Newsdesk Archive
An American spacecraft is about to attempt the audacious task of grabbing rock samples from an asteroid.
Sweat baths have a long history of use in Mesoamerica. Commonly used by midwives in postpartum and perinatal care in contemporary Maya communities, these structures are viewed as grandmother figures, a pattern that can also be traced to earlier periods of history.
Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed another trove of ancient coffins in a vast necropolis south of Cairo, authorities said Monday.
Image from Nazlet El-Semman, Al Haram, Giza Governorate, Egypt - panoramio (10).jpg (Wiki Commons)
This year, the Southern Taurids are active from late September to late November this year, with a peak on the night of November 4. The Northern Taurids peak a week later, on the night of November 11.
"The initial purpose of this study was to refine the chronology of these two sites, which are amongst the oldest evidence of human presence in Western Europe, north of the 45°N latitude, before 500,000 years ago,"
Feline geoglyph from 200-100BC emerges during work at Unesco world heritage site
Ancient art throughout the catacombs of Rome, painted on the walls and carved into stone coffins, shows Jesus as he multiplies loaves of bread, heals the sick and brings the dead back to life. These images are unified by one surprising element: In each of them, Jesus appears to brandish a wand.
It's an excellent year to view the Orionids, which peak before dawn on Wednesday (Oct. 21).
The group climbed the steep mountainside, clambering across an Alpine glacier, before finding what they were seeking: a crystal vein filled with the precious rocks needed to sculpt their tools.
The earliest blotter papers expressed the astronomical depths of LSD with images of crescent moons, swirling nebulas, and star scapes.
Have you ever been in more than one place at the same time? If you’re much bigger than an atom, the answer will be no.
New research suggests that feelings of awe from psychedelic drugs can positively affect narcissistic personality traits.
Image by David Morris (Wiki Commons)
The earliest "babies" known to science have been uncovered in the remains of a primitive fish found in Orkney.
More than 10,000 years ago, a woman or young man—a toddler balanced on one hip—set out on a harried trip northward through what is now White Sands National Park, New Mexico.
Such conversations may seem flippant. But ever since Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford wrote a seminal paper about the simulation argument in 2003, philosophers, physicists, technologists and, yes, comedians have been grappling with the idea of our reality being a simulacrum
They might be tiny creatures with a comical appearance, but tardigrades are one of life’s great survivors. Now scientists say they have found a new species boasting an unexpected piece of armour: a protective fluorescent shield.
I loaned my head to the world’s first fMRI study on the effects of salvinorin A, a potent psychedelic. Here’s what it revealed.
The drawings depict birds, monkeys, killer whales and more. Theories about their ultimate purpose abound.
The islands of the Caribbean used to be home to a huge array of unusual animals, including a group of rodents that weighed up to 200 kilograms.
Death by spaghettification and a stellar peacock.
Psychedelic drugs like psilocybin are being tested to treat mental illness. They're also expanding our understanding about human consciousness.
Today, ball games are one of the most popular leisure activities in the world, an important form of mass entertainment and big business. But who invented balls, where and when?
Long overshadowed by traditions that loom larger in the public imagination such as the Maya and the Aztecs, artists of the Gulf Coast region of Mexico produced some of the most striking sculptures known from the ancient Americas.
The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb wouldn’t happen for another century but in 1821 in Piccadilly, London, an exhibition about ancient Egypt opened. Encouraged by Napoleon’s dramatic invasion of Egypt two decades earlier, ‘Egyptomania’ was catching on in Britain as it had in Paris.
Image from Awikimate (Wiki Commons)
People aren't the only ones who show sympathy. Birds also seem to care about the fate of conspecifics. They notice how much food the others already have and then share theirs with individuals that were not given any.
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Scientists are developing psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, into a treatment for depression.
In Kazakhstan’s Tamgaly gorge, 3,500-year-old rock art provides clues about the society that created them.
Image from Wiki Commons
New findings published today in Scientific Reports suggest that one major feature of our spatial recall is efficiently locating high-calorie, energy-rich food. The study’s authors believe human spatial memory ensured that our hunter-gatherer ancestors could prioritize the location of reliable nutrition, giving them an evolutionary leg up.
Some babies are now being born without wisdom teeth, and more people have a previously rare additional artery in their forearm, as humansundergo a “micro-evolution”, a new study suggests.
A startup founder who fled from a chaotic and violent childhood in Myanmar opens up about how MDMA-assisted psychotherapy helped her come to terms with repressed shame and grief.
At least two dozen planets outside the solar system might be better for life than Earth. These planets are just a little older, a little wetter, a little warmer and a little larger than Earth is, researchers wrote Sept. 18 in the journal Astrobiology.
A stream of new studies reveals clues about Bennu’s past....
In an editorial in the New Zealand Medical Journal, specialists from the fields of addiction treatment, public health, health promotion and epidemiology have urged New Zealanders to tick yes in the referendum, days after a poll showed the vote on a knife-edge.
