Newsdesk Archive
Breaking the sound barrier makes a lot of noise, but if supersonic planes can quiet down, the future of air travel could get a lot faster. On Monday NASA announced it's giving Lockheed Martin $20 million to begin designing an experimental plane that uses “boom reduction” technology to muffle the noise from the sound barrier breaking.
Many quantum technologies rely on quantum states that violate local realism, which means that they either violate locality (such as when entangled particles influence each other from far away) or realism (the assumption that quantum states have well-defined properties, independent of measurement), or possibly both. Violation of local realism is one of the many counterintuitive, yet experimentally supported, characteristics of the quantum world.
A 100ft-wide asteroid is heading for a close encounter with Earth on Sunday and could come closer than some orbiting satellites.
But scientists are sure it will miss the Earth by at least 15,000 miles, and say there is no need to panic.
By pushing the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to its limits astronomers have shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the distance to the most remote galaxy ever seen in the Universe. This galaxy existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang and provides new insights into the first generation of galaxies.
I think we were all blown away when the New Horizons spacecraft looked back at Pluto’s dark side and returned the first photos of a surprisingly complex, layered atmosphere. Colorless nitrogen along with a small percentage of methane make up Pluto’s air.
By using mathematical models to tilt Mars's surface 20 degrees, an international team of scientists have upended current predictions about the history of water on the Red Planet.
Their findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggest that the climate conditions of young Mars allowed water to flow there for a longer period of time than scientists previously thought, which would have allowed more time for life to form on the planet.
A planet found at an extreme distance from its parent star may have been kicked out by a fellow planet.
Planet HD 106906b orbits 16 times as far from its parent star as Pluto lies from the sun. A new study of the far-flung alien planet reveals what appears to be a lopsided comet belt surrounding its parent star — a finding scientists say indicates a history of violence in the early planetary system.
A 17th century French token has UFO hunters claiming 'absolute proof' of UFO sightings hundreds of years ago.
The ancient jeton, a coin-like object used for counting, depicts an unusual circular entity that looks remarkably like a flying saucer.
Fragments of a long-vanished Tudor royal residence have been discovered in an English country church – and in a London museum.
The fragments, beautifully carved wooden panels, are likely to have come from a 16th century London stately home – Chelsea Place, once owned by at least three English monarchs, including Henry VIII and Queen Mary, according to research by a leading authority on Tudor architecture and interior design, Dr Jonathan Foyle, former Curator of Buildings at Hampton Court Palace.
Assorted and unexpected is certainly one way to describe the archaeological findings at Jerusalem’s Schneller compound, until you consider the site’s history. Today it is undergoing a salvage excavation led by the Israeli Antiquities Authority in preparation for the construction of residential buildings intended for use by Jerusalem’s orthodox population.
A fragment of the world’s oldest and largest unsolved jigsaw puzzle, a 2,200-year-old map of Rome made of thousands of marble fragments, has been finally reunited to the other existing pieces, according to the Rome Cultural Heritage Superintendency.
Connecting to a large piece discovered in 1562, the new fragment bears an inscription that completes the word “Circus Flaminius.”
A Spanish community is crowdfunding in order to help excavate an impressive Iron Age hillfort in Galicia, on the Atlantic coast of Spain. They are inviting adventurous travellers to join a field school for a week, learning hands-on about archaeology.
Scientists are hoping to use revolutionary new DNA techniques to bring a species of Ice Age cave that roamed the Eearth 12,000 years ago back to life. In August 2015, the remains of two lion cubs, named Uyan and Dina, were found frozen and practically unspoilt in the remote Sakha Republic in Russia's north-west.
A man who was paralysed from the chest down after a knife attack in 2010 can now ride an adapted tricycle.
In 2014, surgeons in Poland announced they had reversed Darek Fidyka's paralysis using cells taken from his nose to repair his spinal cord.
Neuroscientists at Duke Health have developed a brain-machine interface (BMI) that allows primates to use only their thoughts to navigate a robotic wheelchair.
