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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 Protestant Reformation in the Netherlands was among the most violent and destructive of any region during the first 50 years of the movement, ultimately informing the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648), but causing massive destruction and death prior to that conflict through religious intolerance and the inability to compromise by either faction....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Elizabethan Religious Settlement was a collection of laws and decisions concerning religious practices introduced between 1558-63 CE by Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558-1603 CE). The settlement continued the English Reformation which had begun during the reign of her father, Henry VIII of England (r. 1509-1547 CE) whereby the Protestant Church of England split from the Catholic Church led by the Pope in Rome....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Huldrych Zwingli (l. 1484-1531) broke with the Church in 1522 and defended his beliefs at the First Disputation in 1523, encouraging many people in Zürich to embrace his teachings. Among his followers was a group, soon known as Anabaptists, who felt he had compromised himself at the Second Disputation, and they were then persecuted for their convictions....

The noise in the Pacific off the southern California coast has become 10 times louder over the past five decades because of the rumbling of commercial shipping vessels, the clicking of oceanographic research equipment, and the din of Navy operations and sonar systems—all of which are threatening whales that use the same frequency range to communicate. “These animals should have earplugs on,” says whale expert and acoustic ecologist Christopher Clark, director of the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell University, noting that mid-frequency active sonar has resulted in hundreds of whales and other marine mammals getting flustered, losing their way, and, in some cases, becoming beached and dying....

By Kate Kelland and Stephanie NebehayLONDON/GENEVA (Reuters) - The air we breathe is laced with cancer-causing substances and is being officially classified as carcinogenic to humans, the World Health Organization’s cancer agency said on Thursday.The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) cited data indicating that in 2010, 223,000 deaths from lung cancer worldwide resulted from air pollution, and said there was also convincing evidence it increases the risk of bladder cancer....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - A traveler with a bulge in their body from a cyst or hernia might get flagged for an invasive airport security screening to look for explosives, a case report suggests. In many larger airports, X-rays have been replaced in recent years by machines that use radio frequencies to detect suspicious items on travelers, researchers note in JAMA Dermatology, September 7. One female traveler with a common type of skin cyst was flagged for a hidden explosive search at a U....

I suggest that we not talk about the brains of our students but rather their behavior. After all, if we figured out some way to improve their brains—increase the volume of specific regions, say, or the number of interconnections—but we saw no change in their ability to succeed at their actual schoolwork, we would not be satisfied. This distinction may sound like a matter of semantics, but there is an important practical implication....

Although it is about bees, not humans, a paper just published in The Journal of Neuroscience will speak to anyone who has ever been up around the clock as a new parent, a medical resident, or any other type of caregiver. The findings by Guy Bloch and his Hebrew University of Jerusalem team suggest that our brains, our very body clocks, are capable of profound change when we get an all-important signal: Our care is needed....

A young woman with wavy brown hair and maroon nails lay on a gurney in a hospital room in Copenhagen. Her extended left arm was wired with electrodes. A pop pierced the air every few seconds—an electric shock. Each time, the woman’s fingers twitched. She winced. She was to receive hundreds of shocks that day. The woman, attended to by several physicians in laboratory coats, was renting out her arm for 1,000 Danish kroner, about $187....

Can a lobster ever truly have any emotions? What about a beetle? Or a sophisticated computer? The only way to resolve these questions conclusively would be to engage in serious scientific inquiry—but even before studying the literature, many people have pretty clear intuitions about what the answers are going to be. A person might just look at a computer and feel certain that it could not possibly be feeling pleasure, pain or anything at all....

A key argument used by climate skeptics to downplay the consequences of anthropogenic climate change is resurfacing: the idea that carbon dioxide emissions are a net positive for the planet’s vegetation. The line of reasoning is being used to push back on the underlying science of global warming. The Heartland Institute, which has sought to place climate contrarians on science advisory councils at U.S. EPA, even suggested that it might sue companies for not emitting more CO2 Climatewire, Oct....