The journal Science Advances published a study showing that newborn Neanderthals possessed a broad thoracic cage similar to adults, capable of sustaining the demanding energy expenditure of a large and broad body.
The remains of a 1,200-year-old pagan temple to the Old Norse gods such as Thor and Odin have been discovered in Norway — a rare relic of the Viking religion built a few centuries before Christianity became dominant there.
Sir Roger, 89, who won the honour for his seminal work proving that black holes exist, said he had found six ‘warm’ points in the sky (dubbed ‘Hawking Points’) which are around eight times the diameter of the Moon.
Black holes are perhaps the strangest, least-understood objects in our universe. With so much potential — being linked to everything from wormholes to new baby universes — they have sucked in physicists for decades.
October is set to be a bumper month for spotting shooting stars in the night sky.
In today’s human-dominated world, rampant deforestation is driving many of Southeast Asia’s species towards extinction. But according to research published in the journal Nature, the opposite once occurred – as rainforests replaced grasslands thousands of years ago, megafauna and ancient humans vanished.
A growing body of research suggests the planet Venus may have had an Earth-like environment billions of years ago, with water and a thin atmosphere.
Image from https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/figures/PIA23791_fig2.jpg (Wiki Commons)
It is thought the celestial body was created in a cosmic crash 4.5bn years ago.
A new study by Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority indicates that a workshop for smelting copper ore once operated in the Neveh Noy neighborhood of Beer Sheva, the capital of the Negev Desert.
An antelope, a lonely figure, a family linking arms — Kanniga Premjai shines her flashlight across a cave to reveal long-hidden paintings, a stunning discovery for Thailand’s scrappy team of archaeologists.
Preserved brain cells have been found in the remains of a young man who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.
Human ancestors not only knew how to use fire, they also developed sophisticated technologies for making tools. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science recently employed cutting-edge technologies of their own to take a fresh look at a collection of stone tools.
Something is showering gold across the universe. But no one knows what it is.
Early people were rapidly adapting to climate change as they made their way towards Australia tens of thousands of years ago, new research shows.
Research led by The University of Texas at Austin has found fossil evidence for manatees along the Texas coast dating back to the most recent ice age. The discovery raises questions about whether manatees have been making the visit for thousands of years, or if an ancient population of ice age manatees once called Texas home somewhere between 11,000 and 240,000 years ago.
The final resting place of what appears to be an Anglo-Saxon warrior has been unearthed in a field in Berkshire, in a discovery archaeologists say sheds fresh light on the rise and fall of local tribes.
With no bright stars in the same part of the sky, the red planet will be unmistakeable.
Image from ESA (Wiki Commons)
During my first experience with iboga — a powerful psychedelic made from the wood of the African tabernanthe iboga shrub — I took a “flood dose,” which is considered the highest dose you can take.
M87*, the first black hole ever to be directly imaged, has a newly-identified feature: it glitters and wobbles, according to new research.
Those higher in narcissism are disproportionately taking part in the democratic process, according to new research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Image from Flickr (Wiki Commons)
This summer brought the richest harvest of anthropological discoveries to archeologists working at the world-famous Denisova Cave in the south of Siberia.
Two in five of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction as a result of the destruction of the natural world, according to an international report. Plants and fungi underpin life on Earth, but the scientists said they were now in a race against time to find and identify species before they were lost.
Southern Taurid meteor shower, which is best viewed after midnight September 10 to November 20.
Archaeologists in Siberia have unearthed a 2,500-year-old grave holding the remains of four people from the ancient Tagar culture — including two warriors, a male and female — and a stash of their metal weaponry.
As some places in America begin to decriminalise psychedelic drugs for medical treatment, ethical questions are being raised about whether those who really need the treatments will be able to get them.
Image from Freevg.org (Wiki Commons)
Debate is raging about whether pterosaurs, flying reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs, had feathers or not.
Image from Tim Evanson (Wiki Commons)
European astronomers are taking a close look at one of the hottest known exoplanets.
A top goal in cosmology is to precisely measure the total amount of matter in the universe, a daunting exercise for even the most mathematically proficient. A team led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, has now done just that.
Three underground lakes have been detected near the south pole of Mars.
Modern humans arrived in the westernmost part of Europe 41,000 to 38,000 years ago, about 5,000 years earlier than previously known, according to Jonathan Haws, professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Louisville, and an international team of researchers.
A form of symbiosis, mutualism is an interaction between two individuals that benefits both—and it’s widespread across the animal kingdom.
Image from Alvesgaspar (Wiki Commons)
Experts from the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology of the University of Seville have just published a study in the prestigious journal PLOS ONE on an important archaeological find in the Cueva de la Dehesilla (Cádiz).
Sometime between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago, after the last ice age ended, the Sahara Desert transformed.
Billions of years ago, long before oxygen was readily available, the notorious poison arsenic could have been the compound that breathed new life into our planet.
