Newsdesk Archive
To date, Earth is the only planet we know of that has continents. Exactly how they formed and evolved is unclear, but we do know – because the edges of continents thousands of miles apart match up – that, at one time long ago, Earth's landmass was concentrated in one big supercontinent.
Researchers have deciphered enigmatic recipes for metal-making contained in an ancient Chinese text, revealing unexpected complexity in the art at the time.
Archaeologists in Mexico have uncovered two Olmec reliefs chiseled into large, circular stones that are thought to depict local rulers performing ritual contortion.
A new discovery about jumping spiders could challenge some pretty hefty human assumptions about the cognitive abilities of arthropods.
The story of peyote is something like a fairytale, beginning in a time long ago and containing what could be called magic by those who utilize it for healing. However, today’s reality for the Indigenous people who consider it sacred is anything but...
Could the universe be an elaborate game constructed by bored aliens?
Birds' brains are a bit of a mystery. Despite the small size of their noggins, parrots and corvids show remarkable intelligence, solving some puzzles as well as primates.
Atomic clocks, combined with precise astronomical measurements, have revealed that the length of a day is suddenly getting longer, and scientists don't know why.
The annual Perseids shower lasts more than a month, but will peak this week.
Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a 4,500-year-old temple dedicated to the Egyptian sun god Ra at the site of Abu Ghurab, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) south of Cairo.
The Bantu Expansion transformed sub-Saharan Africa's linguistic, economic, and cultural composition. Today, more than 240 million people speak one of the more than 500 Bantu languages.
Archaeologists recently stumbled upon a set of mysterious 'ghost footprints' in the salt flats of a Utah desert.
An analysis of fossils suggests changes in the shape of the braincase during human evolution were linked to alterations in the face, rather than changes in the brain itself
Once the reserve of hippies and those going on “journeys”, magic mushrooms have evolved into another casual party drug alongside booze or MDMA.
A California-based organisation wants to harness the power of machine learning to decode communication across the entire animal kingdom. But the project has its doubters
Scientists have supercharged one of Earth's most powerful telescopes with new technology that will reveal how our galaxy formed in unprecedented detail.
About 37,000 years ago, a mother mammoth and her calf met their end at the hands of human beings.
The study, conducted by research groups based in France and Chile, is the first to document a seaweed species that depends on small marine crustaceans bespeckled in pollen-like spores to reproduce.
As conservative leaders continue to rail against its legalisation, sentiment among the broader Australian population is shifting—markedly. Now, even the most conservative pockets of regional Australia are warming to the idea.
A farm in England was the unlikely source of a Jurassic jackpot: a treasure trove of 183 million-year-old fossils.
Scientists experimenting on mice have found evidence that key parts of the modern human brain take more time to develop than those of our long extinct cousin, the Neanderthal.
Your subjective experience might not end the moment your heart stops, research on near-death experiences suggests.
A new Curtin University study has found that water was transported much deeper in the early Earth than previously thought, shedding new light on how the continents were originally formed.
The dawn of dairy farming in Europe occurred thousands of years before most people evolved the ability to drink milk as adults without becoming ill. Now researchers think they know why...
As psychedelic therapies for mental health go mainstream, companies are recruiting chemists to create patentable versions of hallucinogens. Critics say it’s all a bad trip.
Come November, Colorado voters will be asked to decide whether to legalize psilocybin and psilocin, psychoactive compounds in magic mushrooms, as well as whether to establish healing centers where the public can access them in a therapeutic context.
In our Universe, time has been progressing forward, for all observers, ever since the inception of the hot Big Bang. There are a few "arrows of time" that coincide with this, including that the Universe has been expanding and, thermodynamically, that entropy has been increasing. If the Universe instead were to contract and collapse, could that lead to time running backwards?
Researchers have been able to use an analysis of ancient rock crystals – and the magnetism records locked inside them – to trace back the history of Earth's inner core across hundreds of millions of years.
Evidence from 252m years ago shows surviving animals bounced back stronger, fitter, faster and smarter.
