Newsdesk Archive
Now that we’ve gotten a look at the genomes of archaic humans, researchers are trying to determine whether our differences are due to genetics.
Archaeologists have unearthed what could be the oldest known beer factory at one of the most prominent archaeological sites of ancient Egypt, a top antiquities official said on Saturday.
Birdwatchers get very excited when a 'rare' migratory bird makes landfall having been blown off-course and flown beyond its normal range. But these are rare for a reason; most birds that have made the journey before they are able to correct for large displacements and find their final destination.
Researchers have observed water vapour escaping high up in the thin atmosphere of Mars, offering tantalising new clues as to whether the red planet could have once hosted life.
One of Britain's biggest and oldest stone circles has been found in Wales - and could be the original building blocks of Stonehenge.
Genetic and fossil records do not reveal a single point where modern humans originated, researchers have found.
Researchers say the Australian lungfish, native to the Burnett and Mary Rivers, is the closest living fish relative to humans and other land dwellers.
Archaeologists have managed to get near-perfect notes out of a musical instrument that's more than 17,000 years old.
They’ve long been thought of as smarter than your average animal, but now researchers claim they have taught pigs to use a joystick, suggesting they are even cleverer than previously thought.
FarFarOut, a large chunk of rock found in 2018 at a whopping distance of around 132 astronomical units from the Sun, has been studied and characterised, and we now know a lot more about it, and its orbit.
Scotland's remote St Kilda archipelago was inhabited as long as 2,000 years ago, according to archaeologists
Scientific research and indigenous oral traditions have long been separated. But increased interaction is bringing new insight into the past.
Experts hailed the discovery in 2015 as "stunning" -- 47 teeth found in a cave in southern China dated back to 80,0000 to 120,000 years ago, challenging widely accepted ideas about human evolution.
Some useful human microorganisms have long, long histories.
On Wednesday (February 3), Cambridge became the second city in Massachusetts to decriminalize natural psychedelics, such as ibogaine, ayahuasca, and psilocybin mushrooms.
A planetary system 200 light-years away has been found locked in a rare orbital dance.
Were the Amazons of ancient Greek mythology — fierce female warriors said to have roamed a vast area around the Black Sea known as Scythia — real?
Bronze age graves, neolithic pottery and the vestiges of a mysterious C-shaped enclosure that might have been a prehistoric industrial area are among the finds unearthed by archaeologists who have carried out preliminary work on the site of the proposed new road tunnel at Stonehenge.
When you look up at the sky, the region of space around Earth may look as clear as a song, but there's a heck of a lot going on out there that we can't see.
Archaeologists have discovered dozens of terracotta figurines that are over 2,000 years old, including ones that depict gods, goddesses, men, women, cavalry and animals.
There's a landmark project underway in Melbourne to find out whether psilocybin - the hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms - can be used to improve end-of-life experiences. But many Australians have already turned to the underground because they're convinced psychedelics to improve their mental health.
Image from: Spirit Vine Retreats (Wiki Commons)
I feel therefore I am ... In this fascinating study, a neuropsychologist argues that the mystery of consciousness centres on emotions
Psychedelic drug DMT could help stroke victims recover by rewiring their brains faster, according the first clinical trial of its kind.
It is thought the dead were given gold foil amulets shaped like tongues so that they could speak before the court of the god Osiris in the afterlife.
New observations of a very unusual and mysterious star located approximately 15,000 light-years away from Earth have revealed a bizarre pattern of stellar activity that astronomers say they've never witnessed before.
A recent discovery has uncovered evidence of what may be the earliest-known use of symbols. The symbols were found on a bone fragment in the Ramle region in central Israel and are believed to be approximately 120,000 years old.
Findings suggest the first galaxies in the universe were more massive than previously thought.
Gullickson, executive director of the Mental Health & Addiction Association of Oregon.... pushed for the passage of Measure 110,first-of-its-kind legislation that decriminalizes the possession of all illegal drugs in Oregon, including heroin, cocaine, meth and oxycodone.
The oldest evidence of land fungus may be a wee microfossil that's 635 million years old, found in a cave in southern China.
Deep - really deep - in the Antarctic ice, scientists have found jarosite, a tawny-hued mineral that's rarely found on Earth, but seems to be curiously abundant on the red planet.
When Harvard professor Avi Loeb discovered possible signs of extraterrestrial activity, it caused a scandal in the research community. Is fear and conservatism stopping science from considering plausible evidence that there are aliens out there?
Prehistoric teeth unearthed at a site in Jersey reveal signs of interbreeding between Neanderthals and our own species, scientists say.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS IN EGYPT are preparing to open a 3,000-year-old burial shaft at the Saqqara necropolis, south of Cairo, in the coming week.
The treatments of the future may arise from a long-stigmatized class of drugs
"What second moon," you ask? Astronomers call it 2020 SO – a small object that dropped into Earth's orbit about halfway between our planet and the moon in September 2020.
