pounds, beats from two to 37 times per minute, varying dramatically between diving, feeding and surfacing. PERU Researchers analyzing satellite and imaging data have found 143 new Nazca lines—large line drawings of humans, animals and symbols etched into the Peruvian landscape millennia ago....

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazineIn the era of WikiLeaks and Twitter, can anyone keep a secret? Governments have learned that, all too often, the answer is no. Now, as teams of particle physicists close in on one of their biggest targets in decades, they too are struggling to keep confidential data under wraps.In late April, leaked results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, seemed to show a preliminary signal of the Higgs boson....

After more than 40 years that included five long-running TV series (even an animated version) and a string of movies, the writers of the latest Star Trek blockbuster in theaters decided to move to a new universe—one that has created fresh opportunities for stories and the chance to modernize and update the franchise. In the movie last summer Kirk, Spock and the rest of the gang were back. But a critical change—a time-jumping, revenge-seeking mad­man who caused the death of Kirk’s father and then destroyed the planet Vulcan—shattered the well-trod timeline of events that longtime fans have come to know so well....

Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness by Joel Gold and Ian Gold Simon & Schuster, 2014 In 2003 “Albert” came to Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric emergency room. A 26-year-old assembly worker, he was convinced that his life was the focal point of a television show. He entered Bellevue after a fracas at the United Nations, where he had gone to demand asylum from his televised life. For psychiatrist Joel Gold, Albert was the first in a series of patients convinced they lived their entire existence on TV, circumstances that proved eerily similar to those depicted in the 1998 film The Truman Show....

Gene therapy, in which a viral vector is used to modify defective genes or replace missing ones, has shown significant potential as a way of treating disease in animal models. But its use in humans has been hampered by safety concerns, including some fatalities in clinical trials. Researchers have thus been looking into the possibility of using nonviral vectors, which should carry fewer inherent risks, to deliver therapeutic genes. In a paper published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists report that silicon nanoparticles can perform this task successfully in mice....

Poking through some of the innermost rubble of an ancient pyramid known as Las Pinturas in San Bartolo, Guatemala, graduate student Boris Beltrn uncovered a boulder-size chunk of plaster. Mayan builders had created the boulder when constructing the third version of Las Pinturas, following their practice of supporting subsequent structures with the ruined remnants of the preceding pyramid. This particular fragment happened to be part of an ancient mural and thick black hieroglyphics ran down its side, following a faint pinkish-orange guideline....

FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY researchers have been trying to figure out how malaria first arose in humans. The question is urgent, because more than two million people die every year from Plasmodium, the malaria parasite, and understanding its origins might one day lend clues to its complex biology. A piece of the puzzle fell into place in September 2009, when a team of researchers discovered that the main strain that infects human beings—P....

Nothing captures the depth and dimensions of a generation gap like popular music. Parents, mystified (or horrified) by their children’s taste—“How can they listen to that stuff?”—harken back to their own youth, when the Rolling Stones or the Bee Gees or Prince ruled the charts. Confronted by the recent recombinant country-rap smash “Old Town Road,” they shake their heads, turn up the soothing sounds of “Sympathy for the Devil,” and marvel at how much and how fast things change....

NASA should aim to put boots on the moon in 2028, not 2024, and achieve this goal explicitly to aid human Mars exploration in the 2030s, according to an authorization bill that was introduced Friday (Jan. 24) by the leadership of the House Committee on Science, Space, & Technology. Other major items on the bill’s wish list include extending International Space Station (ISS) operations beyond 2024 to 2028; allowing NASA’s proposed Gateway space station to be built in one of a variety of locations in Earth-moon space, not just lunar orbit; and launching the Artemis human moon lander in one piece instead of in multiple segments for assembly in space, as NASA proposes to do now....

In my Scientific American column this month I noted that humanity’s flood of e-mail seems to be subsiding. The quantity has dropped 10 percent in the last few years, and among young people it’s dropped a staggering 60 percent. But that doesn’t mean that written communications are dead—far from it. It means that we’ve found better, quicker, more targeted channels for sending messages, thanks to our trusty smartphones and tablets. With the rise of these new apps and channels, two key aspects of e-mail are changing: the store-and-forward routine (I send you a message, which waits until you come and get it) and the fact that these communications are typed....