Newsdesk Archive
They are separated by nearly 5,000 miles and boast wildly different cultures.
But archaeologists believe they have discovered evidence that musicians from ancient Ireland and southern India may have exchanged instruments and skills around 2,000 years ago.
A new exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland showcases a rarely seen collection of Stone Age jade axeheads. Most of them were brought to Scotland around 4,000 years BC. In those times they were at least 100 years old.
According to the initial report, William Gadoury of Québec was able to align more than 100 Maya cities to maps of modern constellations. When one constellation appeared to be missing its corresponding city, Gadoury turned to specialists to interpret satellite images of the area in an attempt to find the "lost" site.
When the announcement that a Maya city, which Gadoury named K’aak Chi, or "Mouth of Fire," had indeed been located where it was expected to be, international media stumbled through its own Kübler-Rossian stages of coverage
Hikers out for a stroll on the Caribbean island of Montserrat have discovered ancient stone carvings that archaeologists believe could offer valuable insight into the island’s pre-colonial history.
The petroglyphs – which appear to depict geometric designs as well as beings of some kind – were carved into the side of a mossy boulder in the densely forested hills in the island’s north.
The disposable paper face masks offer little protection from the clouds of dust that fill the cliffside cave where Israeli archaeologists are wrapping up the largest excavation in the Judean desert of the past half-century.
Clipped into safety harnesses, volunteers stand at the cave opening, 250 meters (820 feet) above a dry river bed that leads to the lowest spot on earth, the Dead Sea.
“Healthy” and “vampires” are two words you don’t want to see in the same sentence, yet they’re together in recent headlines out of Poland where archeologists studying the graves of people buried in the strange manner that alleged vampires were interred in medieval times have determined that the bones did not show signs of the diseases and deformities that often caused unenlightened to assume they were denizens of darkness. So what were they?
Stanford researchers studying the effect of stem cells injected directly into the brains of stroke patients said Thursday that they were "stunned" by the extent to which the experimental treatment restored motor function in some of the patients.
From sinner to saint. A modified virus can repair diseased livers by turning bad cells into good. The treatment could one day offer a lifeline to thousands of people with liver failure.
More than 35,000 people in the US die of liver disease each year. The new viral treatment targets liver fibrosis, the progressive scarring of the liver that leads to organ failure.
Los Angeles is planning to impose a tax on millionaires and use the money collected to try to fix the city's spiralling homelessness problem.
Those with an annual income of over $1m will be required to pay a 1 per cent surcharge on everything they earn, if the idea is approved, in an attempt to provide accomodation for the city's 46,000 homeless people.
Hitachi today announced that it has developed a basic artificial intelligence (AI) technology that analyzes huge volumes of Japanese text data on issues that are subject to debate, and presents in Japanese both affirmative and negative opinions on those issues together with reasons and grounds.
For the first time, scientists have successfully played back a word someone was thinking by monitoring their brain activity. This milestone could lead to people’s intended thoughts being transferred to an electronic speaker or writing device.
A dietary supplement containing a blend of thirty vitamins and minerals--all natural ingredients widely available in health food stores--has shown remarkable anti-aging properties that can prevent and even reverse massive brain cell loss, according to new research. It's a mixture scientists believe could someday slow the progress of catastrophic neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's, ALS and Parkinson's.
Scientists on Thursday formally announced the start of a 10-year project aimed at vastly improving the ability to chemically manufacture DNA, with one of the goals being to synthetically create an entire human genome.
Roman tablets discovered during an excavation in London include the oldest hand-written document ever found in Britain, archaeologists have revealed.
The Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) said it had deciphered a document, from 8 January AD 57, found at the dig at Bloomberg's new headquarters.
Two eyes painted on a newly discovered Egyptian coffin seem to stare out from across millennia, conveying the secrets of the ancient Egyptian elite.
