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Bubbly Gone Flat Water bubbles created by ultrasonic waves can collapse fast enough to generate a flash of light [see “Sonoluminescence: Sound into Light”; SciAm, February 1995]. In 2002 Rusi Taleyarkhan, then at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, claimed to have triggered nuclear fusion in these bubbles; in 2006 he published a second report of successful bubble fusion. In both cases, other researchers could not duplicate his work, and many were suspicious because he did not share his data....

Albinos—people with white hair and skin, and often reddish eyes—are being mutilated and murdered for their body parts in Tanzania, according to The New York Times. Sometimes as family members look on in horror, groups of machete-wielding men have chopped off the legs, heads, and genitals of albinos. Among the dead: a seven-month-old baby, a cassava farmer with two children, and a child murdered by his own father, according to reports by the BBC....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The best-known ghost story from ancient Egypt is known, simply, as A Ghost Story but sometimes referenced as Khonsemhab and the Ghost. The story dates from the late New Kingdom of Egypt (c. 1570 - c.1069 BCE) and specifically the Ramesside Period (1186-1077 BCE). It was found in fragments on ostraca (pottery with writing on it) which scholars such as Georges Posener (in 1960 CE) and Jurgen von Beckerath (in 1992 CE) claim are copies of a much older story from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt (2040-1782 BCE)....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. While ancient Chinese warfare was often characterised by large armies in pitched battles, siege warfare and the sacking of cities were also regular features. Huge earth walls with towers and encircling ditches or moats became the normal strategy of defence for most cities, even from the Neolithic period....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The tombs of the great kings and nobles of Egypt were built to safeguard the corpse and possessions of the deceased for eternity and yet, while many have endured for thousands of years, their contents often disappeared relatively quickly. Tomb robbing in ancient Egypt was recognized as a serious problem as early as the Early Dynastic Period (c....

Thousands of people with post-traumatic stress disorder have taken the drug prazosin to ease the nightmares and disturbances that stalk their sleep. Numerous studies have shown the drug to be effective at controlling those episodes. But a team of researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs, seeking to collect more evidence, set out to study the sustained effectiveness of the treatment. They organized a large, lengthy, multisite trial—the most rigorous type of trial....

On this Martin Luther King Day, TheGreenGrok asks, are the underrepresented over-represented when it comes to environmental risk? U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech at the Environmental Protection Agency in 2011 that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “plant[ed] the seeds of the environmental justice movement” and that environmental justice is “a civil rights issue.” In that spirit, let’s take a moment on this day celebrating the life and legacy of Dr....

New coal power plants won’t find a home in Kansas, according to the state’s Department of Health and Environment (KDHE). The agency, tasked with protecting the state’s environment and public health, denied air quality permits for two 700-megawatt, coal-fired power plants proposed by Sunflower Electric for Holcomb, a municipality in the southwestern corner of the state. “After careful consideration of my responsibility to protect the public health and environment from actual, threatened or potential harm from air pollution, I have decided to deny the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation application for an air quality permit,” Roderick Bremby, KDHE secretary, said in a written statement....

Early humans successfully fended off a virus that infected chimpanzees by evolving a protein capable of neutralizing it, according to a new study. But what goes around comes around, evolutionarily speaking: Four million years later, the same protein seems to have left us more vulnerable than other primates to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). When researchers sequenced the chimpanzee genome in 2005, the biggest difference between it and the human genome was the extinct PtERV1 retrovirus, which inserted its DNA into the cells it infected like HIV does today....

Can current theories of cosmology explain how the Universe evolved? One way to find out is to plug everything we think we know about the early Universe and how galaxies form into a supercomputer, and see what comes out. In a simulation presented today in Nature, researchers did just that — and revealed a cosmos that looks rather like our own. The findings lend weight to the standard model of cosmology, but could also help physicists to probe where our models of galaxy formation fall down....

