Newsdesk Archive
Archaeologists discover burial sites “of remarkable scientific quality” below the fire-damaged cathedral
Astronomers and the European Space Agency’s planetary defence community recently spotted an asteroid just hours before it struck the Earth
New research provides evidence that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy can improve and extend lives of patients with chronic and severe posttraumatic stress disorder while also reducing healthcare costs. The findings have been published in the journal PLOS One.
On 7 December 1691, a precious rune drum, created to help a noaidi, or shaman, to enter a trance and walk among spirits, was confiscated by the authorities. The owner, Anders Poulsson – or Poala-Ánde in the name’s Sámi form – was tried for witchcraft the following year.
Imagine a cup of tea. Wrap a piece of string around the circumference of the cup, and measure the length of the string.
Prehistoric sites are full of stone tools that appear to have two life cycles: They've been crafted, used, and discarded before being picked up a second time and used again. A new study puts forward an interesting hypothesis as to why this is.
Evidence suggests surface minerals of outer main-belt asteroids, proposed to have sourced building blocks of Earth's water and life, are only stable at low temperatures. These asteroids formed in distant orbits and may help explain Earth's composition
Scientists have found the oldest known ancestor of octopuses – an approximately 330m-year-old fossil unearthed in Montana. The researchers concluded the ancient creature lived millions of years earlier than previously believed, meaning that octopuses originated before the era of dinosaurs.
New date of 58 million years undercuts idea that strike triggered recent 1000-year plunge in temperatures.
Scientists discovered traces of carbon—the element on which life on Earth is based—that appear to have come from the Cambrian Explosion.
There is a scientific reason that humans feel better walking through the woods than strolling down a city street, according to a new publication from UO physicist Richard Taylor and an interdisciplinary team of collaborators.
Having never evolved wings, many species of spider instead evolved an uncanny ability to take to the skies using nothing more than a few short threads of gossamer dangling from their dainty butts.
A study suggests the world's largest rainforest is losing its ability to bounce back from damage caused by droughts, fires and deforestation.
People suffering debilitating cluster headaches say the active ingredient in magic mushrooms is a help.
People have been trying to understand how predators and prey are able to stay balanced within our planet's ecosystems for at least 2,400 years. The Greek author Herodotus even raised the question in his historical treatise Histories, written around 430 BC.
Archaeologists have uncovered a Pictish symbol stone close to the location of one of the most significant carved stone monuments ever uncovered in Scotland.
The Venus of Willendorf, one of the world’s oldest pieces of artwork, was made of rock mined in Italy, more than 600 kilometres from her final resting place in Austria, according to new research.
What happens inside your brain during these experiences and after death are questions that have puzzled neuroscientists for centuries. However, a new study published to Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience suggests that your brain may remain active and coordinated during and even after the transition to death, and be programmed to orchestrate the whole ordeal.
Scientists discovered remnants of an Old Stone Age culture, less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Beijing, where ancient hominins used a reddish pigment called ochre and crafted tiny, blade-like tools from stone. The archaeological site, called Xiamabei, offers a rare glimpse into the life of Homo sapiens and now-extinct human relatives who inhabited the region some 40,000 years ago.
Archaeologists may have just uncovered evidence for the oldest known practice of mummification. Human remains interred 8,000 years ago in the Sado Valley in Portugal, during the Mesolithic, appear to have been deliberately treated for mummification prior to burial.
With its immense size, dagger-like teeth and sharp claws, Tyrannosaurus rex was a fearsome predator that once terrorised North America. Now researchers studying its fossils have suggested the beast may not have been the only tyrannosaurus species
A team of scientists will use advances in High Energy Physics (HIP) to scan the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza with cosmic-ray muons. They want to see deeper into the Great Pyramid than ever before and map its internal structure.
A new study explains how Stonehenge may have originally been used to keep track of a solar year (aka tropical year) of 365 and a quarter days, which has long been suggested by researchers but never fully understood.
An ancient skull uncovered at a 6,000-year-old megalithic monument in Spain still holds signs of what would have been a brutal ear surgery.
The accidental finding was made when a man suddenly died during a routine brain scan.
New study examines the paradoxical relationships between psychosis, psychotherapy, and psychedelic experiences.
Researchers have created the largest-ever family tree – a genealogical network of human genetic diversity – that is a major step towards mapping the genetic relationships between all humans.
Archaeologists believe they may have found evidence of a 4,000-year-old prehistoric burial mound during the construction of new student flats.
The study of false—sober—insights teaches us to be wary of accepting every realization from psychedelic trips without critical thinking.
It might be best known today for its otters and puffins but 170m years ago the Isle of Skye was home to an enormous flying reptile with a wingspan bigger than a kingsize bed, researchers have revealed.
A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists said Tuesday that it had found a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine at a remote Neolithic site in Jordan's eastern desert.
You may already know the legend of King Tutankhamen's space dagger – an iron weapon forged from the rock of meteorites, and entombed with the ancient Egyptian pharaoh. Now a new study has revealed more details about this most fascinating and mysterious of artifacts
A new study published in Frontiers in Psychology provides an in-depth look at the types of otherworldly experiences that people have when they take a high dose of the psychedelic substance dimethyltryptamine (DMT). The findings provide new insight on the complex dimensions of the DMT experience.
