Newsdesk Archive
Scheme could ‘divert young people found with small amount of cannabis’ away from arrest by police.
New analysis rewinds previous research findings that atmospheric oxygen existed prior to the Great Oxygenation Event.
Archaeological deposits typically consist of a mix of artifacts and the remains of plants and animals—including the occasional human fossil—all held in a matrix of dirt. But these days, we dig for a lot more besides fossils and artifacts.
There are a lot of unexplained objects out there in the Universe, and astronomers have just found another one – a strange, dusty object that may be causing its host star to dim by up to 75 percent.
Dinosaur footprints found on a beach in south Wales are actually a "trackway" of footprints dating back more than 200 million years, researchers have found.
Image from: MarnixR (Wiki Commons)
Known as 'Burning Mountain', the mysterious underground blaze is the oldest known fire on the planet. And some scientists estimate it may be far more ancient than we currently think.
A dense, magnetic star violently erupted and spat out as much energy as a billion suns — and it happened in a fraction of a second, scientists recently reported.
An international team of researchers has found and excavated the remains of a young man killed approximately 3,600 years ago by a tsunami created by the eruption of Thera—a volcano located on what is now the island of Santorini.
The brain is the most complex organ in the human body. Now, a new study has brought us closer to understanding some of its evolution.
Analysis of ancient DNA from one of the best-preserved Neolithic tombs in Britain has revealed that most of the people buried there were from five continuous generations of a single extended family.
On the grand cosmic scale, our little corner of the Universe isn't all that special – this idea lies at the heart of the Copernican principle. Yet there's one major aspect about our planet that's peculiar indeed: Our Sun is a yellow dwarf.
The mummified body of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh has been studied for the first time in millennia after being digitally "unwrapped".
Scientists have announced the discovery of a perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo that was preparing to hatch from its egg, just like a chicken.
Just over a year after Japan's Hayabusa2 mission returned the first subsurface sample of an asteroid to Earth, scientists have determined that the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu is a pristine remnant from the formation of our solar system.
Giant millipedes as long as a car and weighing 50kg once hunted across northern England, experts have revealed, following the discovery of a 326m-year-old fossil.
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects 1 in 44 children in the United States, according to the CDC. It begins early in life, and the core symptoms are social and communication issues as well as repetitive behaviors and rigidity.
In a new study published in Nature, researchers Drs. Jennifer Miller and Yiming Wang report 50,000-years of population connection and isolation, driven by changing rainfall patterns, in southern and eastern Africa.
Tardigrades — those microscopic, plump-bodied critters lovingly known as "moss piglets" — have been put through the ringer for science.
If you want to be dazzled by a spectacular northern lights display, your best bet is to skywatch near the North Pole. But that wasn't the case 41,000 years ago, when a disruption of Earth's magnetic field sent auroras wandering toward the equator.
For people with post-traumatic stress disorder, recalling memories of physical or sexual assault, combat or disaster-related events can induce intense anxiety or panic attacks as well as debilitating flashbacks.
The isolated Faroe Islands were once home to an unknown population in 500 AD, about 350 years before Vikings ever arrived, according to new research. And the evidence comes from an unusual source: ancient sheep poop.
Thousands of miles away from its origin, magic happens: around 27 million tons of dust from the deserts of Africa drops out of the sky, bringing life into the ‘lungs of the planet’.
Image from: Catedral Verde - Floresta Amazonica (Wiki Commons)
Hunter-gathers caused ecosystems to change 125,000 years ago. These are the findings of an interdisciplinary study by archeologists from Leiden University in collaboration with other researchers. Neanderthals used fire to keep the landscape open and thus had a big impact on their local environment.
Ten thousand years ago, just after the last Ice Age, a group of hunter-gatherers buried an infant girl in an Italian cave. They entombed her with a rich selection of their treasured beads and pendants, and an eagle-owl talon, signaling their grief, and showing that even the youngest females were recognized as full persons in their society.
You're looking at a 300-megapixel photo of our Sun. Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy used a specially modified telescope, taking over 150,000 individual photos and combining them into this magnificent image.
A naturalistic study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides evidence that the ceremonial use of ayahuasca can lead to significant reductions in neuroticism, a personality trait associated with depression and anxiety.
