Underneath a relict patch of illinois prairie, complete with a small herd of grazing buffalo, protons and antiprotons whiz along in opposite paths around a four-mile-long tunnel. And every second, hundreds of thousands of them slam together in a burst of obscure particles. It’s another day at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator embedded in the verdant grounds of the 6,800-acre Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory complex in Batavia, about 50 miles due west of Chicago....
In Eben Alexander’s best-selling book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster), he recounts his near-death experience (NDE) during a meningitis-induced coma. When I first read that Alexander’s heaven includes “a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes” who offered him unconditional love, I thought, “Yeah, sure, dude. I’ve had that fantasy, too.” Yet when I met him on the set of Larry King’s new streaming-live talk show on Hulu, I realized that he genuinely believes he went to heaven....
After nearly four years mapping the “hidden universe,” the largest infrared telescope ever launched into space has reached the end of its life, European Space Agency officials say. The $1.4 billion Herschel Space Observatory has exhausted the vital supply of liquid helium coolant that allowed it make the most sensitive and detailed observations of the cosmos in infrared light, ESA officials announced Monday (April 29). The infrared space telescope’s official end was recorded by a ground station in Australia, which recorded an increase in temperature for all of the spacecraft’s instruments during the telescope’s daily communications session....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Battle of the Eurymedon (c. 466 BCE, also given as the Battle of the Eurymedon River) was a military engagement between the Greeks of the Delian League and the forces of the Achaemenid Empire toward the end of the reign of Xerxes I (r. 486-465 BCE). The battle took place at the mouth of the Eurymedon River in Asia Minor (modern-day Koprucay River in Antalya Province, Turkey) and was both a naval and land engagement....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. To many historians, the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE has always been viewed as the end of the ancient world and the onset of the Middle Ages, often improperly called the Dark Ages, despite Petrarch’s assertion. Since much of the west had already fallen by the middle of the 5th century CE, when a writer speaks of the fall of the empire, he or she generally refers to the fall of the city of Rome....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. With the appearance of the legionary, the Roman army was able to maintain a vast empire that totally embraced the Mediterranean Sea. Although the success of the army rested on the backs of the foot-soldiers and cavalry, there were others on the field and in camp who enabled them to prevail....
Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Dreyfus Affair, or L’Affaire as it has become known, demonstrated the competing forces at work to either reestablish the monarchy and the Church in power or to solidify and advance the unfulfilled ideals of the 1789 French Revolution. This event is considered the trigger for the movement which led to the Law of Separation of Churches and the State in 1905....
Voluntary movements are one of the brain’s main “outputs,” yet science still knows very little about how networks of neurons plan, initiate and execute them. Now, researchers from Columbia University and the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, say they have discovered an “activity map” that the brain uses to guide animals’ movements. The findings, published Wednesday in Neuron, could advance our understanding of how the brain learns new movements—and of what goes wrong in related disorders such as Parkinson’s disease....
November 1962 Socially Deprived “Our investigations of the emotional development of our subjects grew out of the effort to produce and maintain a colony of sturdy, disease-free young animals for use in various research programs. By separating them from their mothers a few hours after birth and placing them in a more fully controlled regimen of nurture and physical care, we were able both to achieve a higher rate of survival and to remove the animals for testing without maternal protest....
Glenn Langenburg, a Certified Latent Print Examiner at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, explains. Yes, there is an inheritable quality to fingerprints. Pattern types are often genetically inherited, but the individual details that make a fingerprint unique are not. Humans, as well as apes and monkeys, have so-called friction ridge skin (FRS) covering the surfaces of their hands and feet. FRS comprises a series of ridges and furrows that provide friction to aid in grasping and prevent slippage....
“The encounter could create a time paradox, the results of which could…destroy the entire universe! Granted, that’s a worst-case scenario.”—Doc Brown October 21, 2015, was a long way off when Back to the Future, Part II hit movie theaters in November, 1989. That October day was the destination for the film’s time-traveling teen Marty McFly, inventor Dr. (Doc) Emmett Brown, and their flux capacitor–equipped DeLorean car/time machine as they tried to fix a future mess caused by Marty’s nemesis, Biff....
Because ovarian cancer often progresses to its late stages with few outward signs, it has come to be known as a silent killer. It affects more than 20,000 women each year in the U.S. and is three times more lethal than breast cancer. But a new blood screening test may help doctors diagnose the stealthy disease earlier. Gil Mor of the Yale School of Medicine and his colleagues based the novel screening tool on four proteins: leptin, prolactin, osteopontin and insulinlike growth factor II....
From Nature magazine “The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.” Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was referring to purported links between genetics and an individual’s intelligence when he made this familiar complaint in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man. Fast-forward three decades, and leading geneticists and anthropologists are levelling a similar charge at economics researchers who claim that a country’s genetic diversity can predict the success of its economy....
Sundials and water clocks are as old as civilization. Mechanical clocks—and, with them, the word “clock”—go back to 13th-century Europe. But these contraptions do nothing that nature did not already do. The spinning Earth is a clock. A dividing cell is a clock. Radioactive isotopes are clocks. So the origin of clocks is a question not for history but for physics, and there the trouble begins. You might innocently think of clocks as things that tell time, but according to both of the pillars of modern physics, time is not something you can measure....
Growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania, Patrice Tomcik had never heard of Lyme disease — an infectious, flu-like illness transmitted by ticks. But in the last few years, five of her friends have caught it, she’s had to have her dog vaccinated and she regularly finds herself pulling ticks off her children. It can be disconcerting, she said, having to worry about an illness that she had never been exposed to in the past....
LOS ANGELES—A team of physicians and neuroscientists on Wednesday reported the successful use of ultrasound waves to “jump start” the brain of a 25-year-old man recovering from coma—and plan to launch a much broader test of the technique, in hopes of finding a way to help at least some of the tens of thousands of patients in vegetative states. The team, based at the University of California, Los Angeles, cautions that the evidence so far is thin: They have no way to know for sure whether the ultrasound stimulation made the difference for their young patient, or whether he spontaneously recovered by coincidence shortly after the therapy....
In the north of Burkina Faso, not far to the east of one of the best-known backpacker destinations in West Africa, the Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali, lies the town of Koumbri. It was one of the places where the Burkina Ministry of Health began a mass campaign five years ago to treat parasitic worms. One of the beneficiaries, Aboubacar, then an eight-year-old boy, told health workers he felt perpetually tired and ill and had noticed blood in his urine....
Every month, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN—the longest-running magazine in the U.S. and an authoritative voice in science, technology and innovation—provides insight into scientific topics that affect our daily lives and capture our imagination, establishing the vital bridge between science and public policy. Key information from this month’s issue: • CHEMICAL TOXINS Exposure to chemicals found in everyday objects, such as disposable cups and soap, could have damaging effects on our bodies in the long run....
Quasars are the bright, young things of the black hole family, emitting brilliant light as they gobble up matter. Their older siblings at the center of enormous galaxies were thought to be both less powerful and messier eaters–ejecting the majority of matter before it could be consumed. Now new observations with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed that these black holes are as energetic as quasars and might just be responsible for slowing star formation....
The majestic old-growth forests of western North America, greening patches of the landscape from Arizona to British Columbia, may be far more vulnerable to subtle climate change than scientists previously believed. A study published today in the journal Science reveals that these western forests are dying at faster rates as regional average temperatures climb more rapidly than the global average. “Tree death rates have more than doubled,” says study co-author Phillip van Mantgem, a research ecologist with the U....
