Newsdesk Archive
Haryana archaeology dept is yet to carry out a full survey, but believe they've discovered possibly the largest Paleolithic site in the Indian subcontinent.
Archaeological evidence shows that ancient people ate bread, beer and other carbs, long before domesticated crops.
Image from: Gugatchitchinadze (Wiki Commons)
Research increasingly suggests that extracts from the plant are effective in treating pain, anxiety, epilepsy and more, but experts still preach caution around recreational use.
Language produced under the influence of the psychedelic drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) displays increased levels of entropy and reduced semantic coherence, according to new research published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. In other words, people tend to have more disorganized speech while under the effects of LSD and are more likely to jump from one topic to another.
Researchers exploring the Indian Ocean have discovered the remains of a collapsed underwater volcano with an uncanny resemblance to the all-seeing "Eye of Sauron" from J.R.R. Tolkien's famous fantasy series "The Lord of the Rings," as well as two other seafloor structures named after places in Tolkien's Middle-earth.
Norwegians have been left awestruck by a bright meteor that illuminated the night sky in the country's south-east.
In a strange turn of events, researchers in Mexico have announced they plan to rebury an unusual archaeological monument found in the outskirts of Mexico City – covering up an important historical discovery until some unknown time in the future.
Around 74,000 years ago, a “supereruption” on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, blasted out an estimated 5,000 cubic kilometres of magma.
Researchers have discovered the fossilised remains of 3.4-billion-year-old methane-cycling microbes that lived in a hydrothermal system beneath the ancient seafloor – the oldest microfossils of this type found to date.
Palaeontologist Tim Ewin is standing in a quarry, recalling the calamity that's written in the rocks under his mud-caked boots.
Lucid dreaming, in which people are partially aware and can control their dreams during sleep, could explain so-called alien abduction stories, a study suggests.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is proving very adept at certain tasks – like inventing human faces that don't actually exist, or winning games of poker – but these networks still struggle when it comes to something humans do naturally: imagine.
Humans constantly alter the world. We fire fields, turn forests into farms, and breed plants and animals. But humans don't just reshape our external world—we engineer our internal worlds, and reshape our minds.
Harvard scientists have found that a single dose of psilocybin given to mice induces a rapid and long-lasting increase in connections between pyramidal neurons in the medial frontal cortex, an area of the brain known to be involved in control and decision-making. Their new findings are published in the journal Neuron.
What makes humans unique? Scientists have taken another step toward solving an enduring mystery with a new tool that may allow for more precise comparisons between the DNA of modern humans and that of our extinct ancestors.
Evidence of ancient life may have been scrubbed from parts of Mars, a new NASA study has found.
One rocket launch produces up to 300 tons of carbon dioxide into the upper atmosphere where it can remain for years.
Dogs are born with an innate ability to read human gestures that is not apparent in their closest relative, wolves.
The stories of enigmatic birds told in indigenous folklore aren't just fascinating tales, they may be a way to preserve languages and cultures at risk of extinction.
A torn 2,300-year-old mummy wrapping — covered with hieroglyphics from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead — has been digitally reunited with its long-lost piece that was ripped away.
Low doses of psilocybin and ketamine can heighten food-related motivation and improve attention in poorly-performing male rats, according to new research published in Frontiers in Pharmacology.
Large coastal sharks engage in ‘shift work’ to share their resources, according to a new study from Murdoch University’s Harry Butler Institute.
A trio of researchers from Slovenia's Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia at the Centre for Preventive Archaeology and Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, in Germany, has found evidence of the oldest known use of cosmetics at a dig site in the Balkans.
Technology can help indigenous communities to significantly curb deforestation, according to a new study. Indigenous people living in the Peruvian Amazon were equipped by conservation groups with satellite data and smartphones.
For almost 2 decades, genomes isolated from fossils have galvanized the study of human evolution. Yet despite vast improvements in retrieving and analyzing that DNA, researchers have deciphered whole genomes from just 23 archaic humans, 18 of them Neanderthals. This week, however...