New neuroimaging research sheds light on the brain regions involved in extracting structure from past experiences when making decisions. The study, which appears in Cell Reports, indicates that the hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex play key roles in this process.
Once just an obscure island dialect of an African Bantu tongue, Swahili has evolved into Africa's most internationally recognized language. It is peer to the few languages of the world that boast over 200 million users.
Some planets, like ours, rotate as they spin around their stars – an endless turning of day into night into day again. But other planets behave differently; tidally-locked to their stars, one side continually faces the sun, while the other is shrouded in perpetual darkness.
Photosynthesis quite literally changed our world. Plants 'eating' sunlight and 'breathing out' oxygen transformed Earth's entire atmosphere into the one we now breathe, and fuel our ecosystems with energy.
Retreating ice at the end of the last ice age created bewildering landscape of gulleys, plateaus and dry waterfalls which have long puzzled geologists studying their formation
The use of psilocybin — the active component of “magic” mushrooms — is associated with a decreased likelihood of engaging in criminal behavior, according to new research. The findings have been published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
Astronomers have just found an absolute monster of a galaxy. Lurking some 3 billion light-years away, Alcyoneus is a giant radio galaxy reaching 5 megaparsecs into space. That's 16.3 million light-years long, and constitutes the largest known structure of galactic origin.
Findings from the journal Scientific Reports suggest that psychedelic drugs can alter a person’s core beliefs about the nature of reality, consciousness, and free will.
All through history, humans have created and shared stories that ponder the creation of stars—what they are and how the first stars came to be.
Lying on the pebbles and rocks of the riverbed at low tide was a human femur, or upper leg bone.
The 2,000-year-old fragments also included receipts, school texts, trade information and lists of names, according to researchers at Germany's University of Tübingen, which carried out the excavation.
Image from Encyclopædia Britannica (Wiki Commons)
The 5,000-year-old drum carved from chalk is set to go on display for the first time in a major exhibition about the Neolithic site of Stonehenge and its historical context.
Researchers believe there may be a planet that could sustain life, in the vicinity of a dying sun.
With its tail flipping rhythmically from side to side, this strange synthetic fish scoots around in its salt and glucose solution, using the same power as our beating hearts.
While black holes might always be black, they do occasionally emit some intense bursts of light from just outside their event horizon. Previously, what exactly caused these flares had been a mystery to science
Some scientists believe that LSD and psilocybin could treat everything from cluster headaches to fibromyalgia.
An incredible quantity of archaeological reports are stored in digital archives. If you want to search for information in them, you have to do this manually. And that is a real chore.
New fossils are challenging ideas that modern humans wiped out Neanderthals soon after arriving from Africa.
Experts think the violent blast incinerated Hopewell settlements in what is now Ohio.
Image from:File:Map of Muskingum County Ohio With Municipal and Township Labels.PNG (Wiki Commons)
The deep-ocean floor is teeming with undiscovered life-forms that help to regulate Earth's climate, a new study finds.
Once, there were giants. Mountain ranges that rivaled the Himalayas in height used to stretch thousands upon thousands of kilometers across the seams of merging supercontinents, billions of years in the past.
Research has shown that the Earth trails an asteroid barely a kilometer across in its orbit about the Sun—only the second such body to have ever been spotted. It goes round the Sun on average two months ahead of the Earth, dancing around in front like an excited herald of our coming.
An ancient temple dating from the early centuries of Buddhism has been unearthed in the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan — part of the ancient Gandhara region that was conquered by Alexander the Great and gave rise to a mixing of Buddhist belief and Greek art.
New research sheds light on the different types of subjective experiences produced by five different types of psychedelic substances. The study, published in Psychopharmacology, used computer algorithms to analyze thousands of anonymously published reports about the effects of psychedelic drugs.
A new study led by researchers from Bar-Ilan University, Ono Academic College, The University of Tulsa and the Israel Antiquities Authority presents a 1.5 million-year-old human vertebra discovered in Israel's Jordan Valley.
The venerable elders of a forest are hugely important to the diversity, fitness, and survival of the woodland as a whole, new research shows – and they bring with them a hardiness and experience in dealing with change, as well as a lifetime of ecological interactions preserved in their immediate surrounds..
The remains of a woolly mammoth have been found among a host of hugely significant Ice Age animal remains in a cave in Devon, experts have said.
An extremely powerful solar storm pummeled our planet 9,200 years ago, leaving permanent scars on the ice buried deep below Greenland and Antarctica.
If you see the majestic stones on Salisbury Plain as an emblem of England, think again. A major new British Museum exhibition connects them to many points and cultures across Europe through 1,500 years of immigration
Australian scientists say they have discovered an unknown spinning object in the Milky Way that they claim is unlike anything seen before.
It's been 27 years since geologist David Roberts identified some of the oldest footprints of our species ever discovered.
Our eyes are continuously bombarded by an enormous amount of visual information – millions of shapes, colors, and ever-changing motion all around us. For the brain, this is no easy feat.