Magawa has been formally recognised for his work and been presented with a miniature PDSA Gold Medal, the animal equivalent of the George Cross. He is the first rat in the charity’s 77-year history to receive such an award.
Guided dreaming could be used to boost creativity or to confront sources of stress and trauma.
A new study finds Homo sapiens men essentially emasculated their brawny brethren when they mated with Neanderthal women more than 100,000 years ago.
Researchers have found a previously unknown arrangement of microcircuits in the avian brain that may be analogous to the mammalian neocortex. And in a separate study, other researchers have linked this same region to conscious thought.
Tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors sought out wild canines with a frisky streak that lives on in modern dogs—particularly herding and hunting breeds.
Animism—seeing the spirit in everything—goes deeper than the psychedelic experience, and this distinction may be crucial for psychedelic healing work.
Chromium steel—similar to what we know today as tool steel—was first made in Persia, nearly a millennium earlier than experts previously thought, according to a new study led by UCL researchers.
Dark matter is a mysterious non-luminous substance making up the vast majority of matter in the universe. Though experts have observed the gravitational effects of dark matter for decades, scientists remain baffled as to its true nature.
Few phrases in science are as influential as Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory of 'survival of the fittest'.
The idea is commonly understood to mean that those who are physically dominant have a higher chance of survival. But the evolutionary success of Homo Sapiens suggests that we might have completely misunderstood Darwin’s idea.
Image from Page:Reclus - L'Homme et la Terre, tome V, Librairie universelle, 1905.djvu/128 (Wiki Commons)
Ann Arbor's City Council unanimously voted Monday to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms and plants.
Have you ever heard the story of a wizard battle that supposedly took place when an early church was constructed? Or how about the story of a border guard who defied King Herod's orders and spared Jesus' life?
A total of 27 sarcophagi buried more than 2,500 years ago have been unearthed by archaeologists in an ancient Egyptian necropolis.
This is a world often regarded as Earth gone wrong, where extreme climate change has turned it into one of the closest approximations of hell we’ve ever seen. And now we’re told it might be home to alien life.
About 800 people usually gather at the Wiltshire monument, on or around 21 September, to mark the autumn equinox.
Study uncovers relationships between plants, people dating back more than 1,300 years.
A sixth religious group in Canada has been granted an exemption to use the hallucinogenic tea, known for causing visions and vomiting, as part of its ceremonies.
Psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline cause severe and often long-lasting hallucinations, but they show great potential in treating serious psychiatric conditions, such as major depressive disorder.
One day about 120,000 years ago, a few humans wandered along the shore of an ancient lake in what is now the Nefud Desert in Saudi Arabia.
A milk-tooth found in the vicinity of "Riparo del Broion" on the Berici Hills in the Veneto region bears evidence of one of the last Neanderthals in Italy.
A mass extinction event sparked by a sudden shift in climate more than 200m years ago reshaped life on Earth and ushered in the age of the dinosaurs, scientists claim.
One day, perhaps a little over 7,000 years ago, a man in his 30s and a younger companion dipped their fingers in ochre pigment and set about daubing the walls of a shallow cave in southern Spain with anthropomorphic, circular and geometric designs.
The rhythmic activity of a single layer of neurons has now been shown to cause dissociation — an experience involving a feeling of disconnection from the surrounding world.
The first official push to get MDMA and magic mushrooms rescheduled in Australia is underway...
There’s a lot of discussion about artificial consciousness and the possibility of machines gaining self-awareness once they become sufficiently complex. But isn’t the most complex system in existence the internet?
In the popular imagination, Vikings were fearsome blonde-haired warriors from Scandinavia who used longboats to carry out raids across Europe in a brief but bloody reign of terror. But the reality is more complex, says SFU Archaeology Prof. Mark Collard.
Image from Flickr(Wikki)
Some of the oldest remains of early human ancestors have been unearthed in Olduvai Gorge, a rift valley setting in northern Tanzania where anthropologists have discovered fossils of hominids that existed 1.8 million years ago.
A major mental health healing solution is on the horizon: ketamine therapy. A growing body of research shows that the drug, which has long been used as an anesthetic in emergency departments, can be an effective treatment option for several mental health conditions...
After months of testing, the first funeral has taken place in the Netherlands using a fast-composting “living coffin” made of mycelium, the mat of fibres that forms the underground part of fungi.
Egypt is building two highways across the pyramids plateau outside Cairo, reviving and expanding a project that was suspended in the 1990s after an international outcry.
From ayahuasca to iboga, and even synthetic compounds, people are turning to psychedelics to treat pain, in addition to mental health.
Traces of a pungent gas that waft through the clouds of Venus may be emanations from aerial organisms – microbial life, but not as we know it
A University of Central Florida researcher is co-author of a new paper that may help answer why some animals have a magnetic 'sixth' sense, such as sea turtles' ability to return to the beach where they were born.