Vast networks of microscopic, underground fungi serve a crucial role in Earth’s ecosystems — and there’s a lot we don’t know about them.
Malta will this week become the first European country to legalise the cultivation and possession of cannabis for personal use, pipping Luxembourg to the post, as the continent undergoes a wave of change to its drug laws.
Soils kept in cold storage suggest that some of these now-extinct animals survived longer than previously thought...The ice-cold cores from Klondike were later found in a McMaster University freezer by Tyler Murchie, an archaeologist specializing in ancient DNA at the university, who began to reinvestigate them. Murchie and his team’s work was published today in Nature Communications.
The Tibetan Plateau has long been considered one of the last places to be populated by people in their migration around the globe. A new paper by archeologists at the University of California, Davis, highlights that our extinct cousins, the Denisovans, reached the "roof of the world" about 160,000 years ago—120,000 years earlier than previous estimates for our species—and even contributed to our adaptation to high altitude.
Near 1,900-year-old skeleton discovered with nail through heel bone during excavation in Fenstanton
A Viking sword found at a burial site in Orkney is a rare, exciting and complex artefact, say archaeologists.
Researchers at the University of Zurich have investigated a unique leather scale armor found in the tomb of a horse rider in Northwest China.
A new study published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology sheds light on the mechanism connecting psychedelic use to improved mental health. The study found evidence of a pathway whereby the use of psychedelics increases spirituality, and in turn, leads to better emotion regulation.
The mighty forces that created our planet’s mountains in ancient days got some unexpected help, scientists have discovered. Their research shows some of Earth’s greatest ranges got a boost from primitive lifeforms whose remains lubricated movements of rock slabs and allowed them to pile up to form mountains.
The Solar System exists in a bubble. Wind and radiation from the Sun stream outwards, pushing out into interstellar space. This creates a boundary of solar influence, within which the objects in the Solar System are sheltered from powerful cosmic radiation.
An international team of astronomers led by researchers from the Netherlands has found no trace of dark matter in the galaxy AGC 114905, despite taking detailed measurements over a course of fourty hours with state-of-the-art telescopes. They will present their findings in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
A staggering 3.7 million years ago, an unknown species walked on two legs across a blanket of volcanic ash in what's now northern Tanzania. These steps, immortalized by the volcanic ash gradually turning into rock, were unearthed back in 1978 and mistakenly dismissed as being bear-like. But not everyone agreed.
If we want to tackle the climate crisis, we need to address a global blindspot: the vast underground fungal networks that sequester carbon and sustain much of life on Earth.
Scientists say they have made a major step forward in efforts to store information as molecules of DNA, which are more compact and long-lasting than other options.
Remains found inside an underground structure were tied up by ropes and with the hands covering the face.
A new multidisciplinary study by an international team reports the discovery of an ivory pendant decorated with a pattern of at least 50 punctures, creating an irregular looping curve. The direct radiocarbon date of the ornament yields an age of 41,500 years.
A team of researchers from Germany, France and the U.K. has discovered a long thin filament of dense gas connecting two of the Milky Way galaxy's spiral arms. In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the group describes their work studying carbon monoxide gas in the galaxy.
A dinosaur-age fossil heralded as the first four-legged snake known to science might actually be an entirely different beastie, a new study claims.
In 2015, mining excavations in Malapa, South Africa, revealed fossil vertebrae trapped in cement-like rock called breccia. Analysis revealed the vertebrae to be two million years old, from the lower back of a female Australopithecus sediba, a relative of modern humans first discovered at the same site in 2008.
Referred to as China's Venice of the Stone Age, the Liangzhu excavation site in eastern China is considered one of the most significant testimonies of early Chinese advanced civilisation. More than 5000 years ago, the city already had an elaborate water management system. Until now, the cause of the sudden collapse has been a subject of debate.
When a series of deep pits were discovered near the world heritage site of Stonehenge last year, archaeologists excitedly described it as the largest prehistoric structure ever found in Britain – only for some colleagues to dismiss the pits as mere natural features.
A spacecraft has launched on a mission to test technology that could one day tip a dangerous asteroid off course.
Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in the world, but it doesn't 'exist' outside the minds of the people who use it.
