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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 Hundred Years’ War was fought intermittently between England and France from 1337 to 1453 CE and the conflict had many consequences, both immediate and long-lasting. Besides the obvious death and destruction that many of the battles visited upon soldiers and civilians alike, the war made England virtually bankrupt and left the victorious French Crown in total control of all of France except Calais....

Deep under the streets and buildings of Rome is a maze of tunnels and quarries that dates back to the very beginning of this ancient city. Now, geologists are venturing beneath Rome to map these underground passageways, hoping to prevent modern structures from crumbling into the voids below. In 2011, there were 44 incidents of streets or portions of structures collapsing into the quarries, a number that rose to 77 in 2012 and 83 to date in 2013....

A company banking on drivers’ weariness of skyrocketing gasoline prices unveiled a home refinery device on Thursday offering another option: ethanol. E-Fuel Corporation says its EFuel100 MicroFueler can produce up to 35 gallons (132 liters) of ethanol a week that consumers can pump directly into their cars and trucks. There is no combustion inside the device, which runs on a standard household 110- to 220-volt AC power supply (consuming about 150 watts*) and uses a membrane system to distill the sugar, yeast and water solution required to make ethanol rather than combustion heating elements, as commercial ethanol producers do....

The Black Death notoriously swept through Europe in 1347, killing an estimated 50 million people. Yet DNA from Bronze Age human skeletons now shows that the plague had first emerged at least as early as 3,000 BC. The earlier outbreak probably did not spread as ferociously, the analysis reveals—but it may nonetheless have driven mass migrations across Europe and Asia. The bacterium Yersinia pestis is suspected to have caused the Black Death and other ancient plagues....

Transmitted by bloodsucking kissing bugs, tropical Chagas disease—which afflicts millions in Central and South America—may affect more people in the U.S. than previously thought. Although doctors officially have recorded only seven cases of new human infections in North America, a new study found that five of 13 kissing bugs collected from California and Arizona had bitten a human host—and many of the bugs they collected were infected with Chagas. Chagas, aka American trypanosomiasis, is a cryptic foe....

One reason cancer is not considered a single disease but many is that every cancer cell seems to be dysfunctional in its own way. Random mutations in a cell’s DNA initiate its slide into abnormal behavior. And as additional mutations accumulate, that randomness is also thought to account for the diversity in different patients’ tumors, even when they are cancers of the same tissue. But evidence is growing that there is a method to the madness of tumor cells, making some scientists reevaluate the nature of cancer....

Fossil records can tell us a lot about our evolutionary past: what our ancestors looked like, how they walked, what they ate. But what bits of bone don’t typically reveal is why humans evolved the way we did—why, compared with all other known species, we wound up capable of such complex thought, emotion and behavior. A team of researchers has now used a novel technique to form a hypothesis on the origins of our rich cognitive abilities....

A widely used pesticide – banned in homes but still commonly used on farms – appears to harm boys’ developing brains more than girls’, according to a new study of children in New York City. In boys, exposure to chlorpyrifos in the womb was associated with lower scores on short-term memory tests compared with girls exposed to similar amounts. The study is the first to find gender differences in how the insecticide harms prenatal development....

Mitochondria are biological dynamos. Damage to genetic material in these cellular powerhouses does more than sap energy—it can cause neurological disorders and derail central body functions such as motor control and sight. The mutations that cause the damage are rare and passed down exclusively from mother to child. But their catastrophic effects can be difficult to detect and prevent when scrutinizing an embryo in the laboratory because the genetic abnormalities are often inconsistent across cells....

Less than a decade from now, a spacecraft from Mars may swing by Earth to drop off precious cargo: samples of the Red Planet’s rocks, soil and even air to be scoured for signs of alien life by a small army of researchers right here on our terra firma. Orchestrated by NASA and the European Space Agency, this fast-paced, multibillion-dollar enterprise, formally known as the Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign, is the closest thing to a holy grail that planetary scientists have ever pursued....