For decades, scientists thought that being more carnivorous set our ancestors along their evolutionary path. New evidence casts doubt on this theory.
Image from Venison Steaks (Wiki Commons)
Planet likely to be spared from catastrophic end if 10km-wide Earthbound asteroid was spotted, analysis finds
New insight into how our early ancestors dealt with major shifts in climate is revealed in research, published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution, by an international team, led by Professor Rick Schulting from Oxford University's School of Archaeology.
For about 2,000 years most humans have imagined themselves to be the Earth’s “apex predators” – smarter, faster and more deadly than any other creature with which we share the planet.
A new image of the heart of the Milky Way is revealing mysterious structures we've never seen before.
The country first legalised the use of marijuana in 2018 for medical use and research, but now the Narcotics Control Board has dropped it from its list of controlled drugs.
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered two colossal limestone statues of King Amenhotep III that are fashioned to look like sphinxes, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
Earth is far from a solid mass of rock. The outer layer of our planet – known as the lithosphere – is made up of more than 20 tectonic plates...
Scientists are designing new psychedelic-inspired drugs that don’t yet exist, which might have effects no one can yet describe.
Fresh analysis of craters on Mars suggests that asteroids have been smashing into the surface at a consistent rate for at least 600 million years.
A new analysis has looked at multiple sites which show evidence of early humans and found something surprising. It suggests that findings of increasing carnivory over time in Homo erectus are just a quirk of sampling.
Many people have experienced reductions in stress, pain and anxiety and sometimes even euphoria after exercise. What’s behind this so-called “runner’s high”? New research on the neuroscience of exercise may surprise you.
Scientists have found "compelling evidence" that Saturn's "Death Star" moon is hiding an ocean just beneath its surface, furthering the search for possible life in our solar system.
In 2010, small cores of permafrost sediments were collected by a team at the University of Alberta from gold mines in the Klondike region of central Yukon.
After a century of research and many life-changing progressions in science, Alzheimer’s disease remains unhindered and incurable...Researchers have now had to think more imaginatively about how to treat Alzheimer’s disease. Remarkably, it appears as though psychedelic drugs may offer unprecedented potential.
Image from: DrOONeil (Wiki Commons)
A set of ancient gold and silver tubes dating to about 5,500 years ago and unearthed in North Caucasus in Russia could be the world’s oldest surviving drinking straws, experts have claimed.
The question of how life first sparked into existence on our planet is one we haven't yet fully answered, but science is getting closer all the time – and a new study identifies the structures of the proteins that may well have made it happen
Mesopotamians were using hybrids of domesticated donkeys and wild asses to pull their war wagons 4,500 years ago — at least 500 years before horses were bred for the purpose, a new study reveals
Scientists have uncovered the world’s oldest social network, a web of connections that flourished 50,000 years ago and stretched for thousands of miles across Africa.
A decades-old Siberian tooth sample has revealed a previously unknown mammoth lineage, along with a potential ancestor’s unexpected adaptations.
Scientists in China say they have found the oldest flower bud in the fossil record, finally aligning the fossil evidence with the genetic data suggesting flowering plants, or angiosperms, evolved tens of millions of years earlier than we initially thought.
Archeologists from The University of Western Australia have discovered people who lived in north-west Arabia in the Early to Middle Bronze Age built 'funerary avenues'—long-distance corridors linking oases and pastures, bordered by thousands of elaborate burial monuments.
A non-psychoactive compound found in live cannabis plants could help sabotage the spike protein on coronaviruses, scientists have found.
Image from: Potleaf.jpg (Wiki Commons)
New analysis based on ash from volcanic cataclysm dates an early human found at Omo, Ethiopia, to 233,000 years, supporting the ‘early evolution’ theory for Homo sapiens
Beer laced with hallucinogenic drugs derived from plant seeds may have helped leaders of a South American culture maintain their political control for hundreds of years, according to new research.
Tests of stone points show that early Americans may have been better scavengers than hunters of the giant beasts.
It's widely understood that animals such as salmon, butterflies and birds have an innate magnetic sense, allowing them to use the Earth's magnetic field for navigation to places such as feeding and breeding grounds.
The world's very first invention of writing took place over 5000 years ago in the Middle East, before it was reinvented in China and Central America. Today, almost all human activities—from education to political systems and computer code—rely on this technology.
In films and literature, they are usually depicted as hulking, foot-stomping, snorting beasts but a new study has claimed that the medieval warhorse was typically a much slighter, daintier animal.
About 2,500 years ago, a man in northwest China was buried with armor made of more than 5,000 leather scales, a military garment fashioned so intricately, its design looks like the overlapping scales of a fish, a new study finds
Canada has amended federal regulations now allowing patients suffering from life-threatening mental illnesses to be treated with MDMA and psychedelic drug psilocybin.
It might be an imaginary character straight out of a Dr Seuss book: The goldfish who could drive. But it’s real.
"I rang up the county council and I said I think I've found a dinosaur," explained Joe Davis, who works at Rutland Water Nature Reserve.
Hundreds of amazingly well-preserved finds from Australia include plants, insects, fish, and more that existed more than 11 million years ago.