More than 1,200 Mesolithic tools have been unearthed from along an Aberdeenshire river.
Reciprocity with Indigenous stewards of plant medicine is one way to start.....Among the shamans of the Peruvian Andes, they have a word, “ayni,” translated as “sacred reciprocity.” Ayni is not about scorekeeping, but about keeping track. Ayni says we should partner...
Based on the identification of plant remains, Tel Aviv University and Tel-Hai College researchers provide the first detailed reconstruction of the climate in the Land of Israel at the end of the last ice age (20,000-10,000 years before present).
Meteor impact sites might seem like easy things to recognize, with giant craters in Earth's surface showing where these far-flung objects finally came to a violent stop. But it's not always that way.
Physically speaking, our Universe seems uncannily perfect. It stands to reason that if it wasn't, life as we know it – and planets, atoms, everything else really – wouldn't exist.
Wormholes, or portals between black holes, may be stable after all, a wild new theory suggests.
Ancient Indigenous fishing practices can be used to inform sustainable management and conservation today, according to a new study from Simon Fraser University.
There's a lot we still don't know about dark matter – that mysterious, invisible mass that could make up as much as 85 percent of everything around us – but a new paper outlines a rather unusual hypothesis about the very creation of the stuff.
Modern humans made several failed attempts to settle in Europe before eventually taking over the continent. This is the stark conclusion of scientists who have been studying the course of Homo sapiens’s exodus from Africa tens of thousands of years ago.
The ability to control our dreams is a skill that more of us are seeking to acquire for sheer pleasure. But if taken seriously, scientists believe it could unlock new secrets of the mind
Earth's first continents, known as the cratons, emerged from the ocean between 3.3 billion and 3.2 billion years ago, a new study hints. This pushes back previous estimates of when the cratons first rose from the water, as various studies suggested that large-scale craton emergence took place roughly 2.5 billion years ago.
Scientists have identified what appears to be a small chunk of the moon that is tracking the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
Archaeologists in Peru have uncovered the remains of 25 people in the ancient city of Chan Chan.
Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy appears to increase both cognitive and neural flexibility in patients with major depressive disorder, according to new research published inTranslational Psychiatry. But the findings suggest that psychedelic-induced increases in neural flexibility do not always result in cognitive improvements.
Some of the ingredients necessary for life didn't take very long to emerge after the Universe winked into existence.
Psychedelics have come a long way since their hallucinogenic hippy heyday. Research shows that they could alleviate PTSD, depression and addiction. So will we all soon be treated with magic mushrooms and MDMA?
Imagine having chronic pain so severe you can’t risk expending the energy it would take to get a glass of water – or what it’s like to hold your baby as they have their 100th potentially fatal seizure of the week....You know this medicine exists but you’re prevented from accessing it because – behind the scenes – the avenues to do so have not been set up.
Teeth and skull fragments found in the maze-like recesses of a South African cave fuel debate on how Homo naledi lived—and whether it disposed of its dead.
Image from Animalparty (Wiki Commons)
Traditionally, scientists believed the Iberian hinterland to be a no-man's land, avoided by Homo sapiens until about 19,000 years ago when the ice sheets of the Last Glacial Maximum—the period when ice sheets were at their greatest extent—retreated. However, recent research has been telling a different story.
Detroit has joined the growing number of cities and states that have decriminalized entheogenic plants and fungi, more colloquially known as “magic mushrooms” and psychedelics.
Image from Magic mushrooms (Wiki Commons)
The connection between human and dog runs deep. Early signs of domestication date back to 33,000 years ago... The pairing makes for a striking case in coevolution — no other species has been so thoroughly integrated into human society. Dogs are our sentinels and shepherds, hunting partners and cancer detectors. And more importantly, to those of us who have had dogs in our lives, they are our dearest friends.
A new ancestor of modern humans with the potential to rip up the family tree has been tentatively named.
Nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the Chilean coast are covered with oblong fragments of desert glass that researchers who recently studied them say came from a comet’s explosion over the Atacama Desert about 12,000 years ago.
Archaeologists have discovered a wooden Maya canoe in southern Mexico, believed to be over 1,000 years old.
An asteroid about the size of a refrigerator shot past Earth last week, and astronomers didn't know the object existed until hours after it was gone.