Last October news broke of allegations that University of California, Berkeley, astronomer Geoff Marcy had for years harassed female students. (Marcy, who denied some of the allegations, resigned.) The news reminded me of an experience I had in school. I admired an instructor and was honored when he took me out for a celebratory dinner near the end of the course. After walking me home, he put his arms around me, and alarm bells began to ring....

WARSAW (Reuters) - Cutting the European Union’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent from 1990 levels by 2030 would reduce economic growth by a fraction of a percent, Britain’s minister for energy and climate change said on Thursday.The European Commission, the EU’s executive, is expected to unveil proposed 2030 green energy goals around the year end, and Britain wants the bloc to take on an ambitious target to help limit global temperature rises to below 2 degrees Celsius....

A relatively small stretch of swamp between Miami and Naples in south Florida was the only place on Earth where the Florida panther lived 20 years ago. In fact, scientists estimate that only roughly 26 of the animals that once roamed the entire Southeast remained in that swamp, many stunted by genetic defects brought on by inbreeding. In a bid to stave off the same kind of extinction that had wiped out all other mountain lion subspecies (also known as cougars, panthers or pumas) east of the Mississippi, wildlife managers imported eight female cougars from Texas in 1995....

What if the universe had no beginning, and time stretched back infinitely without a big bang to start things off? That’s one possible consequence of an idea called “rainbow gravity,” so-named because it posits that gravity’s effects on spacetime are felt differently by different wavelengths of light, aka different colors in the rainbow. Rainbow gravity was first proposed 10 years ago as a possible step toward repairing the rifts between the theories of general relativity (covering the very big) and quantum mechanics (concerning the realm of the very small)....

Some 25,000 genes code for the proteins required to build each human being, a figure representing only 1 or 2 percent of our entire genome. The remainder is “junk DNA”–base-pair sequences that do not directly code for proteins. But where organisms must operate extremely efficiently to endure hostile habitats, evolution has greatly optimized the DNA, shaving the genome down to what some regard as the minimum genetic requirement to create and develop life....

The first time Lori Tipton tried MDMA, she was skeptical it would make a difference. “I really was, at the beginning, very nervous,” Tipton said. MDMA is the main ingredient in the club drug known as ecstasy or molly. But Tipton wasn’t taking pills sold on the street to get high. She was trying to treat her post-traumatic stress disorder by participating in a clinical trial. After taking a dose of pure MDMA, Tipton lay in a quiet room with two specially trained psychotherapists....

Back out to stud: veterinarians perform first reverse vasectomy on an endangered horse Veterinarians at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., announced this week that they reversed a vasectomy that had been performed nearly a decade ago on a Przewalski’s horse (pronounced “zshah-VAL-skeez”), a short, stocky breed that only grows to about four feet (1.3 meters) tall. About 1,500 of the animals have been raised in zoos worldwide since 1970, when they were declared extinct in the wild in their native Mongolia and China....

The chemistry of King Richard III’s bones and teeth has shed light on how his social status, diet and where he lived changed during his life. The study suggests that – as one might expect – he feasted lavishly on luxury foods and wine after he became king during the last two years of his life, before being killed at the age of 32 at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485....

‘I did have to go home for an extra shower one day – it turns out that you can’t necessarily get away completely unscathed after swabbing a skunk,’ recalls Robert Cichewicz at the University of Oklahoma, US. Cichewicz and Bradley Stevenson have been leading a rather unusual research project over the last three years, daily patrolling a 30 mile stretch of an Oklahoma state highway. The team of chemists and microbiologists are on the lookout for roadkill....

“Youth is a wonderful thing,” George Bernard Shaw once said. “What a crime to waste it on children.” Humor aside, recent research suggests that youthful energy may not be “wasted” after all. Through social interactions alone, the young can pass some of their vigor on to the elderly, improving the older generation’s cognitive abilities and vascular health and even increasing their life span. Although researchers have documented these benefits in mammals, such as rats, guinea pigs and nonhuman primates, the reason for the effect has remained unclear....