Newsdesk Archive
With some 7,000 islands and cays and a 7,000-year history of human habitation, the Caribbean Sea is practically synonymous with maritime travel.
"It remains untested how old the artifacts are—they could be 200 years old, 2,000 years old or 20,000 years old—it is completely unknown at this stage,"
Kent was home to some of Britain's earliest humans, according to the latest research. Homo heidelbergensis, an ancestor of Neanderthals, occupied the area around what is now Canterbury between 560,000 and 620,000 years ago.
As if cracking open a cosmic Russian nesting doll, astronomers have peered into the center of the Milky Way and discovered what appears to be a miniature spiral galaxy, swirling daintily around a single large star.
In the quest to discover the most effective psychedelic medicines for treating mental health conditions, some have pointed to DMT as a potential tool for treating depression. Now, a new study published in Nature lends credence to using DMT as a rapid-acting antidepressant.
The Sun shone 20% less brightly on early Earth, and yet fossil evidence shows that our planet had warm shallow seas where stromatolites – microbial mats – thrived.
Thailand legalised cultivating and consuming cannabis this month, reversing a hard-line approach of long prison sentences or even the death penalty for drug offences. The BBC's South East Asia correspondent Jonathan Head reports on what's behind the dramatic change.
“It’s a lesson in the unexpected,” Jones said. “When you’re looking for things, you’re not necessarily going to find the thing you’re looking for, but you might find something else very interesting.”
What Alida Bailleul saw through the microscope made no sense. She was examining thin sections of fossilised skull from a young hadrosaur, a duck-billed, plant-eating beast that roamed what is now Montana 75m years ago, when she spotted features that made her draw a breath.
More than 6,000 people have gathered to watch the sunrise at Stonehenge for the summer solstice. It is the first time since the pandemic that the stone circles in Salisbury and Avebury have been open to the public for the event.
The ancient Maya enjoyed filling their teeth with gemstones. A new study reveals how the procedure was done and how it didn't kill them.
A forest is home to billions of living things, some of them too small to be seen by the naked eye. Collectively, these micro-scale species contribute more to our planet than most of us could imagine.
The varied surface of asteroid Psyche suggests a dynamic history, which could include metallic eruptions, asteroid-shaking impacts, and a lost rocky mantle.
Items found during an archaeological dig near Stornoway have revealed people lived there thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
Image from: Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa) (Wiki Commons)
Scientists have tracked down the oldest wildfires ever detected thanks to 430-million-year-old charcoal deposits from Wales and Poland. They give us valuable insight into what life on Earth was like during the Silurian period.
All brown bears today have some polar bear ancestry due to genetic mixing more than 100,000 years ago.
Embryonic and fossil evidence proves that the human middle ear evolved from the spiracle of fishes. However, the origin of the vertebrate spiracle has long been an unsolved mystery in vertebrate evolution.
Mars object thought to be piece of thermal blanket from when Perseverance touched down on planet
Mastering fire cleared the way into whole new worlds for early humans – from accessing more nutrients through cooking (fueling an increase in brain size), to making the dark hours useful, and surviving migrations into harsher climates.
A team led by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object's strong gravitational field—so-called gravitational microlensing.
Mammoth teeth dating from 200,000 years ago are to be tested in the hope DNA samples can be found to reveal more about the creatures.
Psilocybin is associated with general long-lasting positive psychological effects in healthy individuals as well. New research published in Frontiers in Pharmacology indeed found that psilocybin-induced psychedelic experiences are associated with long-lasting positive effects.
Shrooms, Alice, tweezes, mushies, hongos, pizza toppings, magic mushrooms -- everyday lingo for psychedelic mushrooms seems to grow with each generation. Yet leading mycologist Paul Stamets believes it's time for fans of psilocybin mushrooms to leave such childish slang behind.
Nasa is launching a study of UFOs as part of a new push toward high-risk, high-impact science.
On a sun-blasted hillside in southeast Turkey, the world's oldest known religious sanctuary is slowly giving up its secrets.
The Wallacean islands have always been separated from Asia and Oceania by deep-sea waters. Yet, these tropical islands were a corridor for modern humans migrating into the Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea landmass (Sahul) and have been home to modern human groups for at least 47,000 years.
A new member of a category of star so rare we can count the known number of them on our fingers and toes has just been discovered in the Milky Way.
People in Thailand can now grow cannabis plants at home and sell the crop after the nation removed marijuana from its banned narcotics list. The nation is the first to advance such a move in South-East Asia, a region known for its stringent drug laws.
“In the history of our species, a number of civilians have practiced or allowed human sacrifice including the sacrifice of children,” he said.
"The Carthaginians, the Mesopotamians, the Incas, the Aztecs,” he listed.
“Will we be recorded as such as society that accepts the sacrifice of innocence?”
Image from Wiki Commons
A 65,000-year-old tool – a kind of ancient Swiss Army knife – found across southern Africa has provided scientists with proof that the ancestors of modern homo sapiens were communicating with each other.