All hail the sacred tree. I’ve often wondered aloud in the newsroom about the possibility of finding evidence of a chimp shrine, the discovery of a place where chimps pray to their deity.
Alt: Mysterious chimpanzee behaviour could be 'sacred rituals' and show that chimps believe in god
Despite having brains one tenth the size, crows and parrots are just as intelligent as apes.
According to new research, the mental abilities of corvids and parrots are 'as sophisticated and diverse as those of apes.'
When Philip Stoddard eyes the fish in his research tanks, he's not admiring their graceful movements—he's wondering which ones are liars.
Stoddard, a biologist and expert in electric fish at Florida International University in Miami, studies when fish are deceitful, and how other fish detect their fibs.
“I’ve always wanted to have a neighbor just like you,” Mister Rogers used to sing from millions of television sets while changing his shoes. But even if Fred Rogers wanted to be everyone’s neighbor, most people are more selective. Whether they choose to hang out with each other may depend on their gender, race, political affiliation, or even favorite sports teams.
Unlike most people, the children of a Thailand tribe see with total clarity beneath the waves – how do they do it, and might their talent be learned?
Because most of the evidence of early humans derives from the fossil record, it is difficult to discern a great deal about their lifestyles and habits. Scientists can make inferences from skeletal morphology—jaw and teeth fossils can provide evidence of likely dietary habits, for instance. The influence of local resources on ancestral humans is therefore difficult to determine.
Lizards locked in amber for 99 million years give a glimpse of a "lost world", say scientists.
The ancient reptiles are preserved in "superb detail" down to scales of skin, the tip of a tongue and tiny claws.
The remains of an Anglo-Saxon island have been uncovered in one of the most important archaeological finds in decades.
The island which was home to a Middle Saxon settlement was found at Little Carlton near Louth, Lincolnshire by archaeologists from the University of Sheffield.
BUDAPEST – A jewel among the wild grass? A Hungarian historian is convinced that patches of fresco in a Transylvanian church ruin are a rare medieval copy of a legendary masterpiece by Italian maestro Giotto.
Few of the excesses of the group that calls itself Islamic State have transfixed the outside world as much as its destruction of Palmyra, the ancient desert oasis city in central Syria. Palmyra's remarkable 2,000-year-old Temple of Bel was demolished in August 2015.
A free digital archive launched today that makes one of the most important collections of historical materials to survive in England available online.
Providing free access to over 20,000 images of Registers produced by the Archbishops of York from 1225-1650, the new website also features a growing searchable index of names, subjects, places, and organizations.
A long-lost speech from a play about Moses has been discovered on newly translated papers found more than a hundred years ago on an ancient Egyptian rubbish pile.
The speech explains how he was given the name Moses because he was found on the riverbank, written in a Greek-style tragedy about the Biblical character written in the Second Century BC.
In a middle-class tomb just east of the Nile River in what was Upper Nubia, a woman offers a glimpse of how two met civilizations met, mingled and a new pharaonic dynasty arose.
Her tomb was Egyptian, but she was buried in the Nubian style — placed in a flexed position on her side and resting on a bed. Around her neck she wore amulets of the Egyptian god Bes, the protector of households.
An ancient necropolis that once held more than 100 tombs from as far back as 4,000 years ago has been discovered near the Palestinian town of Bethlehem in the West Bank.
The burial ground was discovered in spring 2013 during the construction of an industrial park.
At 3,400 years old, Yuya and Tuyu don't look their age. And they were buried with treasures that hint at what might lie hidden behind Tut's tomb.
A recent radar scan of King Tut's tomb revealed tantalizing hints that one or more rooms may lie behind the painted walls of the teenage pharaoh's burial chamber. The final report is due soon. If it confirms the existence of hidden spaces, Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves will be vindicated. It was his reading of the evidence that prompted the scan of Tut’s tomb, known to archaeologists as KV 62.