A striking 600-year-old Aztec sculpture depicting a golden eagle has been uncovered in an ancient temple in Mexico, archaeologists with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) announced Monday (Jan. 25).
Large parts of the Sahara Desert were green thousands of years ago, evidenced by prehistoric engravings in the desert of giraffes, crocodiles and a stone-age cave painting of humans swimming.
As countries begin an age of Martian exploration, planetary protection advocates insist we must be careful of interplanetary contamination
The evolution of the opposable thumb is often placed hand-in-hand with the rise of stone tools.
Professor David Nutt explains recent scientific discoveries – and how substances like LSD have influenced creative breakthroughs.
Archaeologists have discovered a fantastical-looking, 1,500-year-old house in Turkey that was decorated with illusory wall paintings and terracotta tiles on the floor with puppy prints and possible chicken decorations pressed into them.
Regulators will soon grapple with how to safely administer powerful psychedelics for treating depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Sometime toward the end of the last ice age, a group of humans armed with stone-tipped spears stalked their prey in the bitter cold of northeastern Siberia, tracking bison and woolly mammoths across a vast, grassy landscape.
One of the lingering mysteries of the universe is why anything exists at all.
The Sun has a lot of rhythm and goes through different cycles of activity. The most well-known cycle might be the Schwabe cycle, which has an 11-year cadence. But what about cycles with much longer time scales? How can scientists understand them?
A massive "cursus" monument, a site for ancient rituals, that was built around the same time as Stonehenge, has been discovered on the Scottish Isle of Arran.
Multi-disciplinary researchers at The University of Manchester have helped develop a powerful physics-based tool to map the pace of language development and human innovation over thousands of years—even stretching into pre-history before records were kept.
Researchers from McGill University have discovered, for the first time, one of the possible mechanisms that contributes to the ability of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to increase social interaction
These two images were taken by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and show how Mars' surface is changing over time – in this case, due to thermal erosion.
Neuroscientist Dr. Carl talks drug addiction, legalization, the opioid crisis, and more in a discussion about his new book "Drug Use for Grown-Ups"
We Homo sapiens didn't use to be alone. Long ago, there was a lot more human diversity; Homo sapiens lived alongside an estimated eight now-extinct species of human about 300,000 years ago
Whichever way you look at it, the story of our species’ birthplace in Africa and dispersal across the planet is incredibly complicated.
Early Medieval Europe is frequently viewed as a time of cultural stagnation, often given the misnomer of the 'Dark Ages'. However, analysis has revealed new ideas could spread rapidly as communities were interconnected, creating a surprisingly unified culture in Europe.
Researchers from the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University unraveled the function of flint tools known as "chopping tools," found at the prehistoric site of Revadim, east of Ashdod.
Indigenous leaders and environmentalists are urging Joe Biden to shutdown some of America’s most controversial fossil fuel pipelines, after welcoming his executive order cancelling the Keystone XL (KXL) project.
Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, astronomers have identified two pairs of stars beyond the galaxy that are consuming their companions.
Simon Fraser University researchers have found evidence that large ambush-predatory worms--some as long as two metres--roamed the ocean floor near Taiwan over 20 million years ago.
New cash for the UK's growing drug problem is welcome. But help for drug users is skewed by the government's old drug war mantra.
The research promises to be the first exploration of naturalistic psilocybin microdosing in a lab-setting using a cutting-edge neuroimaging technique and a unique kind of trial protocol.
Image from: https://www.needpix.com (Wiki Commons)
From cowrie shells to native resources and animals, currency in some shape or form has long been a part of human history.
Likely the most well-known result of the Earth's magnetic field are the Aurora Borealis and Australis (Northern and Southern Lights).
Ancient fragments of Earth's crust acted as 'seeds' for new crust to grow from.
The fluttering flight patterns of butterflies have long inspired poets but baffled scientists.
The Anthropocene marks relentless and increasingly grave environmental degradation as the Earth faces tipping points for climate change, biodiversity and survival. To address these ills, scientists say we can learn valuable lessons from the past.
New research suggests that the public’s perception of the potential harms of magic mushrooms is not in line with drug laws. The study, which appears in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, found that psilocybin-containing mushrooms are considered less dangerous than alcohol, tobacco, and other substances.
A funerary temple belonging to Queen Nearit has been discovered in the ancient Egyptian burial ground Saqqara next to the pyramid of her husband, pharaoh Teti, who ruled Egypt from around 2323 B.C. to 2291 B.C.
In results announced this week at the 237th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky survey present the most detailed look yet at the warp of our own galaxy.
A convoy of Spaniards and allies was ritually sacrificed in 1520 at Tecoaque – ‘the place where they ate them’ – before Hernán Cortés wreaked revenge.
The mighty constellation of Orion the hunter is one of the greatest sights in the night sky.