A newly discovered source of repeating fast radio bursts has deepened the mystery of what, precisely, could be producing these powerful outbursts.
The Curiosity rover has found an outstanding rock formation piercing the alien landscape of Mars.
An ancient Roman route found in Pembrokeshire could be the real "golden road" of the Preseli hills.
Close human contact only started about 3,500 years ago and birds were initially venerated, find archaeologists.
The former chief of the Australian defence force, Chris Barrie, is campaigning to remove barriers stymying doctors from using MDMA to treat veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, saying he hopes “common sense is going to prevail”.
Up to 30% of people with depression don’t respond to treatment with antidepressants...So there is an urgent need to expand the repertoire of drugs available to people with depression.
The discovery of a neutron star emitting slower radio signals than ever recorded suggests there are more to be found.
Depictions of mermaids decorate the posts of the bed. The bed also displays an image of a bird holding a snake in its mouth, a symbol of the ancient Greek god Apollo.
Archaeologists have uncovered a roughly 1,300-year-old sculpture representing the head of a Mayan maize god in ruins in southeastern Mexico.
If archaeology has shown us anything, it's the sobering impermanence of our lives.
Scientists have discovered the world's biggest clone in Australia: A massive network of seagrass meadows that covers more than 77 square miles (200 square kilometers). The network of meadows is actually one single plant that has been continually cloning itself for almost 4,500 years.
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Italy and one in the U.S. has found that a unique Bronze Age cremation site in modern Italy holds the remains of up to 172 people who were left to the elements.
Scientists in Chile believe that a conifer with a four-metre-thick trunk known as the Great-Grandfather could be the world’s oldest living tree, beating the current record-holder by more than 600 years.
Egyptian archaeologists have revealed another massive haul of priceless artifacts from the Saqqara Necropolis, a bountiful site near Cairo that likely still holds untold secrets.
An international team of astronomers used a database combining observations from the best telescopes in the world, including the Subaru Telescope, to detect the signal from the active supermassive black holes of dying galaxies in the early Universe.
A comprehensive assessment of the benefits of medical cannabis for cancer-related pain found that for most oncology patients, pain measures improved significantly, other cancer-related symptoms also decreased, the consumption of painkillers was reduced, and the side effects were minimal.
As waters and ice recede under warming conditions, the traces of people and civilizations long gone from the mortal realm emerge.
Ready to embrace some meteoric uncertainty? The Tau Herculids meteor shower may light up the skies over North America on May 30 and 31. Or it may not.
A new study reveals that humans arriving in what is now Australia likely ate it to extinction by stealing its eggs.
Two swarms of curious, diverse space rocks — called Trojan asteroids — continuously journey around the sun, one in front of the gas giant Jupiter and one behind. Jupiter and the sun's gravity have combined to lock the Trojans into this immutable orbit.
Scientists have detected a completely new type of magnetic wave that surges through Earth's outer core every seven years, warping the strength of our planet's magnetic field in the process.
The story of the Universe is fundamentally our story, too. We want to know where it all started. Current descriptions of the origin of the Universe rest on the two pillars of 20th-century physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics. There are many questions that call for intellectual humility, and the origin of the Universe is foremost among them.
The genome of a victim of the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius over the ancient city of Pompeii has been sequenced for the first time, scientists have revealed, shedding new light on the health and diversity of those who lived in the Roman empire at the time of the disaster.
The sprawling ruins of Amazonian settlements once home to an Indigenous agriculturalist society with a penchant for cosmology have been uncovered in the Bolivian jungle, hidden beneath seemingly impenetrable vegetation.
At the American Psychiatric Association (APA) 2022 Annual Meeting that began on May 21 in New Orleans, Louisiana, COMPASS Pathways unveiled the “largest randomized, controlled, double-blind study of psilocybin therapy ever completed,” according to a May 24 press release, and the data shows “significant” improvements to treatment-resistant depression (TRD) symptoms.
Human sacrifice appears to be as old as humanity itself. Still, experts disagree on how and where the practice first originated.
A team of researchers at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, working with colleagues from the U.S. and France, has uncovered a prehistoric crocodile fossil in Peru.
Research suggests Earth’s biggest deposit of iron – its core – could also be going rusty.
A new computer simulation suggests that dwarf planet Ceres may have been flung by the gravity of gas giant Jupiter toward the sun during the volatile era of planet formation 4.5 billion years ago.
Archaeologists have discovered 46 stunning depictions of goddesses from ancient Egypt, which were previously buried under layers of soot and bird poop. Artists created the detailed and colorful frescoes on the ceiling of a temple nearly 2,200 years ago.
Thousands of jackdaws can suddenly take to the morning skies in winter, creating a whirling black cloud of creatures. Researchers have now found that the birds call out when they want to leave.
A partial skull that was discovered last summer by two kayakers in Minnesota will be returned to Native American officials after investigations determined it was about 8,000 years old.