A new excavation process will start in April in northwestern Turkey, where officials believe a huge ancient palace lies underground
Work to unearth the remains of an ancient city, discovered in northwestern Turkey during the removal of debris after the massive Marmara earthquake of August 1999, are due to begin in April.
Archaeologists working in the borderlands of northern Mexico have uncovered a camp used by ancient hunters as much as 10,500 years ago, revealing insights into some of the earliest human history in the Greater Southwest.
On a ranch near the Santa Maria River in northern Chihuahua, researchers have unearthed more than 18,000 artifacts, including thousands of stone flakes, cores, and hammers, along with 370 projectile points, and a dozen stone ovens.
New research suggests that the feeding strategy of Kolponomos, an enigmatic shell-crushing marine predator that lived about 20 million years ago, was strangely similar to a very different kind of carnivore: the saber-toothed cat Smilodon. Scientists have shown that even though the two extinct predators likely contrasted greatly in food preference and environment, they shared similar engineering in jaw structure.
As polar ice caps melted at the end of the last Ice Age about 8,500 years ago, the global sea level rose and Panama's Pearl Islands were isolated from the mainland. A new archaeological study by a team including a Smithsonian scientist shows that several thousand years later pre-Columbian colonists hunted a dwarf deer to extinction on an island called Pedro González.
The interaction between brain areas during a generous act may reveal the reasons underlying such behavior
Last December Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced the birth of their daughter—and made a pledge to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares over the course of their lives to charitable causes. The decision was met with both praise for its altruism and criticism, as people called into question Zuckerberg’s true motives and whether this was a move to save millions of dollars in taxes.
Turning the lights out or wearing a blindfold while eating could be a quick way to lose weight, according to scientists.
The simple trick works because it stops diners eating for pleasure rather than for calories. It also triggers a part of the brain that is worried that unseen food may be rotten without visual clues to show it is fresh.
Related: Poor Sleep Gives You the Munchies, Study Says
Do people who meditate age more slowly? It seems unlikely on the face of it. How could sitting immobile with one’s eyes closed, perhaps focusing on the breath, possibly keep the Grim Reaper at bay? That said, the Buddha – surely the archetypal meditator – is reputed to have lived to 80, which must have been an exceptionally ripe old age in 5th century BCE India. And according to Buddhist scriptures, even after 80 years in this realm of existence, in the end it wasn’t old age that finished him off but food poisoning.
The viruses that plagued our ancestors millions of years ago aren't ancient history—they're still with us. Remnants of viral genes make up a relatively large part of our modern DNA, and scientists have been mostly uncertain what roles, if any, they play.
If there is a great new hope in the treatment of cancer, the immune system is it. Over the past dozen years, 71 anticancer drugs have been approved by US regulators. Typically they extend the lives of patients by only two months. And they are not cheap. A month of anti-cancer therapy can cost £7,000.
Scientists believe they have discovered a way to "steer" the immune system to kill cancers.
Researchers at University College, London have developed a way of finding unique markings within a tumour - its "Achilles heel" - allowing the body to target the disease.
It turns out the ocean is one noisy, riotous place, teeming with the sound of seismic temblors, whale songs and ship propellers — even at the deepest ocean trench.
Alt: Seven miles deep, ocean still a noisy place
Scientists have provided the first experimental evidence that rising carbon dioxide emissions are harming coral reefs in the wild.
A team led by Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, used an alkaline substance to alter the chemistry of seawater at a small atoll in the Great Barrier Reef off Australia's east coast. The resulting drop in seawater acidity mimicked pre-industrial ocean conditions.
Related: Researchers found shallow-water corals are not related to their deep-water counterparts
In a strange twist of energy development, China is building at least three nuclear plants to power offshore oil and gas drilling.
The plants, scheduled to be finished by 2019, will float on the high seas and can be shipped to any location in the world.
