The first advanced Bronze Age civilization of Europe was established by the Minoans about 5,000 years before present. Since Sir Arthur Evans exposed the Minoan civic centre of Knossos, archaeologists have speculated on the origin of the founders of the civilization. Evans proposed a North African origin; Cycladic, Balkan, Anatolian and Middle Eastern origins have also been proposed. Here we add...

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...

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...

The ancient civilizations were dependent upon sophisticated systems of water management. The hydraulic engineering works found in ancient Angkor (ninth to thirteenth century AD), the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (thirteenth to fifteenth century AD), Byzantine Constantinople (fourth to sixth century AD) and Nabatean Petra (sixth century BC to AD 106) are particularly striking because each of these...

This paper investigates the principal competing visions of global politics that are currently advanced in the public discourse about globalization in opposition to the traditional state-centered perspective. The first part of the paper develops an analysis of ideal models as cultural resources that grounds the different reading of human bonds. The second part applies the notion of ideal models ...