Copyright © 2014, Iranian Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine (ISRAPM); Published by Kowsar Corp. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. There are many references in ancient Iranian literature on...

Iranian traditional architecture is one of the world's architectures par excellence. It was one of the most important architectures in the medieval Islamic world. Iranian architecture has developed over millennia in response to its religion. Many traditional and vernacular buildings in Iran show that the architects had been so clever in harmonizing the Iranian religion and architecture in the p...

The lack of evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life, even the simplest forms of animal life, makes it is difficult to decide whether the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is more a high-risk, high-payoff endeavor than a futile attempt. Here we insist that even if extraterrestrial civilizations do exist and communicate, the likelihood of detecting their signals cruciall...

The 2016 Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science has been awarded to Dan Littman, Professor of Molecular Immunology at New York University’s Skirball Institute. The aim of the Vilcek Prizes, awarded each year since 2006, is to recognize the significant contributions of immigrant professionals to biomedical science in the United States and to help raise public awareness of the important role played b...

Monumental tombs within ancient civilizations worldwide hold precious clues for deciphering the architectural skill, acumen, and industry of prehistoric cultures. Most tombs were constructed from abiotic materials-stone, soil, and/or clay, predominately-and were built to permanently inter royalty or high-status individuals. On the island of Kosrae in the central Pacific, monumental tombs were c...

From a long time age, human beings have chosen their place of residence and comfort so that those places would have relatively ideal natural and climatic conditions. For this reason, from the beginning, the civilizations have been formed in the susceptible natural regions such as Mesopotamia in Iran and Nile coasts in Egypt. Also, the core of human density has been made in the form of an oasis ...

India and China are two of the oldest and still extant civilizations. For Europeans, they were legendary seats of immense wealth and wisdom right up to the eighteenth century. Somewhere between the mid-eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries, both these countries became, in the European eyes, bywords for stagnant, archaic, weak nations. For China, this happened between the adulation o...

Environmental problems have contributed to numerous collapses of civilizations in the past. Now, for the first time, a global collapse appears likely. Overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich and poor choices of technologies are major drivers; dramatic cultural change provides the main hope of averting calamity.

Estimates for the number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy, based on the so-called Drake equation, are meaningless without a plausible estimate for the probability that life will emerge on an Earth-like planet. In the absence of a theory of the origin of life, that number can be anywhere from 0 to 1. Distinguished scientists have been known to argue that life on Earth is a freak acci...