Related: Europe's largest floating solar farm to open near Heathrow
Last week, a group of astronomers announced that they had for the first time discovered the source galaxy for a mysterious type of event known as a fast radio burst (FRB). But only a few days later, another group of scientists produced informal research that suggested otherwise.
Repeating radio signals coming from a mystery source far beyond the Milky Way have been discovered by scientists. While one-off fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been detected in the past, this is the first time multiple signals have been detected coming from the same place in space.
Alt: Mysterious repeating radio signals have been detected coming from outside our galaxy
An asteroid some 600 meters across swooped to within a few hundred thousand kilometers of Earth on Halloween, and the collective public reaction registered as barely more than a snigger. Various news stories called the rock “spooky” or the “The Great Pumpkin,” dismissing it as yet another near miss while we celebrated the holiday with costumes and candy. The sobering reality is that, only three weeks before its closest approach, Earth-based observers discovered a rock that could have wiped out life on a continent.
Mars has become both a literal and figurative graveyard for robotic missions: in total, 26 have either failed to reach the Red Planet or did not survive touchdown. Those disappointments have hardly discouraged further attempts, however. So who's next in line? The European Space Agency, which, in partnership with Russia's Roscosmos state corporation, will launch a hugely ambitious mission to Mars this month.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia have identified a common ancestral gene that enabled the evolution of advanced life over a billion years ago.
The gene, found in all complex organisms, including plants and animals, encodes for a large group of enzymes known as protein kinases that enabled cells to be larger and to rapidly transfer information from one part to another.
Ancient bacteria from nearly two miles below Earth's surface: that's what first drew Tullis Onstott to begin his search for life in the most unlikely of places. The geomicrobiologist had just attended a 1992 U.S. Department of Energy meeting about rocks estimated to be more than 200 million years old—older than most dinosaurs. These prehistoric rocks had been unearthed from a gas exploration well, and they turned out to be teeming with bacteria.
On Luzon Island, scientists have accidentally discovered the smallest of the giant Rafflesia flowers, a species that may be critically endangered, reports Mongabay
Taken from outer space, the satellite images show illegal loggers cutting a road into a protected area in Peru, part of a criminal enterprise attempting to steal millions of dollars worth of ecological resources.
With the launch of a new satellite mapping system on Wednesday, governments and environmentalists will have access to hard evidence of these types of crimes almost in real time as part of a push by scientists to improve monitoring of tropical deforestation.
Women who prefer physically dominant mates tend to feel more at risk of crime, regardless of the actual level of risk.
That's according to a new study - Women's fear of crime and preference for formidable mates: How specific are the underlying psychological mechanisms? - published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour.
The first time it happened, in 2011, Bob Amberger thought he might be having a stroke.
A retired real estate agent and contractor in Modesto, Calif., he awoke one morning, started to climb out of bed and felt the room whirling around him. “It was the most disconcerting experience imaginable,” said Mr. Amberger, 71.
My first encounter with a schizophrenic patient was as a medical student in my third week of a neurology rotation. The attending neurologist and I were called to consult on a psychiatric inpatient who had just had a seizure. “Have you taken psychiatry yet?” the doctor asked. I hadn’t.
Knowledge of our mother tongue acts as a sort of auditory "template" that influences the way we perceive the sounds of other languages (scientists call this "native listening"). Several clues, like the fact that many of the cortical auditory regions responsible for linguistic and musical processing are the same and the existence of auditory illusions dependent on the mother tongue or dialect, have led investigators to hypothesize that native listening transfers also to non-linguistic sound stimuli such as music.
Related: Speaking just one language may improve insight and judgement
A recent headline implicated epigenetics in our predisposition to alcoholism, but the evidence from the study is far from conclusive
Related: Drinking more water associated with numerous dietary benefits, study finds
A young British woman has become one of the first cancer patients to be injected with a new vaccine designed to stimulate the immune system so that it destroys tumours wherever they have spread in the body.
