News Desk

Dozens of circular geoglyphs, some comprising several intertwined rings, have been identified and mapped near the ancient Peruvian town of Quilcapampa, revealing that these earthen designs were created near ancient pathways used for trade.

Geneticists have traced the history of beer’s most important ingredient: yeast. By sequencing the genomes of nearly 200 modern strains of brewer’s yeast, the research reveals how, over hundreds of years, humans transformed the wild fungus Saccharomyces cerevisiae into a variety of strains tuned for particular tipples.

It happened to Marie Antoinette; Mary, Queen of Scots; and me. Is there a scientific explanation?

Canities subita is the medical term for hair turning white overnight. The phenomenon is almost universally acknowledged as myth—but not entirely.

When Aristotle described “the complete happiness of man”, he thought it would include, among other things, “self-sufficiency, leisureliness and unweariedness”. Unfortunately the philosopher concluded that “such a life would be too high for man” – it was suitable only for the gods.

The Swedish government is introducing tax breaks on repairs to everything from bicycles to washing machines so it will no longer make sense to throw out old or broken items and buy new ones.

Obesity now affects more than 600 million people worldwide and is increasingly becoming a serious public health problem. But despite this, we still don’t completely understand what causes people to become obese.

It’s no secret that the adolescent years can be challenging: young teens have a heightened sensitivity to perceived injustice and react against authority. And their newfound social conscience and desire for autonomy can motivate many of their decisions – even food choices.

The traditional advice to “feed a cold and starve a fever” might have an element of truth, say scientists.

Research shows that the old adage appears to be based on sound science when a fever is caused by bacterial infection.

It’s been suggested that women are better at giving directions than men. New research from Concordia University in Montreal, published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, shows that may be thanks to the hormones that trigger the menstrual cycle.

A study has found that during sleep, the experiences you care about are more likely to enter your long-term memory.

Eighty non-Welsh speaking participants were taught Welsh words before either a period of wake or sleep.

The brain doesn’t sound out words it already knows, a new study shows

When children first learn to read, they painstakingly sound out every letter—C-A-T—before mentally stringing them together and connecting the result to a word and its meaning. With practice, however, we begin to recognize words on sight.

Languages have always cycled through their own stages of birth, change, and disappearance. As cultures move and evolve, interacting with the world around them, so do their languages. That languages shift and dominate other tongues isn’t necessarily a bad thing, explains Bernard Perley, a linguist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. What worries linguists and anthropologists isn’t simply that Indigenous languages are fading to silence but that so many are doing so at such a rapid rate.

Likely from the Okunev culture, might this mysterious ancient figurine with the angry face be a children’s ‘rattle’, to ward off evil spirits?

The ‘very distinctive expression of ferocity and rage’ has never been seen before among ancient Siberian statuettes, say experts.

Ancient Roman ruins that lie hidden below the surface at the Apennine Mountains of Italy have largely escaped discovery because the rugged terrain makes them difficult to spot by foot and dangerous to find by airplane.

A simple cryptography method can produce the unusual language-like features of a mysterious manuscript from the Middle Ages. The finding suggests that the famous Voynich manuscript may be an elaborate hoax, not a secret language to be decoded.

The possibility that the writing on the Fuente Magna Bowl was used by the Sumerians, and the identification of Sumerian placenames on the Altiplano suggest that Bolivia and Peru may represent the “Tin Land of the West” or the “Sunset Land”, of Sumerian inscriptions.

“Man perishes; his corpse turns to dust; all his relatives pass away. But writings make him remembered in the mouth of the reader. A book is more effective than a well-built house or a tomb-chapel in the west, better than an established villa or a stela in the temple!”

Those prescient lines were written over 3,000 years ago, in ancient Egypt. They are part of a new book offering fresh translations of Egyptian hieroglyphics by Toby Wilkinson, an Egyptologist at the University of Cambridge. For the book, called “Writings From Ancient Egypt“, he gathered texts from poets, scribes, priests, storytellers and everyday citizens spanning some 2,000 years of Egyptian civilization to present a tantalizingly personal glimpse into a society defined today mostly by pyramids and mummies.