The coffin, discovered this year in the necropolis at Qubbet el-Hawa across the Nile River from Aswan, belonged to an important local woman, Sattjeni, daughter of one governor, wife of another and mother of two more, said excavation leader Alejandro Jiménez-Serrano, an Egyptologist at the University of Jaén in Spain.
On a rugged island just offshore from Ventura County, archaeologists have turned up evidence of some of the oldest human activity in coastal Southern California.
On Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the Channel Islands, researchers have found three sites scattered with ancient tool-making debris and the shells of harvested shellfish.
So much for the Lost City of Zakynthos.
When snorkelers discovered what appeared to be pieces of ancient stonework, including columns and doughnut-shaped disks that might have been column bases, in a bay off the Greek island of Zakynthos several years ago, government archaeologists were sent in to investigate.
The oceans of the world have always been, and still are, wellsprings of seemingly infinite mysteries and the unknown. One very pervasive enigma of the sea is its habit of swallowing up people and things without a trace. History is steeped in tales of ships, planes, submersibles, and swimmers who have ventured out into this vast, churning place, only to slip over the horizon and out of existence without a clue as to what happened to them.
KOLKATA: It may be time to rewrite history textbooks. Scientists from IIT-Kharagpur and Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) have uncovered evidence that the Indus Valley Civilization is at least 8,000 years old, and not 5,500 years old, taking root well before the Egyptian (7000BC to 3000BC) and Mesopotamian (6500BC to 3100BC) civilizations. What's more, the researchers have found evidence of a pre-Harappan civilization that existed for at least 1,000 years before this.
Alt: ‘Harappa: older than we thought’
A 19th-century garden just north of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, D.C., was designed so that its statues align with the rising and setting sun on the summer and winter solstices, a physics professor has found.
Related: Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith, by Graham Hancock & Robert Bauval
Across the centuries, forming cooperative networks beyond cultural boundaries has been a way to overcome natural disasters.
A Nagoya University researcher and his leading international research group discovered a Great Platform built with different kinds of stone at the archeological site of San Andrés, El Salvador, and challenged the prevailing theory regarding the sociocultural development of Southeastern Maya frontier.
Older people are less willing to take risks for potential rewards and this may be due to declining levels of dopamine in the brain, finds a new study of over 25,000 people.The study found that older people were less likely to choose risky gambles to win more points in a smartphone app called The Great Brain Experiment.
Carole, a scientist from Zurich, recently received a dream message on her phone: she will receive 2,500 Swiss francs ($2,500, 2,300 euros) a month for the next year, no strings attached.
The 30-year-old ethnologist, whose last name has not been revealed, could be the first of many in Switzerland to receive such monthly cheques in the mail.
Related: What to do when machines take our jobs? Give everyone free money for doing nothing
A new approach to farming is needed to safeguard human health and avoid rising air and water pollution, high greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss, a group of 20 leading agronomists, health, nutrition and social scientists has concluded.
Rather than the giant feedlots used to rear animals or the uniform crop monocultures that now dominate farming worldwide, the solution is to diversify agriculture and re-orient it around ecological practices
Energy officials from the world’s largest economies are meeting in San Francisco with the aim of accelerating the shift to zero-carbon power. Today, they announced a new campaign that will grease the wheels for businesses to buy into renewable energy.
Simon Fraser University researchers hope that a brain vital-sign test becomes as routine during a doctor's check-up as taking a blood pressure or heart rate measurement.
The National Institutes of Health have approved an application from Bioquark to perform a small pilot study that would attempt to rejuvenate the inactive brains of patients who had experienced traumatic brain injuries. The study will use amino acids, nerve stimulation, lasers, and stem cells to try to trigger measurable EEG activity in brains that no longer perform life-sustaining functions.
Scientists have created a system that uses solar energy to split water molecules and hydrogen-eating bacteria to produce liquid fuels. The system can convert solar energy to biomass with 10 percent efficiency, far above the 1 percent seen in the fastest-growing plants.
The universe is expanding faster than expected and scientists speculate the finding may be explained by a mysterious force called dark radiation.