Kelly Potter, 35, was diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer in July 2015 and was among the first to be enrolled on a cancer vaccine trial that will run over the next two years involving up to 30 volunteers.
Unexplained loud booms have been affecting residents around Grundy County for weeks, and the cause has yet to be determined.
“It’s weird because it’s unlike most booming noises you hear,” said Glen Briggs, the emergency management director of Grundy County.
Related: Return of “The Whistler”: Mystery Deepens in Oregon Town
Call it an old idea in a new box. NASA engineers are working on a Concorde-like commercial airplane that doesn't produce the bone-jarring sonic booms that helped derail the original Concorde, which made its last flight in 2003.
Physicists were all abuzz in February 2016 with a universe-shaking announcement: Scientists had detected the sound of two massive black holes smashing into one another, forming a new black hole nearly twice as big.
A volcano on Mars half the size of France spewed so much lava 3.5 billion years ago that the weight displaced the Red Planet's outer layers, according to a study released Wednesday.
Mars' original north and south poles, in other words, are no longer where they once were.
Alt: Great tilt gave Mars a new face
Some of Europe's earliest inhabitants mysteriously vanished toward the end of the last ice age and were largely replaced by others, a new genetic analysis finds.
The finds come from an analysis of dozens of ancient fossil remains collected across Europe.
An incomplete inscription might reopen the debate about the identity of the owner of a tomb from the Alexander the Great era, according to new research into blocks from the circular retaining wall of the mysterious mound. The tomb was unsealed in northern Greece 18 months ago.
Time has taken its toll on Leonardo da Vinci’s irreplaceable self-portrait. Sketched in red chalk, “foxing spots,” nasty reddish-brown spots, have erupted on the paper’s surface and threaten its survival.
A mystery to scientists for decades, new research has uncovered their cause. In recent years, researchers have sought a biological origin to the spots, using swabs and other media without success.
It might not look much, but without this fossilised Scottish fungus you probably would not exist.
Some 440 million years ago this tiny organism was among the first to make its way out of the seas and begin colonising the land.
I trampled clumsily through the dense undergrowth, attempting in vain to go a full five minutes without getting snarled in the thorns that threatened my every move. It was my first field mission in the savannahs of the Republic of Guinea. The aim was to record and understand a group of wild chimpanzees who had never been studied before
Alt: Are Stone-Throwing Chimps Performing ‘Sacred’ Rituals?
Some birds have cleverly figured out that if they build their nests above alligator hangouts, the gators will scare away most intruders, a new study has confirmed.
The unwitting alligators benefit from the arrangement too, since they eat eggs and chicks that often fall out of the overhead bird nests, according to the study, which is published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Author Carson McCullers famously wrote about the heart as “a lonely hunter,” but her description seems to apply just as well to a shark. They cruise the ocean on their own and generally have little contact with other sharks — or do they? While these apex predators were typically thought to lead mostly solitary lives, a new study finds that sand tiger sharks may be a lot more social than scientists had suspected.
Some thought it was impossible. But a population of stickleback fish that breed in the same streams is splitting into two separate species before our eyes, and at rapid speeds.
Three-spine sticklebacks were introduced to Lake Constance in Switzerland around 150 years ago – a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. But since then, the fish have begun splitting into two separate types: one that lives in the main lake, and another that lives in the streams that flow into it.
Honeybees suffer severe learning and memory deficits after ingesting very small doses of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, potentially threatening their success and survival, new research suggests.
A team of scientists affiliated with several research facilities in France has conducted a study on giant viruses known as mimiviruses and has found that at least some of them have an immune system that is similar in some ways to CRISPR in bacteria. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes the genetic study they undertook of multiple strains of mimiviruses looking to understand why some of them appeared to have immunity to a particular kind of virophage infection while others did not.
Researchers say the best chance for finding a signal from beyond Earth is to presume extraterrestrial observers are using the same methods to search for us that we are using to search for life beyond Earth.