In addition to being found naturally in animal tissues, including the human brain, N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is the primary hallucinogenic compound found in the psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca.
Scientists at the University of Southampton have discovered that changes in Earth's orbit may have allowed complex life to emerge and thrive during the most hostile climate episode the planet has ever experienced.
Climate change has already increased the frequency and severity of hurricanes and other extreme weather events around the world. — But there's a smaller, less splashy threat on the horizon that could wreak havoc on America's coasts.
A large body of research indicates that egocentrism shapes moral judgments. Now, new research indicates that people not only prefer moral decisions that benefit them, some people — particularly those with high collective narcissism — also display a bias towards moral decisions that benefit their group.
Early work by UK scientists indicates the Winchcombe object dates back to the very beginning of the Solar System, some 4.6 billion years ago.
As far as we currently know, there is a single expanding blob of spacetime speckled with trillions of galaxies - that's our Universe. If there are others, we have no compelling evidence for their existence.
The latest push in the burgeoning psychedelic industry is to lose the whole pesky “psychedelic” element, and it has a surprise backer in the late Bob Marley.
A study published in the International Journal of Drug Policy asked psychedelic drug users to share their experiences with drug use, and particularly, their experiences with “bad trips.”
A chess-sized piece of bone crafted before modern humans are believed to have arrived in the area sparks questions about artistic expression beyond Homo sapiens.
Image from: Fährtenleser (Wiki Commons)
It is a mystery that has confounded experts for centuries - how were huge stones transported 180 miles (290km) from the Preseli Hills to Stonehenge?
A new study suggests that prehistoric elephants like the mastodon and woolly mammoth were wiped out by waves of extreme global environmental change, rather than being hunted to extinction by early humans.
Dinosaurs were facing a crisis even before the asteroid hit, with extinctions outpacing the emergence of new species — a situation that made them "particularly prone to extinction," a new study suggests.
Denisova Cave in southern Siberia is a site where conditions allowed for the preservation of ancient human fossils and DNA in fragments of bone, hair and faeces, some going back 300,000 years. Richard Roberts and colleagues from Germany and Russia have analysed DNA from sediments and shown which ancient humans were there at what times.
Image from Nerika (Wiki commons)
Despite their illegality and a tendency among the media and politicians to demonize their use, psychedelics have been shown to have transformative effects on individuals suffering from mental health problems, including depression and anxiety.
Scientists have identified a new contender for "patient zero" in the plague that caused the Black Death.
A new species of the ancient giant rhino - among the largest mammals to walk on land - has been discovered in north-western China, researchers say.
A new study of ancient geological events suggests that our planet has a slow, steady 'heartbeat' of geological activity every 27 million years or so.
They may be vine-smothered ruins today, but the lost cities of the ancient tropics still have a lot to teach us about how to live alongside nature.
On a clear day, the view from the ruins of Göbekli Tepe stretches across southern Turkey all the way to the Syrian border some 50 kilometres away. At 11,600 years old, this mountaintop archaeological site has been described as the world’s oldest temple — so ancient, in fact, that its T-shaped pillars and circular enclosures pre-date pottery in the Middle East.
Caves, often their deepest reaches, were humanity's first art galleries, where early artists produced star maps, hunting scenes and friezes of ice age animals.
Image from: Iakubivskyi (Wiki Commons)
Astronomers say they've put to bed the mystery of why one of the most familiar stars in the night sky suddenly dimmed just over a year ago.
An underwater archaeologist from The University of Texas at Arlington is part of a research team studying 9,000-year-old stone tool artifacts discovered in Lake Huron that originated from an obsidian quarry more than 2,000 miles away in central Oregon.
New insights into the peopling of Siberia and human migration into the Americas have been found in what might seem like an unlikely place: gut bugs.
Archaeologists believe fingerprints left on a piece of Neolithic pottery belonged to two young men.
Sperm whales are among the loudest living animals on the planet, producing creaking, knocking and staccato clicking sounds to communicate with other whales that are a few feet to even a few hundred miles away.
