Rising temperatures in the Middle East more than 8,000 years ago directly led to the invention of money. The carbon emitted from cars and power plants in your neighborhood may be causing destructive hurricanes. These and tens of thousands of other surprising connections are being made on a new online database called K-Web, or Knowledge-Web, to be released this month. The Web site will allow users to trace more than 30,000 connections between science, economics, history and the weather. Created by science journalist James Burke, the site aims to explain, in real-world terms, the impact of melting ice caps, rising...