Do animals dream? And what would proof of their dreams tell us about their consciousness? In a new episode of the University of Chicago’s “Big Brains” podcast, Peña-Guzmán talks about the science of animal consciousness.
New research published in Scientific Reports found that people who microdose psychedelics displayed greater improvements in mental health and mood over the span of 1 month compared to non-microdosers.
While studying diamonds inside an ancient meteorite, scientists have found a strange, interwoven microscopic structure that has never been seen before.
More than 11,000 years ago, young children trekking with their families through what is now White Sands National Park in New Mexico discovered the stuff of childhood dreams: muddy puddles made from the footprints of a giant ground sloth.
The 560-million-year-old specimen, which was found in Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire, is likely a forerunner of cnidaria - the group of species that today includes jellyfish.
High above one of western Britain’s loveliest valleys, the silence is broken by the sound of gentle digging, scraping and brushing, along with bursts of excited chatter as another ancient feature is revealed or a curious visitor stops by to find out what is going on.
As the first dinosaurs were finding their feet around 230 million years ago, the ancestors of modern mammals were also emerging. Somewhere along the way they developed a remarkable ability: to generate their own warmth.
The ancient North American city of Cahokia had as its focal point a feature now known as Monks Mound, a giant earthwork surrounded on its north, south, east and west by large rectangular open areas.
Researchers wanted to know how animals learn to walk and learn from their stumbling, so they built a four-legged, dog-sized robot to simulate it, according to a new study reported in Nature Machine Intelligence.
Mummies are found all over the world and reveal the practices of long-lost peoples.
The mountain fortress of Rabana-Merquly in modern Iraqi Kurdistan was one of the major regional centers of the Parthian Empire, which extended over parts of Iran and Mesopotamia approximately 2,000 years ago.
Scientists have taken an important first step into studying the effects of the psychedelic drug psilocybin — the active substance in “magic” mushrooms — at a cellular and genetic level. Their findings, published in Scientific Reports, indicate that a single dose of psilocybin produces a long-lasting antidepressant-like effect in flies.
A dormant black hole nine times the mass of the Sun has been found outside the Milky Way for the first time, in what researchers have called a “very exciting discovery”.
Groundwater that was recently discovered deep underground in a mine in South Africa is estimated to be 1.2 billion years old. Researchers suspect that the groundwater is some of the oldest on the planet, and its chemical interactions with the surrounding rock could offer new insights about energy production and storage in Earth's crust.
A team of researchers with affiliations to multiple institutions in the U.S. has found that the metal content of Fermi bubble high-velocity clouds does not match with material in the Milky Way's galactic center, suggesting that at least some of the material comes from somewhere else.
Researchers have peered back through 800 years of history to conclude that Mayapan – the capital of culture and politics for the Maya people of the Yucatán Peninsula in the 13th and 14th century CE – may well have been undone by drought.
We all know these busy insects are good for crops and biodiversity, but proof is emerging that they are also clever, sentient and unique beings
Astronomers have detected a new fast radio burst, or FRB, from a galaxy far, far away. The new FRB is currently the longest lasting with the clearest periodic pattern ever observed.
The death of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to become ascendant. But the history of mammals stretches far deeper than that. The first mammals go back about 325 million years, when the ancestral mammal lineage split from the reptile line.
The previously unknown species uncovered is from a group called Squamanita.The group includes a rare parasitic fungus nicknamed the strangler, due to its ability to take over other fungi.
Remains recovered from a cave in the Chinese province of Yunnan more than 10 years ago have finally given up their secrets, with a DNA analysis revealing not just who left them, but ultimately where their ancestors would go.
Some say King Arthur slew a giant there. Others say he knelt in prayer and his knee print indentations are forever etched into the stone. Archaeologists set out to find out what really happened at Arthur's Stone, a 5,000-year-old Neolithic chambered tomb in Herefordshire, England, near the border of Wales.