This bizarre little organism doesn't have a brain, or a nervous system – its blobby, bright-yellow body is just one cell. This slime mold species has thrived, more or less unchanged, for a billion years in its damp, decaying habitats. And, in the last decade, it's been changing how we think about cognition and problem-solving.
Treating mental health conditions with psilocybin is quickly becoming mainstream. But the experience of this scientist and adventurer shows its potential for physical conditions, too.
Installation of new pathway and lift has been criticised by archaeologists and called ‘a scandal’.
At the age of 16, when Tony Kofi was an apprentice builder living in Nottingham, he fell from the third story of a building. Time seemed to slow down massively, and he saw a complex series of images flash before his eyes.
Archaeologists recently discovered Israel's oldest known seal impression, a device that stamps a pattern onto soft material such as clay or wax in order to seal an object.
Astronomers have spotted a giant blinking star, 100 times the size of the sun, lurking near the heart of the Milky Way.
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have discovered that one small dose of NOS can improve symptoms of depression for up to two weeks.
The moon will partially cover the sun in the UK later this week, but some parts of the northern hemisphere will experience a total eclipse
A study that dug into the history of the Amazon Rainforest has found that indigenous people lived there for millennia with "causing no detectable species losses or disturbances".
Knowledge of medicinal plants is at risk of disappearing as human languages become extinct, a new study has warned.
When we think of Antarctic exploration, the narrative is overwhelmingly white. Now, a new paper by New Zealander researchers suggests that the indigenous people of mainland New Zealand - M?ori - have a significantly longer history with Earth's southernmost continent.
Coxcatlan Cave in Mexico's Tehuacan Valley is a time capsule like no other. Its dusty floor is a history book, its pages detailing thousands of years of food and technology of the land's inhabitants.
It’s been a long, strange trip for psychedelics in the state of California, but that journey inched closer to legalization on Monday.
Scientists are proposing a new theory of human evolution. A groundbreaking new analysis of data suggests that key evolutionary changes in prehistory were driven by cyclical changes in tropical climate.
An international study led by UNSW researchers has mapped one of the most intact and complete dog genomes ever generated.
Archaeological finds suggest that people developed numbers tens of thousands of years ago. Scholars are now exploring the first detailed hypotheses about this life-changing invention.
Delicate prehistoric carvings of adult red deer, thought to be the oldest of their type in the UK, have been found in a tomb in one of Scotland’s most famous neolithic sites.
The center of the Milky Way is a strange and wild place. There dwells our galactic nucleus - a supermassive black hole 4 million times the mass of the Sun, a beast named Sgr A*. It's probably the most extreme environment in our galaxy, dominated by Sgr A*'s gravitational and magnetic fields.
A burial mound in northern Syria has been identified by researchers as perhaps the world’s oldest known war memorial.
Scientists have been uncorking long, thin cylinders of soil from wetlands and riverbeds in an attempt to look back in time and understand the impact humans have had on nature. The results have made them radically rethink previous assumptions about when this started.
Former heavyweight champion calls psilocybin an ‘amazing medicine’.
Image from:Glenn Francis (Toglenn) (Wiki Commons)
Some of the first modern humans to settle in East Asia more than 40,000 years ago ranged across the vast northern China Plateau for thousands of years, where they hunted red deer and may have encountered Neanderthals and other archaic humans.
TWO seemingly disparate scientific disciplines have been drawn into each other’s orbits, set on a collision course.
We can’t see it, barely understand it, but know that it exists because of the powerful influence it exerts on space.
New research has questioned theories that a mysterious group of hunter-gatherers from Indonesia interacted with Aboriginal Australians thousands of years ago and provides a basis for future understanding of the people who made tiny, but precise implements out of stone.
Hidden in the vast, arid expanses of India's Thar Desert lie mysterious old drawings carved into the land. These newly discovered designs are of such immense scale, they were likely never able to be glimpsed in their entirety by those who made them, researchers say.