Despite humanity’s best efforts to find evidence of intelligent alien life out there somewhere in the Universe, we’ve turned up squat so far. Is Earth really so unique, or is it just that any extraterrestrials that once existed gave up the ghost long ago?
Alt: Hunt for Intelligent Aliens Should Focus on 'Transit Zone'
With all the talk about manned missions to Mars by the 2030s, its easy to overlook another major proposal for the next great leap. In recent years, the European Space Agency has been quite vocal about its plan to go back to the Moon by the 2020s. More importantly, they have spoken often about their plans to construct a moon base, one which would serve as a staging platform for future missions to Mars and beyond.
A group of Russian engineers has raised over £17,000 to launch a reflective satellite which would be one of the brightest objects in the night sky.
The team behind the proposed 'Mayak' or 'Lighthouse' satellite have raised 1.8 million rubles (£17,500) at the time of writing, surpassing their initial goal of 1.5 million rubles.
Potentially hazardous asteroids are still looming large in the minds of scientists engaged in planetary defense issues. Numerous strategies describing deflection of near-Earth objects (NEOs) have been proposed, including methods employing kinetic impactors, robotic mining, and gravity tractors. However, one of the concepts has recently received attention as one of the most serious proposals.
Manganese dioxide is abundant in nature, and owing to their colour, these oxides have been used as pigments since the Stone Age.
Some of the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, for example, were produced with manganese-based pigments. In a series of compositional analyses, scientists from Leiden University and Delft University of Technology conclude that Neanderthals at Pech-de-l’Azé I in South Western France had a strikingly different use for this mineral 50,000 years ago.
Footage has been recorded of what appears to be a meteor in the sky over north east Scotland.
Police received a large number of calls after a big, bright flash was seen, with people reporting seeing a blue, white or green light, with some saying they also heard a rumbling sound.
Related: Did a UFO Fly Over San Antonio Last Week?
US astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko have touched down on Earth after almost a year in space.
Their 340-day mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS) is twice the length of a normal stay.
Marco Micheli of the European Space Agency’s NEO Coordination Centre (NEOCC/SpaceDys) in Frascati, Italy, realized that this object – which was observed only briefly in 2013 before going into a region of the sky lit by the sun’s glare – was visible on some images a few days before it was officially detected on October 6, 2013. The new images let scientists roughly refine its trajectory, but just a bit.
Related: Forget asteroids: Hundreds of 60-mile comets that 'could wipe out life' are bigger threat
An international team of researchers lead by the University of Granada has scientifically proven, for the first time, that depression is associated with important alterations of the oxidative stress, so it should be considered a systemic disease.
People often make assumptions about each other’s character traits based on facial features. While, to a limited extent, it seems like we can actually glean some reliable info about personality traits from someone’s face, we can also add a heaping pile of bias on top of that too. A paper in PLOS One explores one of these biases: the more attractive we think a person is, the more we’re inclined to think they’re intelligent.
Spotting the first grey hair is a disheartening rite of passage for most people.
But a major breakthrough by British scientists could mean that future generations will no longer suffer the inevitable indignity of the ageing process.
Neil Harbisson was born color blind, with a condition known as achromatopsia. He sees the world in grayscale, a drab range of blacks and whites, never to know the deep indigo of a Pacific wave, the magnificent red of a hummingbird's throat, the iridescent carapace of a jewel beetle, the crystalline orange of sorbet.
When the site of?Wadi?Sura?II was discovered in Egypt's Western Desert?in 2002, researchers were taken aback at the?thousands?of decorations painted on the walls of the rock shelter?as much as?8,000 years earlier.?Not only?are there wild animals, human figures, and odd headless creatures?that have led people to nickname?it?the "Cave of the Beasts," but also hundreds of?outlines?of human handprints?—?more than had ever been seen before at a?Saharan rock art site.?
A gene mutation associated with colon cancer has been discovered in an 18th century Hungarian mummy. The finding suggests colon cancer's genetic roots predate modern risk factors.
