News Desk

Archaeologists have made a discovery so sensational that they have waited a whole year to announce it to be sure they had the dating correct.  A set of teeth belonging to an early hominin species has been found in Eppelsheim Germany that date back 9.7 million years.

Archaeologists in Maine are working to unearth ancient indigenous artifacts buried for centuries in shell middens. But sea levels are rising, eroding the ancient sites.

These mysterious ancient stone spheres in Costa Rica were created by a civilization lost to time and are now mostly lawn ornaments.

Most spherical boulders are molded over millions or even billions of years by a natural but long-misunderstood geological phenomenon called concretion.  Atlas Obscura article looks at spherical geologic formations from numerous places around the world including New Zealand, California, Australia, Kazakhstan, Kansas, and South Africa.

In the Bucegi Mountains of Romania, there lies a rock formation shrouded in mystery and conspiracy theories. From a certain angle, its outline resembles that of Egypt’s Great Sphinx of Giza. Over millions of years, the elements carved the nearly 40 foot tall rock until it resembled something akin to a woman’s face. But the Mountain Sphinx is a hotbed of folklore and conspiracy theories. Some say it sits atop a cave with a strong energetic force field, one of the Earth’s supposed chakras. Others say an ancient civilization carved it to represent some sort of supreme god.

When the collision took place due to the plate tectonic movements, converging crusts of Eurasia and India rose, because of their densities, forming big mountains and took along fragments of oceanic sediments from the Tethys Sea that separated the two landmasses to the highest peaks. Thus, the fold mountains with the sedimentary rocks of the Karakoram and the Himalayan ranges and the high Plateau of Tibet were formed. These rocks suggest that they were on a seabed long ago and contribute to the preservation of a geological history that is many million years old.

Lake Baikal, in Siberia, is a natural wonder of exceptional value to evolutionary science meriting a listing as a World Heritage Site by Unesco. It holds one-fifth of the world’s unfrozen fresh water, and its high biodiversity includes over 3,600 plant and animal species, most of which are endemic to the lake. But over the past several years, the lake has been crippled by a series of detrimental phenomena, some of which remain a mystery to scientists.

Swift parrots visit Tasmania once a year to breed, and it’s here that the sugar gliders do the most damage. According to a researcher who studies the birds, in an article posted on The Conversation, the voracious appetite of the tiny marsupials has hurt 83 percent of swift parrot nests on mainland Tasmania.

Researchers from Utrecht University created an ‘atlas’ spanning 300 million years of Earth’s history, revealing how different geological processes changed the face of our planet. The atlas compiles 94 ancient tectonic plates, known as slabs, in the mantle under Earth’s surface, some of which have sunk more than a thousand miles beneath Earth’s surface over time.

Turn-of-the-century science fiction posited the existence of aliens living deep beneath the surface of the moon. Someday those subterranean creatures could very well be us. New data has uncovered a 30 mile long tunnel under the moon’s surface, likely the relic of ancient lava flows.

Archaeologists working in the shadow of the ancient pyramids of Saqqara, Egypt have uncovered the wooden head of a 4,000 year old statue they believe to be the likeness of Sixth Dynasty Queen Ankhesenpepy II.

Thanks to Hurricane Ophelia’s raging winds, complete Iron Age skeletal remains, believed to be over 1,500 years old, were discovered near Kilmore Quay in Co Wexford, Ireland.

Psychedelic drugs such as magic mushrooms (psilocybin), LSD, and peyote (mescaline) have been the focus of a new study investigating their effects. It was discovered that they are associated with a decreased likelihood of antisocial criminal behavior.

Undark website essay explores the fact that in order to break the silence that shapes contemporary American attitudes toward death and dying, we must explore our own relationship to it.

Not everyone thinks resurrection of extinct species is a good idea, and recent scientific advances in cloning, genetic engineering, in-vitro fertilization, and captive breeding are driving a roiling debate over de-extinction — from its potential for unintended ecological consequences, to its power to distract from the more immediate perils facing species that are still with us.

Astronomy has benefited from amateur efforts, including myths that seek to explain astronomical phenomena. That is true for tribal lore of India too, researchers have found.  A study of tribal people settled around central India has revealed a rich mythology.