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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. Colonel Thomas Blood, a known conspirator, made an infamous but unsuccessful attempt to steal the British Crown Jewels from the Tower of London in 1671. Disguised as a clergyman, Blood and his gang swiped the royal regalia from under the nose of their keeper, but they were captured as they made their escape through the capital....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Pepper has long been the king of spices and for almost 2,000 years dominated world trade. Originating in India, it was known in Greece by the 4th century BCE and was an integral part of the Roman diet by 30 BCE. It remained a force in Europe until 1750 CE....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. This text is part of an article series on the Delian League. The modern term Delian League refers to the primarily maritime συμμᾰχία or symmachy (offensive-defensive alliance) among various Greek poleis, which emerged after the second Mede invasion of the Hellenes (480-479 BCE), and dissolved when the Athenians surrendered to the Spartans at the end of the Peloponnesian War (404 BCE) – also called The Confederacy of Delos....

A blood clot is one of the final steps in a complex process with which the human body seals a rupture in an injured blood vessel. Clotting involves interactions between millions of blood cells, microscopic cell fragments called platelets, and various proteins. First, platelets rush to the site of injury and join together with an inner layer of fibrin and collagen proteins to form a sticky web around the break. Red blood cells are then trapped in the web, forming a clot....

A few years ago, scientists one upped the Pepsi challenge. Unlike the original taste test, there were no camera crews or looks of staged surprise from loyalists of ‘the other’ leading cola. Instead, volunteers rested inside an MRI scanner and tasted sips of Coke and Pepsi delivered through plastic tubes. Some trials involved rating beverage preference by taste alone. On other trials, the brand labels were also provided. To reveal the effect of branding on preference, some of the cola samples were intentionally mislabeled....

Frustration was the mother of invention for Jonas Frisn of the Medical Nobel Institute in Stockholm, when he set out to map the ages of various body parts in living people. As a neuroscientist working toward regenerating brain tissue, he would have found it handy to know whether some or all of the human brain ever regenerates naturally and, if so, how often. “I was pretty annoyed,” Frisn says, because the question was unanswerable for humans: the techniques used to tag cells and watch their life cycles in animals employ toxic chemicals that could not ethically be used on people....

Editor’s Note (9/2/20): This story is being republished in light of the results of several international clinical trials that have found steroids may be a lifesaving treatment for the sickest COVID-19 patients. The World Health Organization is expected to release guidelines encouraging the treatment’s use soon, according to the New York Times. On Tuesday headlines around the world hailed a common steroid drug as a “breakthrough” treatment for the most severe cases of coronavirus—based on findings from a large, randomized controlled trial in the U....

May 1963 Pheromone Messages “It is conceivable that somewhere on other worlds civilizations exist that communicate entirely by the exchange of chemical substances that are smelled or tasted. Unlikely as this may seem, the theoretical possibility cannot be ruled out. It is not difficult to design, on paper at least, a chemical communication system that can transmit a large amount of information with rather good efficiency. The notion of such a communication system is of course strange because our outlook is shaped so strongly by our own peculiar auditory and visual conventions....

Emergency officials have long pondered how to convince the public to follow evacuation orders. Now they have an answer. Use fear. Bombard the public with images of blazing wildfires and crashing waves. Warn that people who stay home will have no electricity, water or emergency rescue. Remind everyone of the most recent disaster to hit their community—and how miserable it was. “People want to see visual images of danger. They’d like to see the fire coming over the ridge before they take action,” said Carol Freeman, a senior preparedness analyst at Argonne National Laboratory’s National Preparedness Analytics Center....

More than a decade ago a contract was signed to build the world’s first third-generation European pressurized reactor (EPR) in Finland. The cutting-edge, 1,600-megawatt nuclear power plant, Olkiluoto 3, which its French maker Areva boasted as the most advanced safety design of the time, is still under construction today. There have been various setbacks as well as endless finger-pointing between Areva and the Finnish utility TVO, which are locked in court battle over expanding costs....