In 1995, some 265 mummies were excavated from a Dominican burial site in Vac, Hungary. The site was used between 1731 and 1838. A combination of low temperatures, ventilation and low humidity allowed for excellent tissue preservation.
It might resemble a menacing shrimp, but scientists have discovered an immaculately preserved 520-million-year-old creature was also a bundle of nerves.
Unearthed in southern China, the fossils boast among the oldest and most extensive nervous systems ever preserved, researchers claim.
Tyrannosaurus rex, king of the dinosaur age, wasn't a North American native as many experts had previously thought, a new study suggests.
Instead, the giant tyrannosaur was likely an invasive species from Asia that dispersed into western North America once the opportunity presented itself, paleontologists said.
An unidentified fossilised bone in a museum has revealed the size of a fearsome abelisaur and may have solved a hundred-year old puzzle.
Alessandro Chiarenza, a PhD student from Imperial College London, last year stumbled across a fossilised femur bone, left forgotten in a drawer, during his visit to the Museum of Geology and Palaeontology in Palermo Italy.
Paleontologists in Argentina have announced the discovery of a major Jurassic-era fossil site four years after it was first discovered.
The site, which spans 23,000 square miles in Patagonia in southern Argentina, came to light this week with the publication of a report in the journal Ameghiniana.
IT is the instantly recognisable pattern of interlocking loops and knots used for Celtic art tattoos and jewellery - a seeming nod across millennia to Scotland’s ancient warriors, druids and bards. So inked fans of body-art will be pretty miffed to learn that these typical ‘Celtic’ designs are actually Christian art, according to experts.
Many ancient objects destroyed or badly damaged in Iraq and Syria since 2003 are things of beauty - sculptures, tombs and temples, monasteries and minarets. Others may be less dazzling but hugely important as a source of knowledge about the ancient world. One of these is Tell Qarqur.
The trial of a Malian jihadist charged with war crimes for ordering the 2012 destruction of 14 mausoleums of Muslim saints resumes next week at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
How did the monuments come to be considered so important and why were they destroyed?
One year ago a man took a pneumatic drill to the statue of a winged bull at the gates of the ancient city of Nineveh, near Mosul in modern Iraq. It's one of countless treasures destroyed by vandals, militants or military action in the region in the past 15 years. This is the first of 10 stories about ancient objects that have now been lost.
As economic and political instability rocked Egypt, looters increasingly plundered the country's archaeological sites, leaving holes across the nation's ancient landscapes.
That's the trend reported today in the journal Antiquity by archaeologists who used satellite images to monitor sites in Egypt from 2002 to 2013.
On April 2, a new series of radar scans will be performed on King Tutankhamun's tomb to search for hidden chambers that may contain an undiscovered royal burial, Egypt's antiquities ministry has announced.
A mysterious 150-kilometer long stone wall stretching across part of southern Jordan has tentatively been dated to pre-Roman times.
The wall, called Khatt Shebib by local Bedouin, was first documented by the British diplomat Sir Alec Kirkbride in 1948 as he flew across Jordan by plane. Only now that the wall has been studied in detail, using low-level oblique photography from helicopters fielded by the Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East, have its complexities come to light.
An incredible 3D reconstruction offers a rare glimpse at the grandest city of the world in all its glory. at the height of Rome's greatness.
The virtual reality video takes the viewer through the city in first person, visiting all the famous sites including the Pantheon and the Colosseum, as they would have looked in 320 AD.
Virtual reality could one day incorporate all the senses, creating a rich and immersive experience, but existing virtual reality headsets only simulate things you can see and hear. But now, a group of engineers wants to help people "touch" virtual environments in a more natural way, and they built a wearable suit to do just that.
Splitting water is a two-step process, and in a new study, researchers have performed one of these steps (reduction) with 100% efficiency. The results shatter the previous record of 60% for hydrogen production with visible light, and emphasize that future research should focus on the other step (oxidation) in order to realize practical overall water splitting.