We humans like to think our mastery of language sets us apart from the communication abilities of other animals, but an eye-opening new analysis of chimpanzees might force a rethink on just how unique our powers of speech really are.
Parasite eggs found in 4,500-year-old human faeces suggest the builders of Stonehenge took part in winter feasts that included the internal organs of animals, researchers have revealed.
New research suggests an unseen "mirror world" of particles that interacts with our world only via gravity that might be the key to solving a major puzzle in cosmology today—the Hubble constant problem.
Researchers may have pinpointed the source of a famous supposed alien broadcast discovered nearly a half century ago.
A spacecraft looping around the Sun has made its first close approach – and filmed the encounter in glorious detail.
Two recent studies, published in The New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Medicine, have shed some light on this mysterious process.
'Standard candle' (or type Ia) supernova explosions are some of the most energetic events in the Universe, happening when a dense white dwarf star subsumes another star. Now, scientists think they're found the first evidence on Earth of such a supernova.
The Milky Way season ranges from February to October in the northern hemisphere and from January to November in the southern hemisphere
New research coming out of the University of Cambridge, UK, suggests that complex ecosystems emerged earlier than we thought, in a period of Earth’s history called the Ediacaran.
Deep in the forests of Laos, in a cave in the Annamite Mountains, lay a single child's tooth. That tooth – an unassuming molar - could be from a mysterious species of human we know little about, and of which few remains are known to exist.
A recent advance in 3D imaging techniques helped spark the biggest ever discovery of North American cave art
From machines to animals, there are many kinds of possible minds.
A team of archaeologists in Egypt has discovered the 4,300-year-old tomb of a man named Mehtjetju, an official who claimed that he had access to "secret" royal documents.
We need to dispel the arrogant and misguided idea that modern humans are superior to earlier human species.
An incredible discovery has just revealed a potential new source for understanding life on ancient Earth.
Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey have unearthed a vast underground city that was built almost 2,000 years ago.
Once thought to have originated and spread culturally from a single population in what's now the Middle East, farming drastically changed our world and continues to do so to this day, for both better and worse.
This is the gargantuan black hole that lives at the centre of our galaxy, pictured for the very first time. Known as Sagittarius A*, the object is a staggering four million times the mass of our Sun.
Startup Clerkenwell Health hopes to help make UK a world leader in psychedelics research.
The sinkhole is 630 feet (192 meters) deep, according to the Xinhua news agency, deep enough to just swallow St. Louis' Gateway Arch.
The astrophysics community is abuzz. On May 12 at noon, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration will hold a news conference at which a major announcement will be made.
Stonehenge has been intensively studied for centuries. Yet even now, we are still discovering new aspects of the famous site. An archaeological 'biopsy' of the surrounding landscape has revealed a hidden network of large pits encircling the stone structure.
One of the most recent snaps beamed back from the Curiosity rover on Mars has revealed a rather interesting feature in the rocks: what looks to be a perfectly carved out doorway nestling in the Martian landscape.
The first whole genome sequences of the ancient people of Uruguay provide a genetic snapshot of Indigenous populations of the region before they were decimated by a series of European military campaigns
Custodians of petroglyphs in remote north-west say Woodside’s $12bn ‘carbon bomb’ spells disaster for culture and climate.
Astronomers have revealed the trails of nearly 1,500 new asteroids hidden in data gathered by NASA's most venerable space telescope.
Psilocybin-assisted therapy has shown promise as a treatment for depression. New research published in Cannabis finds that cannabis users expected that cannabis-assisted therapy could produce similar subjective experiences and have similar therapeutic benefits for the treatment of depression as psilocybin-assisted treatment.
The concept of aliens is quite old. Long before human civilization developed a scientifically accurate understanding of the cosmos, people across the world looked up at the sky and wondered what was out there.
Cephalopod genomes are as weird and wonderful as they are.
Our modern civilisation may be the most advanced to ever exist on Earth, but around 100 generations ago, our ancestors had brains that were larger than our own.
Pharmaceutical patents are used to extend monopolies, leading to high drug prices, and reduced access. Will the psychedelic industry follow suit?
A sweet smell wafts through the air, as two men weave through the small room tightly packed with cannabis plants, growing high above their shoulders in a flush of intoxicating flora. This isn’t yet another illegal weed factory but one of the first licensed medicinal marijuana labs in Britain.
A new study has found a positive association between mindfulness practice, psychedelic use, and overall psychological wellbeing. The findings have been published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs.
This is advance notice of a total lunar eclipse that takes place next weekend. A total lunar eclipse is when the moon passes through the shadow of the Earth.
What if death isn’t the end? NDEs may complicate what science teaches us about death and consciousness.
Image from: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Collage.jpg (Wiki Commons)
Mathematics and religion both embody awe-inspiring, eternal truths.
An expedition to a deep-sea ridge, just north of the Hawaiian Islands, has revealed an ancient dried-out lake bed paved with what looks like a yellow brick road.
A new archaeological study has unearthed evidence Indigenous people in Australia and North America sustainably managed and consumed oysters for thousands of years.