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UNIVERSE EXPANDER “Cosmic Conundrum,” by Clara Moskowitz, describes how the most likely cause of the accelerating expansion of the universe is “vacuum energy,” the effect of virtual particles popping in and out of existence. But it does not explain why vacuum energy would cause the universe to expand. I would think that if space is filled with evanescent virtual particles, they would collectively exert a huge gravitational force that would counteract expansion....

In the eyes of many planetary scientists, the surface of Mars’s northern hemisphere has long looked like it once contained an ocean. Now it is “sounding” that way, too. A European spacecraft equipped with sounding radar that bounces radio waves off the Red Planet to investigate its makeup has identified what appear to be sedimentary deposits in the Martian north. The sediments, which could be mixed with ice, would represent the remains of a shallow ocean that existed some three billion years ago, according to a study published in January in Geophysical Research Letters....

Male ducks respond to sexual competition by growing either an extra-long penis or a nub of flesh, a new study finds. The unusual phenomena occurred in two species studied: the lesser scaup (Aythya affinis) and the ruddy duck (Oxyura jamaicensis). It suggests that penis size—in line with many traits and behaviours meant to impress or allow impregnation of the opposite sex—involves a trade-off between the potential to reproduce and to survive....

According to self-help guru Tony Robbins, walking barefoot across 1,000-degree red-hot coals “is an experience in belief. It teaches people in the most visceral sense that they can change, they can grow, they can stretch themselves, they can do things they never thought possible.” I’ve done three fire walks myself, without chanting “cool moss” (as Robbins has his clients do) or thinking positive thoughts. I didn’t get burned. Why? Because charcoal is a poor conductor of heat, particularly through the dead calloused skin on the bottom of your feet and especially if you scoot across the bed of coals as quickly as fire walkers are wont to do....

A computer algorithm works almost as well as a trained linguist in reconstructing how dead “protolanguages” would have sounded, says a new study. “Our [computer] system is doing a basic job right now,” says Alex Bouchard-Côté, an assistant professor in the department of statistics at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the paper describing the algorithm. But the program does a good enough job that it may be able to give linguists a head start, the statistician added....

By Jim Forsyth SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Monday described the flash flooding that had killed at least three people in his state as “a relentless wall of water that mowed down huge trees like they were grass.” Abbott declared states of disaster in 24 counties and flew over the area south of Austin to assess the damage caused by tornadoes, heavy rainfall, thunderstorms and flooding that forced evacuations and rooftop rescues and left thousands of residents without electrical power....

India’s Supreme Court has temporarily banned tourism in tiger reserves. The problem? All those hotels and shops built within the protected areas for the tourists are cutting down on actual forest habitat for the endangered big cats. In addition, local governments have failed to create buffer zones of slightly less degraded forest around the parks to enable the rare tigers to thrive. The tall trees of such a protected swath of tropical forest often rise like a wall from a denuded hillside or plain....

MISSOULA, Mont.—U.S. forests offset roughly 11 percent of the nation’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions, storing “significant amounts” of carbon that would otherwise pollute the atmosphere, according to new government data. The findings, released last week, estimate the nation’s expanding forests sequester an additional 192 million metric tons of carbon annually due to increases in both the total area of forest land and the amount of carbon stored per acre. That’s the equivalent of removing about half the cars on the roads nationwide, or almost 135 million vehicles....

Steve Slavin was 48 years old when a visit to a psychologist’s office sent him down an unexpected path. At the time, he was a father of two with a career in the music industry, composing scores for advertisements and chart toppers. But he was having a difficult year. He had fewer clients than usual, his mother had been diagnosed with cancer, and he was battling anxiety and depression, leading him to shutter his recording studio....

Over the past three years the UK has experienced some of the most varied and extreme weather events and seasonal trends ever recorded. We may not be able to link these directly to climate change, but since 2011 we have seen examples of precisely the type of extreme conditions that climate projections suggest are likely to be the norm in the future. Are we preparing well to cope with these changes?...

