Newsdesk Archive
Chia seeds sprouted in trays have experimentally confirmed a mathematical model proposed by computer scientist and polymath Alan Turing decades ago. The model describes how patterns might emerge in desert vegetation, leopard spots and zebra stripes.
It’s easy to see why most folks think of mushrooms as some type of weird plant, popping out from under the soil when it rains and found in the vegetable aisle of the grocery store...
A 13-sided shape known as “the hat” has mathematicians tipping their caps. It’s the first true example of an “einstein,” a single shape that forms a special tiling of a plane: Like bathroom floor tile, it can cover an entire surface with no gaps or overlaps but only with a pattern that never repeats.
Scientists in Australia have unearthed 3.48 billion-year-old rock fragments that may be the earliest evidence of a meteorite crashing into Earth.
Over the years, several theories have been put forward about Stonehenge's meaning and function. Today, however, archaeologists have a rather clear picture of this monument as a "place for the ancestors," located within a complex ancient landscape which included several other elements. See the study here.
Scientists at Dartmouth College in the US have studied how octopuses experience reality in a specialist lab...They question the appropriateness of this for a species that has a sophisticated capacity for processing information, rudimentary tool use, complex visual pathways and, not least, the capacity for pain.
A spectacular series of relief paintings on the ceiling of an ancient Egyptian temple depict 12 signs of the zodiac, and you might be surprised to recognize some of them.
In a study at Imperial College London, detailed brain imaging data from 20 healthy volunteers revealed how the potent psychedelic compound DMT (dimethyltryptamine) alters brain function.
Our planet hides its scars well. It's a shame, actually, as evidence of previous asteroid strikes might help us better plan for the next catastrophic impact. In fact, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center chief scientist, James Garvin, thinks we might have been misreading traces of some of the more serious asteroid strikes that have occurred within the past million years
Researchers have recently conducted a study exploring the potential of a non-hallucinogenic version of LSD for treating mood disorders. Their findings, published in Cell Reports, suggest that non-hallucinogenic LSD could have positive effects of mood, while also reducing the need for medical supervision while taking the drug.
Equinoxes occur twice a year, with daylight and darkness being about the same length in both the Southern and Northern Hemispheres. This phenomenon's name comes from the Latin words "aequus" (equal) and "nox" (night). In 2023, the spring equinox occurs at 5:24 p.m. EDT (21:24 UTC) on March 20. The autumn, or fall, equinox will happen at 2:50 a.m. EDT on Sept. 23, 2023.
Our understanding of their origins and history on the plateau is patchy. DNA sampling from ancient humans has been limited to a thin slice of the southwestern plateau in the Himalayas. Now a study has filled this gap by sequencing the genomes of 89 ancient humans dating back to 5100 BP.
Vestiges of a moon-forming cataclysm could have kick-started plate tectonics on Earth. See research here.
Two murals of two-faced men holding unusual treasures — including a goblet that hummingbirds are drinking from, a detail that may allude to sacrifice and "cosmic realms" — were recently discovered at the 1,400-year-old archaeological site of Pañamarca in coastal Peru.
A dinosaur that roamed east Asia more than 160m years ago has been named a contender for the animal with the longest neck ever known.
The desert in southern Egypt is filled with hundreds of petroglyphs and inscriptions dating from the Neolithic to the Arab period. The oldest date is from the fifth millennium B.C. and few have been studied.
A new study published in the journal Nature brings scientists one step closer to answering that question. Led by the University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Geology Megan Newcombe, researchers analyzed melted meteorites that had been floating around in space since the solar system's formation 4 1/2 billion years ago.
According to an in-depth new analysis, the mysterious, rectangular enclosures were used by Neolithic people for unknown rituals, depositing animal offerings, perhaps as votives to an unknown deity or deities.
"We live in a society where religion and spirituality are taboo and something we rarely talk about with each other. What we believe in, why we are here, what happens when we die. And we might be led to believe that it's not important, or something we shouldn't concern ourselves with in the healthcare system. But our study convincingly shows that these topics are important..."
A new study has found that if Venus ever did have habitable conditions, and liquid water on its surface, it was a long time ago, and lasted only briefly before the planet transformed into the parched, arid world it is today.
Glimpsed only occasionally at the hearts of massive clusters of galaxies, ultramassive black holes are some of the largest and most elusive objects in the universe...Now, researchers studying a rare galaxy merger with three supermassive black holes at its center may have finally discovered the origins of these cosmic monsters.