For someone who died at the age of 32, the largely self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan left behind an impressive legacy. Number theorists have now finally managed to make sense of one of his more enigmatic statements, written just one year before his death in 1920. The statement concerned the deceptively simple concept of partitions. Partitions are subdivisions of a whole number into smaller ones. For example, for the number 5 there are seven options: 5 • 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 • 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 1 + 1 + 3 • 1 + 2 + 2 • 1 + 4 • 2 + 3 Mathematicians express this by saying p(5) = 7....

Two physicists say that they have crushed hydrogen under such immense pressures that the gas became a shiny metal—a feat that physicists have been trying to accomplish for more than 80 years. But other researchers have serious doubts about the claim, the latest in a field with a long history of failed attempts. Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera, both physicists at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, first posted a report of their results on the arXiv preprint server last October, which attracted immediate criticism....

People seem to have more than one way to work themselves into a panic. Contrary to a long-standing assumption of neuroscientists, humans can experience fear even when they lack the brain structure widely regarded as the brain’s ‘fear center’. Many studies on animals over the years have shown that the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped structure located deep inside the brain, is crucial for the fear response. This finding has been confirmed in studies of humans....

With only three days left in a long research trip, I finally witnessed what I had traveled halfway around the world to document. I saw sea-level rise. A northwest gale blew across the typically calm lagoon of the Tarawa atoll, the capital of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, now an icon of the places most likely to drown as climate changes and sea levels rise. By high tide that afternoon, waves were breaching seawalls, flooding roads and swamping homes along the crowded islands of South Tarawa....

In early March, Harris Interactive conducted an on-line survey to gauge the attitudes of Americans toward President Barack Obama. The Harris Poll generated some fascinating data. For example, 40 percent of those polled believe Obama is a socialist. (He’s not—ask any socialist.) Thirty-two percent believe he is a Muslim. (I had predicted that a Mormon, Jew, Wiccan, atheist and Quetzalcoatl worshipper would become president before America elected a Muslim, so a third of this country actually may be quite open-minded, in an obtuse way....

If you take scientists at their word, human-induced climate change is well underway, evolution accounts for the diversity of life on Earth and vaccines do not cause autism. But the collective expertise of thousands of researchers barely registers with global warming skeptics, creationist movie producers and distrustful parents. Why is scientific authority under fire from so many corners? Sociologist Harry Collins thinks part of the answer lies in a misunderstanding of expertise itself....

You are a mathematical underwater salvage expert. A pirate’s trunk filled with millions of dollars worth of jewels is buried in the sand on a flat part of the deep ocean floor. Your client has dropped sensors in the area to try to locate the trunk. The sensors can be dropped to a precise location, but their reports of distance to the treasure trunk are accurate only to within 10 percent....

“Mutinous” is not a word frequently used to describe teams of NASA scientists and engineers. But that’s precisely the term employed by Harvard University sleep scientist Charles Czeisler to explain what happened when the group operating the Pathfinder mission’s rover in 1997 was required to live indefinitely on Mars time. “They didn’t really have a plan for dealing with the Martian day before they went up, and the rover lasted a lot longer than it was supposed to, so they actually had a mutiny and wanted to shut the thing off because they were so exhausted,” he says, drily adding the obvious: “NASA wasn’t too happy with that notion....

Fifteen-year-old Kenneth Shinozuka of New York City won the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action Award in August for his invention of a wearable sensor for Alzheimer’s patients. The prize, part of the Google Science Fair, recognizes a teen for an innovation that can make a practical difference by addressing an environmental, health or resources challenge. Shinozuka’s creation—a small pressure sensor that can be attached to a foot or a sock—notifies caregivers via their smartphones if a patient who should be sleeping gets out of bed....

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to extend offshore oil and gas drilling to areas that have been off limits, in a move to boost domestic production just as industry demand for the acreage nears the lowest in years. The order could lead to a reversal of bans on drilling across swathes of the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans and the U.S. Gulf of Mexico that former President Barack Obama had sought to protect from development in the wake of the huge BP (BP....