A host of governors pledged yesterday to intensify their efforts to address climate change regardless of President Trump’s ultimate decision over the Paris Agreement. The proclamations, made mostly by Democrats, were not a surprise in and of themselves. They nevertheless illustrated the evolution of U.S. climate efforts, as policymakers in green-tinged state capitals assume the responsibility for driving deep reductions in carbon emissions. State leaders were unsparing in their criticism of Trump, who was widely reported to be on the verge of pulling out of the carbon-cutting agreement yesterday....

ORLANDO Fla. (Reuters) - A great white shark tagged in 2013 with a satellite tracking device is charting a groundbreaking map of the shark highway from Cape Cod to the Gulf of Mexico. Though the route comes close enough to populated areas to cue the heart-pounding notes from the movie “Jaws,” the threat is miniscule, said Chris Fischer, founder of Ocearch.org, a global non-profit group that researches the one of the top predators in the marine food chain....

Key concepts Weather Humidity Biology Chemistry Introduction Does your hair go crazy during “April showers,” when the weather turns damp? If so, have you wondered why this is? Strands of hair can relax and lengthen when the humidity increases, and then contract again when the humidity decreases. In fact, the rate of change in the length of hair strands is so dependable that they can actually be used as the basis for a hygrometer, a device that measures the humidity level in the air....

An experimental drug that has been tested as a possible treatment for Alzheimer’s disease shows promise for its potential to counteract severe hearing loss, an impairment that affects more than 250 million people worldwide. According to a study published in Neuron, the compound, known as LY-411575, significantly improved the hearing of mice deafened by loud noise. The molecule works by allowing new hair cells to grow inside the inner ear. These cells, in turn, play a key role in the brain’s ability to interpret and understand sound....

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist at New York University, wanted to identify the social factors that best predict a person’s support for public-health measures, such as physical distancing or closing restaurants. He had a handful of collaborators ready to collect survey data. But because the pandemic was going on everywhere, he wondered whether he could scale up the project. So he tried something he’d never done before....

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Malaria deaths have dropped dramatically since 2000 and cases are falling steadily as more people are properly diagnosed and treated and more get mosquito nets, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday. Yet progress against the mosquito-borne infection remains fragile and West African countries suffering an unprecedented epidemic of Ebola are particularly at risk of seeing a resurgence of malaria, the United Nations health agency said....

A lizard captures oxygen from air both when inhaling and exhaling—a feat normally associated with birds. Many scientists believe birds developed the adaptation to cope with the enormous requirements of energy needed to take flight, and the discovery of “unidirectional breathing” in the savannah monitor lizard raises questions about when and why the trait first evolved. “To go and find a similar air-flow pattern in animals as distantly related [to birds] as monitor lizards is mind blowing,” says Mathew Wedel, an evolutionary biologist at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California, who was not involved in the discovery....

Rhesus monkeys possess a natural ability to match the number of voices they hear to the number of individuals they expect to see vocalizing, new research concludes. The results indicate that abstract representation of numbers is possible in the absence of language. Writing in the June 7 Current Biology, Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University and her colleagues describe their experiment. The researchers played the monkeys “coo” calls made by either two or three unfamiliar conspecifics....

When the pain gets to be too much for those suffering from spinal bone fractures due to osteoporosis, there are generally two options: bed rest (often combined with a protective brace and painkillers) or a controversial procedure known as a vertebroplasty, which involves injections of bone cement. In a vertebroplasty, a surgeon uses a hollow-point needle to inject a cementlike substance, typically poly(methyl methacrylate), or PMMA, into any cracks or fractures found in the spine....

Known variations in the sun’s total energy output cannot explain recent global warming, say researchers who have reviewed the existing evidence. The judgment, which appears in the September 14 Nature, casts doubt on the claims of some global warming skeptics who have argued that long-term changes in solar output, or luminosity, might be driving the current climate pattern. The evidence for human-induced global warming is neatly captured in a plot of the planet’s reconstructed temperature over the last 1,000 years....