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In ancient Rome, the wealthy patricians ran the empire. The second-class plebeians worked the farms, baked the bread and built the walls. The rest of the workforce—a full third of the Roman population—were slaves. Human history is, sadly, entwined with inequality. Most early civilizations, the Sumerians, Egyptians and Harappans among them, had social classes—strata of inequity that left some better positioned than others. Yet it has long been assumed that prior to the Athenian and Roman empires,—which arose nearly 2,500 and more than 2,000 years ago, respectively—human social structure was relatively straightforward: you had those who were in power and those who were not....

Apple introduces the latest “i”-gadget; Samsung takes the reins as the world’s leading smartphone provider; Blackberry mounts an all-or-nothing comeback. Just a typical day of tech headlines, right? Dig deeper, however, and you have to wonder what impact all of these new multimedia devices will have on the networks that give them life. Short answer: Real-time streaming video and other large-byte-size content are gobbling up bandwidth on the Internet, a network of networks originally designed to share documents and data....

Excerpted with permission from Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Land, by James McClintock. Available from Palgrave Macmillan. Copyright © 2014. No voyage from South America across the Drake Passage to Antarctica is complete without celebrating the first sighting of an iceberg. Usually one can expect to see one about two-thirds of the way across the Passage. On Antarctic cruise ships, a bottle of fine champagne is awarded to the first guest to inform the officer on the bridge of the sighting....

Although many in the housing rights field were initially dismayed at the prospect of neurosurgeon Ben Carson becoming Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the leaders of some advocacy groups now hope he can make a positive difference—if he applies his medical background to attack some of the dangers that have long lurked in low-income housing. President-elect Donald Trump last week announced he would nominate Carson to lead HUD. The nominee grew up in subsidized housing but lacks any government experience—a fact that has drawn scathing criticism from Democrats—and a spokesman for the onetime GOP presidential candidate indicated before his nomination was announced that Carson believed he would be better placed to serve as a Trump adviser....

The planet-destroying Death Star from “Star Wars” may be fictional, but a star at the end of its life and only a bit bigger than Earth could be its real-world twin: The star is currently destroying and disintegrating an orbiting planet bit by bit. The ill-fated planetary body and its debris are about the size of Texas or the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest asteroid in Earth’s solar system, and it will be fully destroyed within about a million years....

Exoplanets are almost old hat to astronomers, who by now have found more than 1,000 such worlds beyond the solar system. The next frontier is exomoons—moons orbiting alien planets—which are much smaller, fainter and harder to find. Now astronomers say they may have found an oddball system of a planet and a moon floating free in the galaxy rather than orbiting a star. The system showed up in a study using micro lensing, which looks for the bending of starlight due to the gravitational pull of an unseen object between a star and Earth....

Plant thorns, spiny insects and even radio transmitters don’t stick around for long inside tree frogs. Researchers have discovered that these amphibians can absorb foreign objects from their body cavities into their bladders and excrete them through urination.The finding will be of interest to field researchers, who often implant tiny radio transmitters into frogs to track them. It also helps to explain how these little creatures survive a life leaping around in thorny forests and consuming spiny insects whole....

The findings made headlines when they came out recently—more Americans failing workplace drug checks than at any time in the last decade. Quest Diagnostics’s report in September that workforce drug use had reached a 10-year high came from an analysis of more than 10.5 million drug tests that the company conducted for employers in 2015. Most of those tests used urine or saliva. But 200,000 tests were performed on hair, and those tests showed the greatest increase, the report found....

The ability to forecast a major flooding event like Hurricane Florence has improved significantly. But understanding how such a storm will interact with the built environment and affect people living in a specific area is still quite limited. The factors involved in predicting flood scenarios are changing faster than tools that help people prepare and adapt. For example, we know baseline sea levels made higher by climate change will mean bigger storm surges from hurricanes....

Bert Ely, a biologist at the University of South Carolina, explains. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed from a mother to her children. Fathers cannot pass on their mtDNA, only the extra genetic information on their Y chromosome. Because mtDNA only comes from the mother, it does not change very much, if at all, from generation to generation. Mutations do occur, but not very often–less frequently than once per 100 people. Therefore, a person’s mtDNA is probably identical to that of his or her direct maternal ancestor a dozen generations ago, and this fact can be used to connect people across decades....