Related: Does the Universe Have an Edge?
SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk will send a mission to Mars — on the Flying Dragon version 2 rocket —starting in 2018 and launch a rocket headed there at every open opportunity — every 26 months.
Related: This Is How Elon Musk Wants Government to Work on Mars
Pluto's bright "heart" captivated astronomers and amateurs alike when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft beamed back the first clear images of the dwarf planet last July. But there's more to that distinctive shape than meets the eye.
Is it aliens? Sure sounds like aliens—but these strange, glowing patches over Pluto are actually something else (almost) as mysterious.
NASA’s New Horizons snapped this photo of sunlight streaming through Pluto’s haze haze during the spacecraft’s close approach on July 14, 2015.
US astronomers have managed to peer deep into the atmosphere of Jupiter using a radio telescope on Earth.
The Very Large Array (VLA) traced the presence of ammonia in the gas giant to study the circulation systems below the visible cloud tops.
Between May 17 and 19, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured an image of a new — and massive — "hole" on the sun's surface, NASA announced in a statement on Thursday (May 26).
If you thought a comet that contains the building blocks of life and creates its own weather couldn’t get any more interesting, think again. Scientists finally have a theory as to why comet 67P—also known as Rosetta’s comet—has two distinct lobes.
Earth's magnetic field shields us from deadly cosmic radiation, and without it, life as we know it could not exist here. The motion of liquid iron in the planet's outer core, a phenomenon called a "geodynamo," generates the field. But how it was first created and then sustained throughout Earth's history has remained a mystery to scientists.
This factory located in a quiet island of central China’s Xiangyang city probably won’t grab your attention. Its stainless steel complex and three-story office building look similar to any other. But don’t be fooled by appearances.
When self-driving cars can take us anywhere, anytime, garages will empty—and commuting will be transformed
No question about it: self-driving cars are big news.
With the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, ministers last week banned the sale or procurement of any substance that has psychoactive activity, regardless of whether it is harmless or even useful. The sole exceptions are alcohol, nicotine products and caffeine.
A survey of more than 216,000 adolescents from all 50 states indicates the number of teens with marijuana-related problems is declining. Similarly, the rates of marijuana use by young people are falling despite the fact more U.S. states are legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana use and the number of adults using the drug has increased.
Street lights don’t just lure moths, they may be helping to impoverish suburban gardens by causing them to fly too high to pollinate flowers, researchers at Newcastle University report.
It could be at the cost of honeysuckle, ivy, the roadside wildflower white campion, and even buddleia, say the authors of a new study in the journal Global Change Biology.
You could call it a culture shock. Many researchers accept that cultural experiences have helped shape human evolution – and evidence has now emerged that the same may be true of killer whales.
Human genomes have evolved in response to our cultural behaviours: a classic example is the way that some human populations gained genes for lactose tolerance following the onset of dairy farming.
Deep inside Bruniquel Cave, in the Tarn et Garonne region of southwestern France, a set of human-made structures 336 meters from the entrance was recently dated as being approximately 176,500 years old. This discovery indicates that humans began occupying caves much earlier than previously thought: until now the oldest formally proven cave use dated back only 38,000 years (Chauvet).
Syrian regime troops are looting the ancient city of Palmyra like the Islamic State jihadis who controlled it until March, according to a leading archaeologist.
Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, said off-duty soldiers were conducting illegal excavations and had looted at the Unesco world heritage site.
The imperial dominance of the ancient Wari Empire at the Huaca Pucllana site in Lima, Peru, was likely not achieved through population replacement, according to a study published June 1, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Guido Valverde from the University of Adelaide, Australia, and colleagues.
Tertius the Brewer, Junius the Cooper and Julius Classicus – the up-and-coming military commander who would turn traitor against Rome a decade later – have sprung back to life from the first decade of Roman London, their names – along with the first reference to London itself – miraculously preserved on writing tablets in a sodden hole in the heart of the City.
