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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. Unlike the rich corpus of ancient Egyptian funerary texts, no such “guidebooks” from Mesopotamia detail the afterlife and the soul’s fate after death. Instead, ancient Mesopotamian views of the afterlife must be pieced together from a variety of sources across different genres. Many literary texts, most famously the Epic of Gilgamesh, contemplate the meaning of death, recount the fate of the dead in the netherworld, and describe mourning rites....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The island of Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon) became a focus of European attention soon after the Portuguese entry into the Indian Ocean in the late 15th century. Large swaths of the island would come first under Portuguese control, then Dutch and English. Sri Lanka would be under European control for almost four and a half centuries until it received its independence from Great Britain in 1948....

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. No city on earth has preserved its past quite like Rome. Visitors stand on bridges that were crossed by Julius Caesar and Cicero, walk around temples visited by Roman emperors, and step into churches that have hardly changed since popes celebrated mass in them 16 centuries ago. These architectural survivals are all the more remarkable considering the violent disasters that have struck the city....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Family in ancient Mesopotamia was considered the essential unit that provided social stability in the present, maintained traditions of the past, and ensured the continuance of those traditions, customs, and stability for the future. The family unit was of such importance that the hierarchy of palace and temple was based on it....

1970 On Nerves and Behavior “Charles Darwin argued that since man had evolved from lower animals, human behaviors must have parallels in the behaviors of lower forms. Darwin’s radical insights stimulated studies of animal behavior, opening the way to experimentation that was not feasible in man. Crayfish, leeches, various insects and snails have the great advantage that their nervous system is made up of relatively few nerve cells (perhaps 10,000 or 100,000 compared with the trillion or so in higher animals)....

Not that long ago “adaptation” was considered a dirty word among climate activists. Their view was that if we could retool our lives to accommodate the consequences of climate change—rising seas, longer wildfire seasons, and a long list of other not so natural disasters—industries and governments would use that as an excuse to avoid a more important job: curbing our emissions of the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that cause these problems in the first place....

Melbourne, the southernmost state capital of the Australian mainland, was established by Europeans a couple hundred years ago at the juncture of a great river and a wind-whipped bay. Port Phillip Bay sprawls over 750 square miles, providing feeding grounds for whales and sheltering coastlines for brine-scented beach towns. But it’s an exceptionally shallow waterway, less than 30 feet in most places. It’s so shallow that 10,000 years ago, when ice sheets and glaciers held far more of the planet’s water than is the case today, most of the bay floor was high and dry and grazed upon by kangaroos....

BEIJING (Reuters) - Around 100 villagers attacked a police station in southwestern China on Friday as part of an environmental protest, state media said in a rare report about what are increasingly common demonstrations. Two government workers and one local resident were injured in the clash in Baha village in Yunnan province at around midday, Xinhua said, citing local authorities. The situation was brought under control soon afterwards, it added. Xinhua did not give further details about Friday’s incident but said around 100 Baha villagers had attacked the nearby Jiangnan Iron and Alloy factory on Monday and three of them had been summoned to the police station on Friday morning for damaging factory property....

Bad news for—achoo!—those who sniffle, er suffer their way through ragweed—sniff, snort, itch—season: A team of researchers has found that increased warming, particularly in the northern half of North America, has added weeks to the fall pollen season. It’s enough to make you grab a tissue: Minneapolis has tacked 16 days to the ragweed pollen season since 1995; LaCrosse, Wisc. has added 13 days, Winnipeg and Saskatoon in Canada have added 25 and 27 days, respectively....

The Advances section of Scientific American’s December issue helps parents find educational toys for the holidays, pushes cooking into the future, remembers Steve Jobs, takes a look at faster-than-light neutrinos, investigates turtle yawning and more. For those interested in learning more about the developments described in this section, a list of selected further reading follows. Can’t Touch This Feeling The Nature paper by Miguel Nicolelis describes how brain-machine interfaces can help monkeys feel virtual body parts....