Last Thursday, Continental Express flight 3407 was just five miles (eight kilometers) short of the runway in Buffalo, N.Y., when it suddenly pitched, rolled, and plunged into a house outside of town, killing all 48 passengers and crew and one man inside the house. Media reports have suggested that the pilot may have violated company guidelines—but no federal laws—by engaging autopilot on the propeller-driven Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 airplane under severe icing conditions....

CLIMATEWIRE | A surprise climate and energy agreement between Sen. Joe Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer promises a large U.S. emissions cut of 40 percent that seemed out of reach just a few days ago. The announcement marked a startling reversal, breathing new life into the prospects for federal climate legislation two weeks after talks between the two senators broke down. The agreement would offer President Joe Biden a major political victory just before the midterm elections by delivering on his campaign pledge to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to boost clean energy deployment....

In an Aesop fable, a thirsty crow wanting to drink from a pitcher must first raise the water level, so he drops pebbles in the container. In real life, the Eurasian jay can perform the same task. But just how smart is it? Researchers challenged jays and human children with puzzles like the one in the fable. And until the kids reached the age of eight, their results were similar to the birds’....

A once-controversial approach to particle physics has entered the mainstream at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC’s major ATLAS experiment has officially thrown its weight behind the method—an alternative way to hunt through the reams of data created by the machine—as the collider’s best hope for detecting behaviour that goes beyond the standard model of particle physics. Conventional techniques have so far come up empty-handed. So far, almost all studies at the LHC—at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland—have involved ‘targeted searches’ for signatures of favoured theories....

By Declan Butler Eleven Italian researchers who were evacuated from Libya in a C-130 Hercules military aircraft on Saturday are thought to have been among the last foreign archaeologists in the country. With Libya’s people being attacked by forces loyal to the regime of leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, the scientists were thankful to escape to an air-force base south of Rome. The team of seven men and four women were from the Italian-Libyan Archaeological Mission in the Acacus and Messak, an expedition to research prehistoric archaeology and rock-art....

Last night, speakers at the nation’s most prestigious engineering school held forth on an array of financial and educational strategies to crack the challenge of man-made climate change. They included: complete fossil fuel divestment; shareholder engagement with energy firms to advocate environmental concerns; frequent proxy voting on the resolutions of coal, oil and gas companies; educational outreach to politicians and the public to convey the gravity of rising emissions; tax incentives; steadfast energy research; and global emissions pricing....

Soon after the Big Bang, there were tiny ripples: quantum fluctuations in the density of the seething ball of hot plasma. Billions of years later, those seeds have grown into galaxy clusters — sprawling groups of hundreds or thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity. But there seems to be a mismatch. Results released last year suggest that as much as 40% of galaxy-cluster mass is missing when compared with the amount of clustering predicted by the ripples....

Her finalist year: 1972 Her finalist project: Figuring out how pollution can affect plants What led to the project: Nina Schor was always a curious kid. “I guess what I liked most about science, and what drew me to it at a very young age, was the spirit of inquiry,” she says. “I liked the notion that you never knew enough. Every answer raised five or 10 questions.” At Benjamin Cardozo High School in New York City, Schor became interested in how aldehydes—chemical compounds often present in car exhaust—affect respiration in animals as well as photosynthesis, the process by which plants turn light into usable energy....

Last October geographer Luis Andueza clambered into a battered, motorized dugout canoe in Nueva Unión, a village on Peru’s Chambira River. The boatman yanked a starter cord, and the rusty outboard sputtered to life. “Watch out for snakes,” called a villager in Spanish from a dock. “Are there many?” Andueza yelled back. Andueza was heading out for a slog through a swamp where pit vipers patrol the undergrowth and carnivorous caimans, hidden in dark pools, eye passersby....

Hidden for a millennium, it took a 21st-century drought to reveal the ruins of a long-lost port city. Five years after archaeologists discovered its four-kilometer-long seawall on a polluted lake 20 kilometers from Istanbul, they continue to unearth Bathonea, which is yielding a wealth of rare artifacts and architecture spanning a thousand years of the Byzantine era. Excavations this year have essentially doubled Bathonea’s known size, bolstering the idea that it was a well-connected, wealthy, fully outfitted harbor city that thrived from the fourth to 11th century, when a massive earthquake leveled much of it....