An archaeologist thinks he has found the tomb of Aristotle at Stagira, an ancient city where the Greek philosopher lived for much of his life.
But several other archaeologists say there is hardly enough evidence to link the tomb to Aristotle, and there's probably no way to confirm it either way. Even so, historical records do support the idea that Aristotle could be buried in the area.
In 1922, Howard Carter stunned the world with his discovery of the 'lost tomb' of the Egyptian King Tutankhamun (18th dynasty, 14th C. BCE), still intact with its treasures (and body of the now-famous boy-king) having remained safe from looters over the millennia.
Alt: King Tut's Blade Made of Meteorite
Astronomers show that it is highly likely that the so-called Planet 9 is an exoplanet. This would make it the first exoplanet to be discovered inside our own solar system. The theory is that our sun, in its youth some 4.5 billion years ago, stole Planet 9 from its original star.
If anything can sum up just how little we truly know about the Universe, it’s black holes. We can’t see them because not even light can escape their gravitational pull, we have no idea what they’re made of, and where does everything inside go once a black hole dies?
Icy comets may have a reputation for being the inner solar system’s ancient water delivery system, but a new study finds that most of the water in our nearest neighbor, the moon, was actually delivered by asteroids around 4.5 billion to 4.3 billion years ago.
Earth’s plate tectonics could be a passing phase. After simulating rock and heat flow throughout a planet’s lifetime, researchers have proposed that plate tectonics is just one stage of a planet’s life cycle.
Most U.S. homes are full of familiar household products with an ingredient that fights bacteria: triclosan. Most of the triclosan is removed in waste water treatment plants. However, a U.S. Geological Survey found the antibacterial in nearly 58% of freshwater streams. What does that mean for the food and soil irrigated with water from streams? As triclosan breaks down, it can turn into other harmful compounds. The breakdown of triclosan produces more effective hormone disruptors.
Women who want to quit smoking may have better success by carefully timing their quit date with optimal days within their menstrual cycle, according to a new study from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
High school and college are the glory days, and it's all downhill from there, right? Until now, research has supported that popular idea, suggesting that life satisfaction reaches its low point in middle age. New findings, however, suggest that we continually get happier well into our 30s and perhaps beyond.
Unsullied by the trappings of the modern world and cut off from the rest of humanity, the “uncontacted” peoples of the Amazon are seen as offering a fascinating insight into a prehistoric world.
Intestinal bacteria that can boost bravery or trigger multiple sclerosis: An increasing body of research results confirms the importance of the “gut-brain axis” for neurology and indicates that the triggers for a number of neurological diseases may be located in the digestive tract.
Have you read this sentence before? Perhaps it feels strangely familiar? The experience of déjà vu is a common one, but in rare cases, it can become a disorder. In a fascinating new Cortex paper, French psychologists Julie Bertrand and colleagues discuss the phenomenon of pathological déjà vu.
Scientists have found new evidence that brains affected by schizophrenia might be able to reorganise themselves and fight back against the disease. It's a promising new avenue for our understanding of schizophrenia, and could one day point towards a cure for an illness that's estimated to affect more than 21 million people worldwide.
An eight-foot-tall angel hidden beneath plaster for hundreds of years has now been uncovered at the ‘birthplace of Jesus.’
The elaborate mosaic was found during restoration on the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, built nearly 1,700 years ago.
The Turin Papyrus Map is an ancient Egyptian map that is generally considered to be the oldest surviving topographical and geological map of the ancient world - there are some older maps from outside Egypt, thought these have been described as rather crude, and more abstract in comparison with the Turin Papyrus Map.
The extremely difficult conditions in which University of the Witwatersrand's (Wits) Professor Lee Berger's Rising Star team was forced to work, gave rise to the use of space-age technology to map the Dinaledi chamber and Rising Star Cave, in which over 1500 Homo naledi fossils were found.
Higher waves caused by a warming planet are chipping away at platforms that have supported some of the famous statues on Easter Island for more than 500 years, according to a United Nations report on cultural heritage sites and climate change.