A huge ring of warm dust encircling a sun-size star 424 light-years away may well be molded into an Earth-like planet in the next 100 million years, astronomers reported this week. A team that examined infrared light hailing from the star HD 113766 discovered a belt of powdery dust and probably rock—the raw material for a planet—in the star’s habitable zone, the sweet spot where water can stay liquid. The composition of the dust suggests it is also just right for forming a rocky or terrestrial planet instead of a gaseous one, the group reports in a paper set to be published in The Astrophysical Journal....

Lisa Jackson, who President-elect Barack Obama is expected to name Monday evening to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is already being hailed as a historic choice. The former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and transition team member would be the first African-American EPA chief, and supporters have praised her work ethic, approachability and efforts to regulate greenhouse gases in New Jersey. But Jackson’s critics, including a senior scientist who quit her department in frustration, say she has been too close to industry, withheld information from the public and fallen well short of the pledge she made when taking office in February 2006 to fix the state’s beleaguered toxic waste program....

In June the famed Lucy fossil arrived in New York City. The 3.2-million-year-old partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis could attract hundreds of thousands of visitors over the course of her four-month engagement—part of a six-year tour that began in 2007. Before this tour, Lucy had never been on public display outside of Ethiopia. One might expect scholars of human evolution to be delighted by the opportunity to share the discipline’s crown jewel with so many members of the science-interested public....

By Heidi Ledford When news broke last week that famed Harvard University evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser had been investigated for scientific misconduct, it was no surprise to many in the field. Rumors had been flying for three years, ever since university officials arrived to snatch computers from Hauser’s laboratory at the start of the inquiry. By the time Harvard completed its investigation in January, the gossip had become standard cocktail-hour fare at conferences....

Humans are not the only animals that practice social distancing to deal with a deadly pathogen: A new study shows honeybees change their behavior and use of space to avoid spreading Varroa destructor mites, which feed on bees’ organs and can harbor nasty viruses. Researchers observed these changes in wild and caged bees infected with the mites, which are one of the biggest global threats to honeybees. The team found that in the infected wild populations, older forager bees would perform foraging dances—which they use to show other bees where to find food—near the periphery of the hive....

Zeroing in on a group of cells in a high layer of the cortex, a team of researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute may finally have found the cause of the swirling textures, blurry visions and signal-crossing synesthesia brought on by hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, peyote and “‘shrooms.” The group, which published its findings in this week’s issue of Neuron, may have settled a long-simmering debate over how psychedelic drugs distort human perception....

When NASA’s latest Mars-roving robot, Perseverance, landed on the Red Planet in February, its cargo included a long virtual list of “firsts.” Perseverance was the first ever spacecraft to perform an entirely autonomous ultraprecise landing on another planet. In coming months it will also be the first to attempt to produce pure oxygen from the world’s thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere via its experimental MOXIE instrument. And before the conclusion of Perseverance’s mission, it will be the first to gather Martian samples for eventual return to Earth, potentially also making it the first mission to uncover signs of life beyond Earth....

A simple injection is now all it takes to wire up a brain. A diverse team of physicists, neuroscientists and chemists has implanted mouse brains with a rolled-up, silky mesh studded with tiny electronic devices, and shown that it unfurls to spy on and stimulate individual neurons. The implant has the potential to unravel the workings of the mammalian brain in unprecedented detail. “I think it’s great, a very creative new approach to the problem of recording from large number of neurons in the brain,” says Rafael Yuste, director of the Neuro­technology Center at Columbia University in New York, who was not involved in the work....

By Joseph Akwiri MOMBASA Kenya (Reuters) - Kenyan authorities seized 228 whole elephant tusks and 74 others in pieces as they were being packed for export in the port city of Mombasa, police and wildlife officials said. Poaching has surged in the last few years across sub-Saharan Africa, where gangs kill elephants and rhinos to feed Asian demand for ivory and horns for use in traditional medicines. Wildlife authority Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) officers and police confiscated the ivory in a raid at a warehouse in the port city of Mombasa, KWS said in a statement....