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Nations worldwide have agreed to limit carbon dioxide emissions in hopes of preventing global warming from surpassing 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. But countries will not manage to meet their goals at the rate they’re going. To limit warming, nations will also likely need to physically remove carbon from the atmosphere. And to do that, they will have to deploy “negative emissions technology”—techniques that scrub CO2 out of the air. Can these techniques, such as covering farmland with crushed silica, work?...

Hey! We heard you like science, so we rustled up some of this week’s best stories on Scientific American. We’ve got junkie mice, a mathematical holiday (everyone’s favorite kind) and a smart new way to test cancer drugs. Enjoy! Boom-and-bust birdie How did passenger pigeons go from blotting out the sun for days to vanishing in just a few decades? A long-dead pigeon’s toe reveals some answers. Slimy gut feeling Goopy oatmeal talks directly to our intestines, keeping us feeling full for hours....

Dinosaur killers, 10 kilometers across, hit every 100 million years on average. Globally devastating asteroids, one kilometer or larger, come every half a million years or so. City destroyers, 50 meters across, strike perhaps once a millennium. The Spaceguard Survey has found just over 700 kilometer-size bodies, none posing a threat over the coming centuries. The rate of discovery is tapering off, suggesting the survey has found about 75 percent of the total....

SALEM, Mass. – The Rev. Jeff Barz-Snell is looking forward to this Sunday. Fifteen years of labor, strife and community organizing is about to pay off. The Salem Harbor Power Station, a hulking 720-megawatt coal- and oil-fired plant that dominates the waterfront in this historic New England town, goes dark on June 1. Having generated power since 1951, Salem Station succumbed to low natural gas prices, weak electricity demand growth and tightening Federal pollution controls....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. This article is a source-critical Analysis of Mark 4:30-32, Luke 13:18-19, Matt. 13:31b-32 and G.Thom. 20:1-2, otherwise know as the parable of the Mustard Seed. On first comparison we see that all three synoptic texts agree on the essence of the parable but none are identical. All three texts discuss the kingdom of God in likeness to a mustard seed which could be a proverbial metaphor for something large that comes from very little....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The outbreak of plague in Europe between 1347-1352 – known as the Black Death – completely changed the world of medieval Europe. Severe depopulation upset the socio-economic feudal system of the time but the experience of the plague itself affected every aspect of people’s lives. Disease on an epidemic scale was simply part of life in the Middle Ages but a pandemic of the severity of the Black Death had never been experienced before and, afterwards, there was no way for the people to resume life as they had previously known it....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In the 5th century BCE, the Carthaginian explorer Hanno sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, out of the Mediterranean and into hitherto unknown territory down the Atlantic coast of Africa. In his search to find new resources and trading opportunities he encountered such exotic and unfamiliar sights as restless natives, swift-footed pygmies, gorillas, and erupting volcanoes....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Insei or ‘cloistered government’ describes the strategy of emperors during the late Heian Period (794-1185 CE) in ancient Japan where they abdicated in favour of a chosen heir yet still ruled in some capacity, typically after retiring to a Buddhist monastery, hence the reference to a cloister. The emperors took such measures to guard against themselves and their successor being dominated by the powerful ruling families of the period, especially members of the Fujiwara clan, who sought to place their own supporters on the imperial throne....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Unlike today, where shipbuilding is based on science and where ships are built using computers and sophisticated tools, shipbuilding in ancient Rome was more of an art relying on rules of thumb, inherited techniques and personal experience rather than an engineering science. The Romans were not traditionally sailors but mostly land-based people who learned to build ships from the people that they conquered, namely the Carthaginians (and their Phoenician predecessors), the Greeks and the Egyptians....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The interiors of Roman buildings of all description were very frequently sumptuously decorated using bold colours and designs. Wall paintings, fresco and the use of stucco to create relief effects were all commonly used by the 1st century BCE in public buildings, private homes, temples, tombs and even military structures across the Roman world....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The history of Pattadakal goes back to a time when it was called Kisuvolal, a valley of red soil. It even found a mention in Ptolemy’s Geography in the 2nd century CE. Presently Pattadakal is located in the district of Bagalkot, state of Karnataka, India. The Chalukyas of Badami (ancient Vatapi) or Early Chalukyas (543-753 CE) built a large complex of temples for royal commemoration and coronation in Pattadakal....