Ancient charred grains of rice and mung beans excavated from Madagascar provide the first archaeological evidence that ancestors of people living on the East African island known as Malagasy came from South-East Asia, scientists say.
It was during a trip to Indianapolis that Professor Simon Lewis, a forensic and analytical chemist, was approached by Gregory Smith from the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) with an idea.
Smith, senior conservation scientist at the IMA, had read and known of Lewis' search for new luminescent compounds that could be used in fingerprint detection.
A signet made of clay with ornamental design was among the about 3,000 ancient artefacts found at the Keezhadi Pallai Sandhaipudur village in this district during an excavation conducted by a team of experts from the Archaeological Survey of India ( ASI ).
The Bat Creek stone was discovered in a small mound near Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. The archaeologists who dug it up in 1889 discovered a small stone tablet engraved with several mysterious alphabetic characters.
Their feet were firmly on the earth, but their hearts and minds were in the stars. That's the conclusion of archaeologist after studying common household utensils used by Chinese about 5,000 years ago.
Before the end of the last ice age, millennia earlier than the area is traditionally believed to have been inhabited, manmade fires could have been burning in South Carolina.
Scientists have investigated this question for more than a century, and the answer is clear: the differences between people on intelligence tests are substantially the result of genetic differences.
All publicly funded scientific papers published in Europe could be made free to access by 2020, under a “life-changing” reform ordered by the European Union’s science chief, Carlos Moedas.
Flowers generate weak electric fields, and a new study shows that bumblebees can actually sense those electric fields using the tiny hairs on their fuzzy little bodies.
New research has found a global pattern of sustained species extinctions on islands within hydroelectric reservoirs. Scientists have discovered that reservoir islands created by large dams across the world do not maintain the same levels of animal and plant life found prior to flooding.
The waters surrounding Antarctica may be one of the last places to experience human-driven climate change. New research from the University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds that ocean currents explain why the seawater has stayed at roughly the same temperature while most of the rest of the planet has warmed.
As you wind down from your Memorial Day festivities tonight, take a minute to find Mars glowing yellow and bright in the eastern sky.
On the evening of May 30, the Red Planet will come closer to Earth than it has in 11 years.
Houston, you have an epic balloon room in space. NASA has inflated the first-ever expandable room for astronauts on the International Space Station, a round module that made occasional popcorn-like popping sounds as it reached its full size.
Two Turkish airline pilots have made an extraordinary claim they saw a UFO flying over their plane just an hour before the doomed Egyptair jet crashed.
Related: Pilots spot UFO with green lights over Turkey
Related: UFOs Over Wales: A 1909 Wave
As anybody who's ever tried to get by in a foreign country without much grasp of the local language can tell you, oversized hand gestures and speaking English loudly and slowly will only get you so far.
Physicists have just found a way to slow light down without touching or intercepting it, simply by making it 'twist' as it moves through space.
That means they were able to make beams of light take longer to get from point A to point B, a skill that will be incredibly useful when it comes to controlling the next-generation of optical computers and telecommunication systems.
Scientists are continuously investigating the sun to understand its behavior. Any anomaly on the Sun's behavior will definitely affect all life forms harvesting energy from it. Recently, NASA made a study of the black holes on the surface of the Sun called the Coronal Hole using the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
Prior to the Apollo missions to the moon, scientists speculated that volatiles - including water - may have accumulated in permanently shaded regions at the poles. Then the Apollo era brought the return of lunar samples, enabling real measurements: They found none of the water-bearing minerals common on Earth.
New data released by the European Space Agency reveals that Earth’s magnetic poles are weakening much faster than was previously thought. The data was collected by the ESA’s Swarm satellites, a set of three orbital satellites designed to track the strength, direction and variations of the Earth’s geomagnetic field.
If it sounds impossible to you that the surface of our planet is actually older than its inner core, prepare to have you mind blown, because according to new calculations, the inside of Earth is actually 2.5 years younger than the outside.