Cats have a curious allure. Even the most pampered house cats seem to flaunt their independence, as if to say that they do not really need us to get by. Despite this hauteur—or perhaps because of it—many of us cannot resist bringing these regal creatures into our homes, litter boxes and all. In fact, cats outnumber canines as human companions, although we know surprisingly little about their cognition. Our partnership with cats is long-standing....

This flu season will likely peak in February and could be a mild one, according to a new model that aims to forecast the flu in the United States this winter. The model uses information from past flu seasons, along with a mathematical representation of how influenza spreads through a population and the latest data on the current flu season, to predict how seasonal flu will pan out in the coming months....

Rice is one of the world’s most widely consumed staple foods, but its prevalence comes with an environmental price tag. Rice paddies account for between 7 and 17 percent of the methane in the atmosphere, making them the world’s largest source of man-made methane emissions. Though the gas represents a much smaller percentage of overall greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide, it is about 20 times more effective at trapping infrared radiation from the sun....

The quest to turn the motion of the world’s waterways into a significant source of energy may still be in its nascent stage, but several tidal power projects are making headway. Whether they operate in lakes, rivers or the oceans, projects attempting to harness the tides share the same mission: to improve the technology and offer an economical alternative to fossil fuels. Renewable hydrokinetic power comes from a number of different sources, including the up-and-down motion of waves and the smooth flow of the tides caused by the sun and moon’s gravitational forces on Earth’s bodies of water....

Music may calm the savage beast or, at least, make the workday seem shorter. A new study now adds cardiovascular health to the list of music’s potential benefits, suggesting it can directly trigger physiological changes that modulate blood pressure, heart rate and respiration. “Music induces a continuous, dynamic—and to some extent predictable—change in the cardiovascular system,” said Luciano Bernardi, a professor of medicine at the University of Pavia in Italy and lead author on the paper published in the journal Circulation, in a statement....

On September 15, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission affirmed its expert opinion that spent nuclear fuel could be safely stored on nuclear power plant grounds—whether in pools or dry casks—for “at least 60 years beyond the licensed life of any reactor.” That is good news, because there is nowhere else for such waste to go. As President Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future continues to ponder what role nuclear power might play in the U....

The sound was more like a squish than a thud, as the tall male australopith strode across the East African savannah. A volcanic eruption had left a patina of grey ash underfoot, while rainstorms that followed transformed the earth into wet cement. Squish, squish. Four smaller individuals walked not far behind. Squish, squish, squish. Later, ash rained down from the sky again, covering their tracks for 3.66 million years. The first traces of this journey — tracks from three individuals that are the oldest-known footprints of any ancient human relative — were discovered in the 1970s in northern Tanzania by the anthropologist Mary Leakey and her team1....

Last week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first treatment ever for advanced stomach cancer that has not responded to chemotherapy. The medication—called Cyramza—is from a family of drugs that were once hailed as the future of cancer treatment but have so far fallen short of expectations. Cyramza, owned by Eli Lilly and known generically as ramucirumab, is a type of drug known as an angiogenesis inhibitor. (Angiogenesis is the formation of new blood vessels....

By Heidi LedfordBy looking for the genetic alterations that occur in tumour cells, a new assay could allow clinicians to use a simple blood test to track cancer during and after treatment.The technique, developed by Victor Velculescu and Rebecca Leary at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore, Maryland, and their colleagues, generates patient-specific biomarkers using high-throughput DNA sequencing. So far it has only been tested in a proof-of-concept study using six tumours, and there are logistical hurdles to overcome before it could see widespread use....

Editor’s note: The following is an unabridged version of an exchange that appears in the Letters pages of the the February 2011 print issue of Scientific American In his column “Can You Hear Me Now?” [Skeptic], Michael Shermer argues correctly that cell phones lack the power to directly break the ionic bonds that hold together the complex structure of DNA. But Shermer is completely wrong to assert that cell-phone radiation cannot cause damage to DNA through other means or that cancer only arises after such damage occurs....