The new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates that among the 23 specimens analyzed and potentially representing early Homo from southern Africa between 2.5 and 1.4 million years, a maximum of seven of them actually represent Homo, while the others more likely belong to Australopithecus or Paranthropus.
Over 50,000 years ago, giant carnivorous storks would have competed with ancient hominins for food on a tropical island.
Predatory dinosaurs with big skulls tend to have tiny arms. Researchers propose there might be a direct link between those traits.
Somewhere between five and ten million years ago, an asteroid crashed into Mars, creating a massive crater. Like getting caught in the crossfire of a friend’s drama, a piece of detritus from that explosive impact made its way all the way to Earth.
If you look into the sky on Wednesday evening you'll have a good chance of spotting the biggest and brightest Moon of the year.
Neanderthals and Denisovans in our genes, sentient mollusks, and speaking cats and bats. We are not what we thought we were. Nor were other human species, we have been discovering over the last 20 years.
A jawbone fragment discovered in northern Spain last month could be the oldest known fossil of a human ancestor found to date in Europe, Spanish paleontologists said on Friday.
In a former gold mine a mile underground, inside a titanium tank filled with a rare liquified gas, scientists have begun the search for what so far has been unfindable: dark matter.
The image is said to be the deepest, most detailed infrared view of the Universe to date, containing the light from galaxies that has taken many billions of years to reach us.
The identity of an unknown god described in inscriptions from the ancient city of Palmyra, located in modern-day Syria, has long baffled scientists. But now, a researcher declares that she has cracked the case.
In the Stone Age, pendants with potent symbolism were made from animal teeth and bones, adorning clothes or accessories and serving as rattles. Human bones were also used as a raw material for pendants, as demonstrated by a study where burial finds dating back more than 8,200 years were re-examined after 80 years.
Scientists can use various clues to figure out what's under Earth's surface without actually having to do any digging – including firing super-fine lasers thinner than a human hair at minerals found in beach sand.
The 2,000-year-old Roman shipwreck that carried the Antikythera Mechanism — a precise mechanical model of the sun, moon and planets — is giving up new treasures, including a marble head thought to depict the Greek and Roman demigod Hercules.
A team of specialists and students led by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Jodi Magness recently returned to Israel's Lower Galilee to continue unearthing nearly 1,600-year-old mosaics in an ancient Jewish synagogue at Huqoq.
Researchers have created cloned mice from freeze dried skin cells in a world first that aims to help conservationists revive populations of endangered species.
The Amazon river basin experiences seasonal floods, making permanent settlement difficult. Despite this, Bolivia's ancient Casarabe culture managed to flourish centuries before the arrival of the Spanish. Lidar technology reveals the surprisingly complex infrastructure and urban planning that united Casarabe settlements.
Archaeologists from The University of Manchester have started a dig at a 5,000-year-old tomb linked to King Arthur, hoping to answer some of the mysteries surrounding the enigmatic site in the process.
Researchers have discovered never-before-seen types of crystal hidden in tiny grains of perfectly preserved meteorite dust. The dust was left behind by a massive space rock that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, nine years ago.
It’s 10 years to the day since evidence of the Higgs boson – the elusive particle associated with an invisible mass-giving field – was announced. But for Prof Daniela Bortoletto the memories are as fresh as ever.
New genetic research from remote islands in the Pacific offers fresh insights into the ancestry and culture of the world’s earliest seafarers, including family structure, social customs, and the ancestral populations of the people living there today.
Image from: Image:Oceania ISO 3166-1.svg (Wiki Commons)
There's alcohol up in space. No, it's not bottles of wine discarded by careless astronauts; rather, it's in microscopic molecular form. Now researchers think they've discovered the largest alcohol molecule in space yet, in the form of propanol.
The Cosquer cave near Marseille astonished the diver who discovered it with its ancient depictions of sea and land animals. Now it has been painstakingly recreated in the French port for all to enjoy
Formation of solid iron core 550m years ago restored magnetic field and protected surface.
An innovative new perspective on mineralogy, findings rank amongst the field’s most important in the last century.