Fossils of a 70 million-year-old platypus relative called Patagorhynchus pascuali found in South America show that egg-laying mammals evolved on more than one continent.
Archaeologists have analyzed 2,900-year-old stone carvings and a long-ignored chisel from the Iberian Peninsula, revealing that local craftspeople produced steel long before previously thought.
Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a temple dating back around 2,700 years, to a time when a kingdom called Kush ruled over a vast area, including what is now Sudan, Egypt and parts of the Middle East.
Scandinavian scientists said Wednesday that they have identified the oldest-known inscription referencing the Norse god Odin on part of a gold disc unearthed in western Denmark in 2020.
We've got a curious case of mistaken identity to report. Fossils previously believed to have been left by prehistoric tentacle-bearing aquatic invertebrates called Bryozoans may, in fact have been created by a different source: seaweed. See research here.
An archaeology project is to make its final excavation of a 5,000-year-old Neolithic site in Orkney next year.
It had been thought to date that the species Homo sapiens has disproportionately large temporal lobes compared to other anthropoid primates, the group including anthropomorphic monkeys and apes. A new study, one of whose authors is Emiliano Bruner, a paleoneurologist at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), contradicts that hypothesis.
For the first time, astronomers have caught a glimpse of shock waves rippling along strands of the cosmic web — the enormous tangle of galaxies, gas and dark matter that fills the observable universe.
Ice skates made of bone have been unearthed from a Bronze Age tomb in western China, suggesting an ancient technological exchange between the east and west of Eurasia.
A peculiarly gruesome artifact has been uncovered during archaeological digs in England, hearkening back to long lost cultural practices that today we can only try to imagine.
Psychedelic businesses have an opportunity to disrupt existing paradigms with regenerative economic practices. The question is: will they take it?
In the Middle Ages, the Roman alphabet and runes lived side by side. A new doctoral thesis challenges the notion that runes represent more of an oral and less of a learned form of written language.
Nations have reached a historic agreement to protect the world's oceans following 10 years of negotiations. The High Seas Treaty aims to place 30% of the seas into protected areas by 2030, to safeguard and recuperate marine nature.
Together, amino acids form proteins that play many vital roles in organisms. This new study was designed to help establish why a specific group of 20 'canonical' amino acids is used again and again to build proteins when there are so many more of these amino acids to pick from.
Tiny traces of protein lingering in the bones and teeth of ancient humans could soon transform scientists’ efforts to unravel the secrets of the evolution of our species.
A study suggests that psychedelics can access receptors inside cells that standard antidepressants usually can't affect.
Researchers have discovered evidence of horse riding by studying the remains of human skeletons found in burial mounds called kurgans, which were between 4,500 and 5,000 years old.
A Nasdaq-listed company is trialling the active ingredient in magic mushrooms as a new treatment.
A pair of studies offer the most detailed look yet at groups of hunter-gatherers living before, during and after the last ice age.
The oldest known fossils of pollen-laden insects are of earwig-like ground-dwellers that lived in what is now Russia about 280 million years ago, researchers report. Their finding pushes back the fossil record of insects transporting pollen from one plant to another, a key aspect of modern-day pollination, by about 120 million years.
On March 1 and 2, Jupiter and Venus will appear side by side in the night sky in an event called a conjunction, which is visible without a telescope or binoculars.
Hunter-gatherers took shelter from the ice age in Southwestern Europe, but were replaced on the Italian Peninsula according to two new studies, published in Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution today.
Egyptian antiquities officials say they have confirmed the existence of a hidden internal corridor above the main entrance of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Researchers modeling eastern Neanderthal migration from Europe have found the area south of the Caspian Sea in northern Iran to be the most likely route, suggesting there could be significant yet-to-be-discovered archaeological sites hidden in less explored areas along the way. See study here.
The asteroid Ryugu, which orbits the sun between Earth and Mars, contains many of the building blocks for life, a new analysis finds.
An unusual whale feeding technique only recorded for the first time in 2011 may have been around for at least two thousand years, according to researchers from Flinders University in Australia.
The study was published in Marine Mammal Science.
A study by an international and interdisciplinary team headed by University of Freiburg archaeologist Dr. Ralph Araque Gonzalez from the Faculty of Humanities has proven that steel tools were already in use in Europe around 2,900 years ago.