Image from:http://deepskycolors.com/astro/JPEG/RBA_Orion_HeadToToes.jpg (Wiki Commons)
The gravitational waves we’ve detected so far have been like tsunamis in the spacetime sea, but it’s believed that gentle ripples should also pervade the universe. Now, a 13-year survey of light from pulsars scattered across the galaxy may have revealed the first hints of these background signals.
Image from: https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA24036 (Wiki Commons)
An aerial photographer has compiled a series of images of skeletal-like 'trees' cutting their way through mudflats and lake beds in Norfolk and Suffolk.
Scientists have identified the presence of a non-tobacco plant in ancient Maya drug containers for the first time.
Critics condemn ‘callous betrayal’ after Trump officials set in motion transfer of Oak Flat to Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.
A brain imaging study has found that inflicting pain on another person in compliance with an order is accompanied by reduced activation in parts of the brain associated with the perception of others’ pain.
Image from: Martin420 (Wiki Commons)
Franz Mesmer might have been on to something when he described animal magnetism as an invisible force possessed by all living things – at least, that seems to be the case with these snakes.
Roughly 8,200 years ago, the island of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov in Lake Onega in the Republic of Karelia, Russia, housed a large burial ground where men, women and children of varying ages were buried.
Palaeoproteomics, a new technology that studies the proteins of ancient remains, is shaking up history. Not only can we now peer further back in time, but the technique is also letting us see our past in a new way.
Image from: MAKY.OREL (Wiki Commons)
A study of two ancient skeletons recovered from Guam indicates that the early settlers of the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific may have originated from the Philippines.
Psilocybin does not appear to severely impact gene expression, according to a new study published in European Neuropsychopharmacology. But the psychedelic substance — which is found in “magic” mushrooms — might produce lasting changes to the expression of a few immune-related genes in the brain.
Around one of the galaxy's oldest stars, an orange dwarf named TOI-561 just 280 light-years away, astronomers have found three orbiting exoplanets - one of which is a rocky world 1.5 times the size of Earth, whipping around the star on a breakneck 10.5-hour orbit.
Scientists know a surprising amount about the titillating episode in human history when our species got together, including whether we kissed and the nature of their sexual organs.
A study of extinct dire wolf DNA reveals surprises, including that the carnivores, made famous as fictional pets in Game of Thrones, weren't closely related to wolves.
Image from: Flickr: Dire Wolf Skeleton (Wiki Commons)
More than 45,500 years ago, perched on a ledge at the back of an Indonesian cave, an artist was at work.
Remarkably well-preserved fossils are helping scientists unravel a mystery about the origins of early animals that puzzled Charles Darwin.
Based on what we know about gravitational waves, the Universe should be full of them. Every colliding pair of black holes or neutron stars, every core-collapse supernova - even the Big Bang itself - should have sent ripples ringing across spacetime.
A 500-year-old statue of a mysterious woman wearing a large, "Star Wars"-like headdress has been discovered in central Mexico, according to Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.
Researchers at CENIEH, have participated in a study published in the Journal of Human Evolution, on one of the few human fossils known from late Early Pleistocene China...
The oddly coherent motion of small satellite galaxies is challenging our accepted model of the universe.
New research suggests that psychedelics may be a viable treatment option for those suffering from race-based trauma.
Northern hemisphere skywatchers can search for the planet this month as it rises higher each night.
Image from: Brocken Inaglory (Wiki Commons)
Hippies and other early psychonauts weren’t the only ones dropping acid back in the Sixties and Seventies. Several animals also had the experience of dabbling with LSD, courtesy of the scientists who wanted to see what effects it would have on various species. The results of those tests ranged from bizarre to tragic.
Scientists have uncovered the youngest known Middle Stone Age tools in modern-day Senegal, on the west coast of Africa, dated to as recently as 11,000 years ago.
Having survived the meteor impact that wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years ago, crocodiles are one of the most resilient animals on Earth.
The Amarna Letters preserve an inside look at Egyptian diplomacy, revealing how power brokers maneuvered, alliances were forged, and pharaohs were flattered.
Image from: en:Amarna letters (Wiki Commons)
Isolated in the heart of the Amazon, Dario Kopenawa Yanomami’s father is working with shamans and the spirits of the forest to weaken the xawara, the word Brazil’s indigenous Yanomami community uses for epidemics brought in by outsiders.
Image from: NASA (Wiki Commons)
Many botanists dispute idea of plant sentience, but study of climbing beans sows seed of doubt.
Want to know whether an ancient Sogdian smoked cannabis or a Viking got high on henbane? A new method, which analyzes drug residue in the tartar of teeth, may soon be able to tell.
Image from: Metju12. (Wiki Commons)
One of the most remarkable “sixth” senses in the animal kingdom is magnetoreception – the ability to detect magnetic fields – but exactly how it works remains a mystery.
Image from: BanduG (Wiki Commons)
Since time immemorial, philosophers and scholars have contemplated the beginning of time and even tried to determine when all things began.
The Red Planet is wiggling and wobbling as it spins, research in the journal Geophysical Research Letters confirms, and astronomers have no idea why.