The desire for social status is one of the most important factors driving human behavior. Our place on the social hierarchy can determine everything from who we marry to how long we live. However, recent research suggests that some of the things we do to boost our status can backfire: they may make us feel better temporarily but increase the chances we will be stuck with lower status. For example, a recent set of studies found that when people feel they have low status, they offer to pay more money than they need to....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Last March marked the anniversary of Julius Caesar’s assassination over 2,000 years ago, and after two millennia, his legendary achievements still linger in today’s consciousness just as they have for centuries. He was so revered that in Dante’s Inferno, his conspirators shared the lowest circle of hell with Judas Iscariot, labeling them the worst sinners in history....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Poem of Pentaur is the official Egyptian record (along with The Bulletin) of the military victory of Ramesses II (known as The Great, 1279-1213 BCE) over the Hittite King Muwatalli II (1295-1272 BCE) at the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BCE. So proud was Ramesses II of this campaign that he had the poem, which details his personal valor against overwhelming odds, inscribed on the walls of temples at Abydos, Luxor, Karnak, Abu Simbel and in his Ramesseum....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. “The Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire,” wrote Voltaire, and this interpretation still dominates the popular imagination, so the Holy Roman Empire is treated as a bad joke, a pale parody of the glory of Rome. But was Voltaire right? Here we will explore the ideology that explains, and perhaps justifies, the name....

An excavation of an archaeological site in Guatemala has uncovered Mayan astronomical records dating to the ninth century A.D. The tabulated numbers, which predate existing Mayan astronomical documents by several hundred years, chart the motion of the moon and also seem to relate to the orbits of Mars and Venus. (And good news: they do not predict the world will end this year—in fact, some of the numbers appear to refer to dates far in the future....

Skimmers, scoops and thousands of kilometers of booms cannot compare with bacteria and other microbes when it comes to removing oil. The microorganisms that naturally inhabit the Gulf of Mexico are the only real defense against the Deepwater Horizon spill. As researchers study how the microbes are cleaning up the mess, they remain wary of how these saviors could also choke marine life, too. That natural microbes are better than human mop-up efforts may come as a surprise, considering that for decades, genetic engineers have touted the creation of an oil-gobbling superbug—the first patent issued for a genetically modified organism was for such a hydrocarbon-chewing microbe....

Imagine there were no Beatles—or that there was no Beatlemania anyway and that the lads from Liverpool were just another band that never got a record deal or that split up before they hit it big. That is the premise Harvard University professor Cass R. Sunstein ponders in an entertaining and thought-provoking essay to be published in September in the first issue of the Journal of Beatles Studies. (A preliminary draft was posted online early this year....

The latest and most detailed climate model of the continental U.S. predicts temperatures so extreme by the end of the century they could substantially disrupt the country’s economy and infrastructure. The climate simulation, churned out by supercomputers at Purdue University, factors in dynamic environmental variables previously unaccounted for and analyzes them at a resolution twice as fine as previous models. The results indicate an increase in heat, heavier rainfalls and shorter winters, which could strain water resources for people and crops and cause a catastrophic loss of life and property, among other things....

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Spektrum, and has been translated from German. We are publishing it as part of our tribute to Charles Darwin on his 200th birthday. Before marriage, Charles Darwin had confessed everything to her. That he was in the process of rewriting the history of life. That, according to his convictions, all living things descended from a common ancestor. And that species were not to be attributed to God’s endless creativity, but were the product of a blind, mechanical process that altered them over the course of millions of years....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). When the manuscript crossed his desk, Joshua Plotkin, a theoretical biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, was immediately intrigued. The physicist Freeman Dyson and the computer scientist William Press, both highly accomplished in their fields, had found a new solution to a famous, decades-old game theory scenario called the prisoner’s dilemma, in which players must decide whether to cheat or cooperate with a partner....