A newly discovered Moai statue on Easter Island has been found buried in a dried up lake bed.
Dinosaur fossils featuring arms with a suspect bend at the elbow and wrist could hint at the presence of an unpreserved tendon that underpins all modern avian flight.
The study was published in Zoological Letters.
The Arctic today is a hostile place for most primates. But a series of fossils found since the 1970s suggest that wasn’t always the case. See study here.
Over five hundred years ago, in the Guatemalan highlands of the Midwest, the Maya people traded goods with far less intervention from their rulers than previously believed by many archaeologists.
A circular depression that holds a vineyard in a French winery is actually an old impact crater, new research finds. The new research did not give an estimate of the crater's age. However, the winery website estimates that the crater impact occurred around 10,000 years ago.
The new findings suggest that magnetoreception could be much more common in the animal kingdom than we ever knew. If researchers are right, it might be an astonishingly ancient trait shared by virtually all living things, albeit with differing strengths. The study was published in Nature.
Six massive ancient galaxies, which astronomers are calling "universe breakers" appear to have been discovered, which may upend existing theories of cosmology.
Archaeologists have discovered the grave of two Bronze Age brothers who lived during 15th century BC in Israel – and incredibly, one of them appears to have had an early form of brain surgery before he died.
The endless excavations of yesteryear are no longer the best solution. Big digs aren’t the big idea they once were: mapping the human archaeological record is now moving upward, into the sky.
An ancient three-dimensional star-shaped 'thing' still baffles scientists more than a century after its discovery.
Over thousands of years, Indigenous communities have cultivated relationships with and accumulated knowledge on psychedelics such as psilocybin mushrooms, the Amazonian botanical brew ayahuasca, and the West African shrub iboga.
Egyptian officials have released photos of an ancient scroll, the 52-foot-long (16 meters) Book of the Dead papyrus recently discovered in Saqqara. The 10 images show ancient illustrations of gods and scenes from the afterlife, as well as text on the document, which is more than 2,000 years old.
The Milky Way is churning out far more stars than previously thought, according to a new estimate of its star formation rate.
It is as if the human body has its own version of a marijuana seedling inside, constantly producing small amounts of endocannabinoids.
Homo sapiens who reached Europe around 54,000 years ago introduced bows and arrows to that continent, a new study suggests.
Astronomers recently got an up-close look at a "potentially hazardous" asteroid as it whizzed safely past Earth, and what they saw caught them by surprise: The space rock is unusually elongated for an asteroid and is spinning much more slowly than expected.
The theory behind these evolutionary trade-offs is called balancing selection. A University at Buffalo-led study published in eLife explores this phenomenon by analyzing thousands of modern human genomes alongside ancient hominin groups, such as Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes.
A new analysis of Earth's innards suggests the presence of an inner core within the inner core – a dense ball of iron at the very center of our planet.
In a new study conducted by an international team of scientists, researchers identified compounds in the lion's mane mushroom (Hericium erinaceus) – an edible fungus species also known as yamabushitake or hou tou gu – that could boost nerve growth and enhance memory.
The results from the first randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to systematically investigate the effects of psilocybin in cluster headache has been published in the scientific journal Headache. The initial study provides useful information for creating bigger and more conclusive studies in the future.
The cryptic language of the Book of Revelation — famous for its exotic imagery, including a red beast with seven heads and a symbolic female figure likened to the evils of Babylon — is deliberately similar to language used in ancient Roman "curse tablets," according to new research.
While excavating two large buildings in the ruins of the palace in the city of Yueyang, the researchers from the Institute of Archaeology at the China Academy of Social Sciences were surprised to make the discovery.
It is called Radiocarbon 3.0: it is the newest method developments in radiocarbon dating, and promises to reveal valuable new insights about key events in the earliest human history, starting with the interaction between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals in Europe.
A team of epidemiologists and geneticists from Vanderbilt University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California has found evidence that suggests modern humans mating with Neanderthals may have gained an ability to adapt to differences in the amount of daylight hours in Eurasia.
Psychedelics go beneath the cell surface to unleash their potentially therapeutic effects.
About 8,300 years ago, a teenage boy with an unusual skull and short stature may have scampered along the rocky coast of what is now Norway, pausing to regain his balance as he clutched a fishing rod.
Between 75,000 and 50,000 years ago, humans began to make their way across the megacontinent of Sahul, a landmass that connected what is now Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea, and the Aru Islands.