Assembly Theory method ‘vital to support the first discovery of life beyond Earth,’ researcher says.
The Texas Senate has approved House-passed bills to reduce criminal penalties for possessing marijuana concentrates and require the state to study the therapeutic potential of psychedelics like psilocybin and MDMA.
Image from: Wiki Commons
Skoltech scientists and their colleagues from Germany and the United States have analyzed the metabolomes of humans, chimpanzees, and macaques in muscle, kidney, and three different brain regions.
Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have investigated what happened to a specific kind of plasma—the first matter ever to be present—during the first microsecond of the Big Bang. Their findings provide a piece of the puzzle to the evolution of the universe, as we know it today.
Here's a mystery: Ancient fossils show animals originating from South America in the Antilles islands off Central America, but how did they get over the sea? The answer is via land masses that have long since sunk from view under the ocean, according to a new study.
About 250 tombs, some with fancy layouts and hieroglyphics, have been discovered cut into a hill at Al-Hamidiyah cemetery to the east of Sohag, in Egypt's Eastern Desert, about 240 miles (386 kilometers) southeast of Cairo, Egypt's antiquities ministry said.
As the drug inches toward regulatory approval, desperate people are going underground to treat urgent mental health issues.
We sort-of take it for granted that there's a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, but we can't really go there and check. What if something else is actually lurking in this messy, dusty region?
BY THE TIME Sophie took MDMA for the first time at my mental health clinic, she was willing to try just about anything. Now in her late fifties, Sophie (not her real name) had struggled for most of her life with post-traumatic stress disorder, suffering from insomnia, hypervigilance, and flashbacks to the abuse she suffered as a child.
Important research on Stonehenge could be put in jeopardy if the threatened closure of one of the UK’s most renowned university archaeology departments goes ahead, leading experts on the prehistoric monument have warned.
A new study has shown, for the first time, that humans recognize the intended meanings of iconic vocalizations — basic sounds made by people to represent specific objects, entities and actions — regardless of the language they speak.
Study analysing brain scans of people finds psychedelic drug lowers barriers that constrain thoughts.
Scientists have started to investigate whether psilocybin could be helpful to those who suffer from migraine headache. Their new findings, published in Neurotherapeutics, provide preliminary evidence that the drug could provide long-lasting therapeutic benefits to migraine sufferers.
A new study of ancient DNA from horse fossils found in North America and Eurasia shows that horse populations on the two continents remained connected through the Bering Land Bridge, moving back and forth and interbreeding multiple times over hundreds of thousands of years.
The birth of a star is a wild and magnificent thing....It's not a process we're likely ever going to be able to observe from start to finish - but an absolutely spectacular simulation brings us closer than we've ever been.
UK government proposals to recognise vertebrates as sentient beings are welcome, but this should be just the start.
From treating depression to understanding consciousness, the promise of psychedelics is shifting their study from fringe to frontier neuroscience.
Scientists have pinpointed major changes in Europe’s Neanderthal populations – from traces of blood and excrement they left behind in a Spanish cave 100,000 years ago.
If asked where meteorites come from, you might reply "from comets." But according to our new research, which tracked hundreds of fireballs on their journey through the Australian skies, you would be wrong.
New research reports that ancient rock art in Indonesian caves is degrading over time, as bits of rock slowly flake away from the walls. It's a tremendous loss for human history — some of these paintings, which depict everything from animals to human figures to abstract symbols, date back about 40,000 years.
Animals are to be formally recognised as sentient beings in UK law for the first time, in a victory for animal welfare campaigners, as the government set out a suite of animal welfare measures including halting most live animal exports and banning the import of hunting trophies.
Sand samples examined by National Trust experts indicate hillside chalk figure was created in the 10th century.
A recent case study by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers provides evidence that a promising option for patients with chronic itch may already be available: medical marijuana (cannabis).
The interiors of Jupiter and Saturn are actually quite difficult to probe. But Saturn's uniquely glorious and extensive ring system is proving to be an excellent tool for figuring out the densities deep below its thick cloud layers, right down to the core.