Fossil hunters have traced the rise of the dinosaurs back to the freezing winters the beasts endured while roaming around the far north
New archaeological research into grave goods and skeletal material from the oldest grave field in the Netherlands shows that male-female roles 7,000 years ago were less traditional than was thought.
The extinct animal is not as closely related to Australian roos as once thought.
A new map shows there could be around two million trees with exceptional environmental and cultural value previously unrecorded in England. That's ten times as many as currently on official records. This tree-map is sounding a rare note of optimism in the conservation world.
A bronze sculpture of a snake with a human head, along with a large number of other artifacts including finds made of bronze, jade and gold, have been discovered in a series of pits at the archaeological site Sanxingdui in Sichuan, China.
Ancient DNA, including that of wolves preserved in permafrost for tens of thousands of years, is shedding some light on how wild wolves became some of our best non-human friends.
Archaeologists spend a lot of time examining the remains of distant pasts, which includes the study of rock paintings. This is largely visual work – but sometimes we can “hear” the ancient past using acoustic methods.
A new wave of scientists argues that mainstream evolutionary theory needs an urgent overhaul. Their opponents have dismissed them as misguided careerists – and the conflict may determine the future of biology.
While humanity reckons with many problems here on Earth — war, political turmoil, an ongoing pandemic, all alongside the energy, climate, and water crises — it’s important to remember just how relentless the Universe can be.
A fifty-thousand-year-old bone flute changes perceptions of an ancestor and explains why music is a powerful force.
Using light-capturing proteins in living microbes, scientists have reconstructed what life was like for some of Earth's earliest organisms. These efforts could help us recognize signs of life on other planets, whose atmospheres may more closely resemble our pre-oxygen planet.
A first-of-its-kind study published in the journal Icarus investigates this phenomenon on Mars. Looking at the planet, researchers have discovered hundreds of craters that likely resulted from the impacts of a binary system, where one asteroid orbits another, like the moon orbits Earth.
Image from ESA & MPS for OSIRIS Team (Wiki Commons)
We know that the Earth has had at least five major ice ages. The first one happened about 2 billion years ago and lasted about 300 million years. The most recent one started about 2.6 million years ago, and in fact, we are still technically in it.
Researchers have developed a way to detect the presence of rock art in remote, hard-to-reach areas in Australia's rugged landscapes using Machine Learning (ML) methods.
Fossils of early human ancestors from a South African cave are 3.4 million to 3.6 million years old -- making them a million years older than previously suspected and shaking up the way researchers understand human origins and evolution.
A new study has identified an important molecular analogy that could explain the remarkable intelligence of these invertebrates
The oldest evidence of wildfire has been identified in South Wales.It takes the form of some truly ancient, charred remnants trapped in some truly ancient mudstone.
Hidden passageways used by ancient Andean culture opened for the first time in 3,000 years.
It was a young miner, digging through the northern Canadian permafrost in the seemingly aptly named Eureka Creek, who sounded the alarm when his front-end loader struck something unexpected in the Klondike gold fields
Archaeologist Mate Parica was examining satellite images of Croatia's coastline when he spotted something unusual.
Scientists have unearthed an Inca-era tomb under a home in the heart of Peru’s capital, Lima, a burial believed to hold remains wrapped in cloth alongside ceramics and fine ornaments.
Scientists probe the link between serotonin and cannabinoid signaling.
Image from: Apollo (Wiki Commons)
Fed by waters that pass through 600 meters (1,970 ft) of permafrost, the sub-zero, salty, virtually oxygen-free Lost Hammer Spring in the Canadian Arctic is one of the harshest places on Earth. Even here, however, life finds a way.
An unpublished report obtained has outlined the cultural and archaeological significance of Kokatha Aboriginal sites that were discovered in a military testing range in South Australia.
Image from: en.wikipedia (Wiki Commons)
This rare planetary alignment has been visible since early June. But the view should be particularly impressive this week, as Mercury is at its brightest and the waning moon joins the parade of planets.