In the span of 15 years, psychedelics have transformed dramatically in the public eye, from the consciousness-expanding darlings of the counterculture to what could be the most significant breakthrough in psychiatric treatment in many decades.
Image from: Pashminu (Wiki Commons)
DNA reveals previously unknown degree of mixture between Japan, North America and the Eurasian mainland. See study here.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and the Heidelberg University have created a new technology to assemble matter in 3D. Their concept uses multiple acoustic holograms to generate pressure fields with which solid particles, gel beads and even biological cells can be printed. See study here.
The use of psilocybin, a hallucinogenic substance found in some “magic” mushrooms, has stronger connection to how people feel about nature compared to the use of other psychedelic drugs, according to new research published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
A sparkling cannibal galaxy discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope appears to be a "very early" mirror image of the Milky Way, and it could help astronomers understand how our galaxy took shape, a new study has revealed.
A new analysis of the teeth remains found at the Lezetxiki site confirm that they belonged to Neanderthal individuals. The study, which... has been published in American Journal of Biological Anthropology, confirms a late presence of Neanderthals in the north of the Iberian Peninsula.
A rare green comet zipping by Earth for the first time since the Stone Age is about to pass right next to Mars this week, and the once-in-a-lifetime cosmic pairing could be visible through a simple pair of binoculars.
About 250 million years ago, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction killed over 80% of the planet's species. In the aftermath, scientists believe that life on Earth was dominated by simple species for up to 10 million years before more complex ecosystems could evolve. Now this longstanding theory is being challenged by a team of international researchers. See paper here.
Archaeologists have revealed what could be the oldest stone tools ever found, and they think someone other than our closest Homo ancestors may have made them. See paper here.
Researchers have pinpointed two intervals when ice and ocean conditions would have been favorable to support early human migration from Asia to North America late in the last ice age, a new paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows.
A study published in BJ Psych Open suggests that psilocybin, a psychedelic substance found in “magic” mushrooms, may be more beneficial than certain antidepressants for helping improve depressive symptoms related to thought suppression and rumination.
A study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology shows that 90,000 years ago, these Neanderthals were cooking and eating crabs.
A new analysis of 125,000-year-old bones from around 70 elephants has led to some intriguing new revelations about the Neanderthals of the time: that they could work together to deliberately bring down large prey, and that they gathered in larger groups than previously thought.
Copper’s allure has endured for millennia. Both ancient and modern mines for the extremely useful metal abound in North America’s Lake Superior region; long before modern miners extracted the ore from deep underground, local Indigenous communities dug it from shallow pit mines.
Many are celebrating Australia’s decision to pave the way for these psychedelic therapies, but questions around accessibility remain.
Image from: Pashminu (Wiki Commons)
The discovery of a Neolithic era settlement is helping shed new light on how people lived on the shores of Lough Foyle some 5,000 years ago.
The moon exerts a previously unknown tidal force on the "plasma ocean" surrounding Earth's upper atmosphere, creating fluctuations that are similar to the tides in the oceans, a new study suggests.
New, sophisticated models combined recent improvements in demography and models of wayfinding based on geographic inference to show the scale of the challenges faced by the ancestors of Indigenous people making their mass migration across the supercontinent more than 60,000 years ago.
Scientists rattling normal frozen water around in a jar of ultracold steel balls have discovered a previously unknown form of ice, closer to liquid water than any other ice yet.
Paleontologist Matt Friedman was surprised to discover a remarkably detailed 319-million-year-old fish brain fossil while testing out micro-CT scans for a broader project.
Biological amino acids could have celestial or terrestrial roots. An experiment simulated their formation in deep space—but the mystery isn’t solved yet.
Image from: ESO (Wikki Commons)
A new study has uncovered a new thalattosuchian—an ancient 'sister' of modern-day crocodiles' ancestors.
An ancient Egyptian mummy is the oldest covered with gold, but it's not the oldest ancient Egyptian mummy on record....The oldest embalmed mummy in Egypt predates the pharaohs; the remains of a man who was placed in a fetal pose about 6,000 years ago.
Now, there's more research to back up the Big Bang. Recently, researchers took a more careful look at the data and determined that the distant galaxies discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope are, indeed, perfectly compatible with our modern understanding of cosmology.
A newly discovered comet will make its closest approach to our planet on Wednesday.Astronomers say the object's journey toward us took around 50,000 years.