Scientists have begun to examine whether the psychedelic drug psilocybin... can help people who feel insecure in their attachments to others. Their preliminary research, published in ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science, suggests that psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy might help to reduce attachment anxiety.
Research from Johns Hopkins and NYU suggests that psychedelic drugs can significantly reduce pain and distress for those with terminal illnesses. As the British government faces calls to reschedule these substances, Kevin E G Perry talks to some of those who’ve already chosen to take the trip
The proliferation of ketamine clinics around the country could offer a model for other psychedelic therapy clinics in the future. Here's what it's like on the inside.
The species lived in Africa about 500,000 years ago, during the Middle Pleistocene age, and was the direct ancestor of modern humans, according to scientists. The name bodoensis derives from a skull found in Bodo D’ar in the Awash River valley of Ethiopia.
Archaeologists believe fingerprints on fragments of clay found in Orkney were left by experienced potters and their young apprentice 5,000 years ago.
Stick a turtle's beak on a baby hippo. Then twist its front legs so they stick out to either side, but keep its back legs straight. And give it tusks. Presto, you have something that looks a little bit like a prototype mammal-like animal that walked the planet hundreds of millions of years ago.
Ancient Central American people may have designed their cities around an early iteration of the Maya calendar.
Archaeologists in Iraq revealed Sunday their discovery of a large-scale wine factory from the rule of the Assyrian kings 2,700 years ago, along with stunning monumental rock-carved royal reliefs.
Mammoths and other giant creatures of the Ice Age such as woolly rhinos survived longer than scientists thought, coexisting with humans for tens of thousands of years before they vanished for good. That's according to the results of an ambitious 10-year research project that analyzed DNA from hundreds of soil samples across the Arctic.
Nobody knows who she was, just that she was different: a teenage girl from over 50,000 years ago of such strange uniqueness she looked to be a 'hybrid' ancestor to modern humans that scientists had never seen before.
The ancient Egyptians were carrying out sophisticated mummifications of their dead 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to new evidence which could lead to a rewriting of the history books.
A longitudinal study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry investigated the effects of medicinal cannabis among clinically depressed and/or anxious patients.
Traces of ancient life were locked inside a 2.5 billion-year-old ruby from Greenland, according to a new study.
A Jurassic graveyard in Patagonia, Argentina, holds more than 100 fossilized eggs and the bones of 80 Mussaurus patagonicus dinosaurs ranging in age from hatchling to adult. The trove of dinosaur remains suggests that these paleo-beasts lived in herds as early as 192 million years ago, a new study finds.
Some of the oldest evidence for modern humans living in rainforests has been found in a cave in Southeast Asia. Researchers analysed fossilised teeth discovered in Laos, revealing that these humans ate fruits and meat as part of an omnivorous diet.
Long before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, eight timber-framed buildings covered in sod stood on a terrace above a peat bog and stream at the northern tip of Canada's island of Newfoundland, evidence that the Vikings had reached the New World first.
Results announced by the LHCb experiment at CERN have revealed further hints for phenomena that cannot be explained by our current theory of fundamental physics
We know that true polar wander (TPW) can occasionally tilt whole planets and moons relative to their axes, but it's not entirely clear just how often this has happened to Earth. Now a new study presents evidence of one such tilting event that occurred around 84 million years ago – when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.
Nearly half of our DNA has been written off as junk, the discards of evolution...
Archaeological discoveries are shattering scholars’ long-held beliefs about how the earliest humans organised their societies – and hint at possibilities for our own.
A group of researchers wants to save Earth from a potential asteroid apocalypse using a new planetary defense method they call PI — short for "Pulverize It."
Mysterious structures in the sky that have puzzled astronomers for decades might finally have an explanation – and it's quite something.
An ancient object thought to be the world's oldest map of the stars is to go on display at the British Museum.
A comprehensive study of the Taurid meteor stream released last week confirms a central understanding of astronomer Dr. Bill Napier and the Comet Research Group, which was incorporated into the YDI hypothesis from the start in 2007
New techniques for spotting previously hidden planets could reveal whether there is life out there – or not.
People who have tried a psychedelic drug at least once in their lifetime have lower odds of heart disease and diabetes, according to new research published in Scientific Reports.