Long-ago close encounters with planetary building blocks may have cracked open the surfaces of icy moons in the outer solar system — and could perhaps even have created the gigantic Martian canyon system Valles Marineris, a new study suggests.
The same laser system being developed to blast tiny spacecraft between the stars could also launch human missions to Mars, protect Earth from dangerous asteroids and help get rid of space junk, project leaders say.
There’s some good news and bad news for Europa colonization enthusiasts.
As our Sun gets older, brighter, and bigger over the next several billion years, it will expand into a red giant so large that its heat could melt ice on the surface of Europa and other moons of Jupiter, as well as those around Saturn. Liquid water flowing freely would not only be a boon for would-be space explorers, but it could provide a stable environment ripe for fostering life. The bad news is Earth will be burnt to a crisp.
German researchers are experimenting with an “artificial robot nervous system” to teach robots how to feel and react to pain, in what might be one of the saddest displays of robot bullying since Boston Dynamics’ Atlas was pushed by a hockey stick.
Careening through the bloodstream, a single nanoparticle is dwarfed by red blood cells whizzing by that are 100 times larger. But when specially designed nanoparticles bump into an atherosclerotic plaque — a fatty clog narrowing a blood vessel — the tiny particles can play an outsized role. They can cling to the plaque and begin to break it down, clearing the path for those big blood cells to flow more easily and calming the angry inflammation in the vicinity.
A new study answers the question: Why are robin eggs blue? The answer: sun protection.
According to new research, the light blue-green color of bird eggs helps facilitate just the right amount of light absorption -- and thus, the right temperature without overexposure.
Deep sea scientists exploring the remote waters between Hawaii and Midway atoll have found a gigantic sea sponge “about the size of a minivan” that could be the oldest animal on earth.
Vampires are real, and they've been around for millions of years. At least, the amoebae variety has. So suggests new research from UC Santa Barbara paleobiologist Susannah Porter.
It is one of the world's greatest enduring mysteries. Stories of a yeti, or an abominable snowman, have been entrenched in Himalayan folklore for hundreds of years - but there has never been any definitive proof of its existence.
It's the biggest jigsaw puzzle you've ever seen but in this case, there are no instructions on the box.
Hundreds of bones are laid out on the floor and Dr Hilary Ketchum, of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, has kindly offered to piece them all together.
66 million years ago a mass extinction event, believed to be caused by a massive asteroid impact or volcanic explosions, wiped dinosaurs from the face of the planet. For years scientists have believed that as the animals at the poles were far enough from harm and hardy enough to survive changes in their climate.
The average ancient Roman worker was riddled with arthritis, suffered broken bones and was dead by 30 thanks to a diet of rotting grains and a lifetime of hard labour.
The grim realities of the Eternal City were revealed in a study carried out by an Italian team of specialists that used modern-scanning techniques to analyse 2,000 ancient skeletons.
Geometric signs on cave walls and ancient artifacts may be some of humanity’s earliest graphic communications.
Imagine Palmyra rebuilt as if Isis had never arrived, or Kathmandu restored to its pre-quake glory. As the V&A’s special pavilion at the Venice Biennale shows, we now have the technology to create perfect copies of cities – but should we?
A research delegation from Harvard University is making a visit this week to Peru to take DNA samples from the mummified remains of the famous Señora de Cao (‘Lady of Cao’), a powerful queen of the ancient Moche civilization.
The Israel Antiquities Authority have initiated comprehensive archaeological excavations in the Judean Desert caves, in order to find the last Dead Sea Scrolls, which are among the earliest texts written in the Hebrew language.
Construction workers in the Seaport District stumbled onto an unusual find in recent days — the remains of a shipwreck, buried beneath the ground.
Boston’s archeologist, Joe Bagley, said so far he and his colleagues, who were called to the scene, have determined, based on the ship’s nails, that the vessel is from the mid-to-late 19th century.