George W. Bush was not known for his cunning intellect, but he did have a good sense of humor. In a commencement address at Southern Methodist University, he famously told the graduates, “For those of you graduating with high honors and distinctions, I say well done. And as I like to tell the “C” students, you too can be president.” Like Bush, many of us use humor to diffuse difficult situations, mask nervousness, soften criticism, and cope with failure....

Astronomers estimate that every star in the universe has about one planet in orbit, on average. Given that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 billion (yes, with a “b”) stars in the Milky Way alone, the number of potential planets out there is staggering. Despite this apparent plethora, researchers have yet to conclusively observe any moons orbiting one of these faraway worlds. As Lee Billings writes in “Astronomers Tiptoe Closer to Confirming First Exomoon,” Columbia University investigators have reported compelling data that a Neptune-size exomoon is circling a planet around the sunlike star called Kepler 1625 b, about 8,000 light-years from Earth....

For years scientists have urged national leaders to tackle climate change, based on the assumption that prevention efforts would require the coordinated actions of entire nations to be effective. But as anyone who has watched the past 15 years of international climate negotiations can attest, most countries are still reluctant to take meaningful steps to lower their production of greenhouse gases, much less address issues such as how to help developing countries protect themselves from the extreme effects of climate change....

When it comes to friendship it may be quantity, not quality, that matters — at least for Barbary macaques in a crisis. Scientists have long known that sociable humans live longer than their solitary peers, but is the same true for animals? A harsh natural experiment may offer some answers. It also raises intriguing questions about the type of social ties that matter. Endangered Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus) in the mountains of Morocco are accustomed to cold, but the 2008–09 winter was devastatingly hard for them....

In the movies, action heroes leap from planes sans parachutes or second thoughts, counting on the air to break their falls long enough to grab a soft landing off of parachuted foes. Now a team says that a properly designed molecule could do essentially the same thing by coasting on gravity. Other researchers, however, may need more convincing before they fall for the idea. In Einstein’s theory of general relativity, planets and stars bend, drag and otherwise contort the taffylike fabric of spacetime....

The tornado that leveled much of Joplin, Mo., Sunday evening gave little warning. Although a watch had been in effect for a broader region for much of the day, some locals had as few as 20 minutes’ notice that a tornado that would ultimately span as much as three quarters of a mile was about to touch down on top of them. Major advances have been made in the science of issuing storm watches, thanks to improvements in computing power that allow meteorologists to run multiple computer simulations of the weather simultaneously....

Definition As used in this article, pop evolutionary psychology, or Pop EP, refers to a branch of theoretical psychology that employs evolutionary principles to support claims about human nature for popular consumption. Fallacy 1: Analysis of Pleistocene Adaptive Problems Yields Clues to the Mind’s Design Tooby and cosmides have argued that because we can be quite certain that our Pleistocene ancestors had to, among other things, “select mates of high reproductive value” and “induce potential mates to choose them,” we can also be sure that psychological adaptations evolved for solving these problems....

More than 30 states have passed or are considering “renewable energy portfolio standards” that require utility companies to generate some portion of their electricity from renewable sources. Geothermal power plants, which tap hot subterranean water or steam, are high on many lists. Most utilities have not pursued geothermal energy primarily because up-front costs, including exploratory drilling, can be high. (Geothermal taps deep reservoirs, not groundwater, which collects much closer to the surface....

By Delcan ButlerThe sponsors of the largest ever HIV vaccine trial yesterday hailed a “historic” moment as they formally announced the trial’s results at an international AIDS vaccine meeting in Paris. The results received rapturous applause from an audience of more than 1,000 HIV researchers.But some scientists are much more sceptical of the findings, arguing that the response of the HIV research community, long deprived of any good news from vaccine trials, is based more on hope than on rigorous science....