Newsdesk Archive
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) found quasi-periodic flickers in millimeter-waves from the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius (Sgr) A*.
Astronomers believe they may have found the first direct evidence of a new planet being born. A dense disc of dust and gas has been spotted surrounding a young star called AB Aurigae, about 520 light years away from Earth.
A new study has revealed the oldest link yet between Native Americans and their ancestors in East Asia: a 14,000-year-old tooth belonging to a close cousin of today’s Native Americans, found thousands of kilometers from the landmass that once connected Eurasia and the Americas.
A long-anticipated recalibration of radiocarbon dating could shift the age of some prehistoric samples hundreds of years
Climate scientists from the IBS Center for Climate Physics discover that, contrary to previously held beliefs, Neanderthal extinction was neither caused by abrupt glacial climate shifts, nor by interbreeding with Homo sapiens
Mathematics is visible everywhere in nature, even where we are not expecting it. It can help explain the way galaxies spiral, a seashell curves, patterns replicate, and rivers bend.
One ecstasy trial reached a milestone when it was approved to treat people with post-traumatic stress disorder in America. This could be good timing for the UK too.
We now know people and megafauna overlapped by up to 20,000 years, until changes to vegetation, water and fire
Elephants ranged over Schöningen in Lower Saxony 300,000 years ago. In recent years, remains of at least ten elephants have been found at the Palaeolithic sites situated on the edges of the former opencast lignite mine.
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the widespread disruption of our usual routines. The ambiguity of when it will end, how things will unfold and what will happen in the future has resulted in a collective liminal state, a kind of a waiting area on the threshold of change.
Journalist Leslie Kean investigates topics that many consider to be beyond the pale.
Encounters with inter-dimensional beings, atheists discovering belief, and the bizarre world of DMT-induced entities. A trip to the fringes of psychedelic science.
Image from hellO Flickr (Wiki Commons)
You've probably been a little too preoccupied during the tumultuous start to this year to notice that 2020 has also been a high-drama time for comets visiting the inner solar system.
Image from Diego Toscan (Wiki Commons)
Early humans lived in South African river valleys with deep, fertile soils filled with grasslands, floodplains, woodlands, and wetlands that abounded with hippos, zebras, antelopes, and many other animals, some extinct for millennia.
Researchers have discovered part of the mystery behind the construction of the earliest known temple in human history.
A British cannabis producer has been acquired by a US-based private equity fund in a multimillion-pound deal which some say could accelerate the legalisation of the recreational drug in the UK.
While many of us use social media to be tickled silly by cat videos or wowed by delectable cakes, others use them to discover new species.
Imagine a psychedelic that promises you’ll never have a bad trip and resets your brain in such a way that you wouldn't have to depend on antidepressants.
The oldest Homo sapiens fossils that anthropologists have found thus far date to around 315,000 years ago. That means we can say that modern humans are at least that old. But our lineage likely extends further back in time....
A rock floating in space is an asteroid. While it is zooming through our atmosphere it is called a meteor. Once it hits the ground, we call it a meteorite.
Once stigmatized across the western world, the likes of MDMA, LSD and magic mushrooms are taking back their place in the world of medicine.
When it comes to reconstructing how ancient creatures lived, palaeontologists like us are as much detectives as we are scientists.
Ancient genomics is starting to unravel the history of East Asia. The first large-scale studies of ancient human genomes from the region suggest that many of its inhabitants descend from two once-distinct populations that began mixing after the development of agriculture some 10,000 years ago.
Earth may have been far more oxygen-rich early in its history than previously thought, setting the stage for the evolution of complex life, according to new research by scientists at the University of Alberta and the University of Tartu in Estonia.
A hillfort in Aberdeenshire is one of the largest ancient settlements ever discovered in Scotland, researchers have said.
Dozens of previously unrecorded Roman, prehistoric and medieval sites have been discovered by archaeology volunteers based at home.
Astronomers have detected regular pulsations in a class of intermediate-sized stars known as delta Scutis that has until now puzzled scientists.
Native American spiritual leaders say this is a time to recalibrate for a better future.
Image from Creative Commons
Spied through a normal telescope, the galaxy PKS 2014?55 is an unremarkable smudge of bright light. But look again in radio wavelengths, and you'll see that the galaxy is hiding a gargantuan, glowing treasure at its center — and X marks the spot.
Modern humans began to edge out the Neanderthals in Europe earlier than previously thought, a new study shows.
Two drug policy reform campaigns in Oregon are teaming up as they both work to collect enough signatures to qualify for the state’s November ballot.
Image from Psilocybe cubensis (Wiki Commons)
They shape the world—and offer lessons for how to live in it.
The Histories by Herodotus (484BC to 425BC) offers a remarkable window into the world as it was known to the ancient Greeks in the mid fifth century BC.
If you go to the Surrey Hills of northwest Tasmania, you’ll see a temperate rainforest dominated by sprawling trees with genetic links going back millions of years. It’s a forest type many consider to be ancient “wilderness”. But this landscape once looked very different.
Evidence continues to mount that the Neandertals, who lived in Europe and Asia until about 40,000 years ago, were more sophisticated people than once thought.
Astronomers have produced a remarkable new image of Jupiter, tracing the glowing regions of warmth that lurk beneath the gas giant's cloud tops.
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Alexander Wendt is one of the most influential political scientists alive. Here’s his case for taking UFOs seriously.
The magic mushroom, a miraculous drug in human history. Once used by religious leaders in ancient societies, they have now been downgraded to the same level as other recreational drugs.
“All these native stories talk about what happens when you die: Your soul goes to the edge of the world, jumps into the Milky Way and climbs into the sky,” says Illinois State Archaeological Survey director Timothy Pauketat.
An international team has conducted what it says is the first in-depth, wide-scale study of the genomic history of ancient civilisations in the central Andes mountains and coast before European contact.
An ancient squid-like creature with 10 arms covered in hooks had just crushed the skull of its prey in a vicious attack when disaster struck, killing both predator and prey, according to a Jurassic period fossil of the duo found on the southern coast of England.
We can now add atmospheric craziness to WASP-79b's already substantial exotic appeal. The gas-giant exoplanet, which lies about 780 light-years from Earth, circles extremely close to its bright host star...
What do the painkillers morphine and codeine, the cancer chemotherapy drug vinblastine, the popular brain health supplement salidroside, and a plethora of other important medicines have in common?
European scientists think they can now describe with confidence what's driving the drift of the North Magnetic Pole.
Astronomers have a new candidate in their search for the nearest black hole to Earth. It's about 1,000 light-years away, or roughly 9.5 thousand, million, million km, in the Constellation Telescopium. That might not sound very close, but on the scale of the Universe, it's actually right next door.
Image from Creative Commons
Studies showing the mental health benefits of psychedelics are inspiring people to take matters into their own hands. But doctors warn it's not as simple as it sounds.
It’s no secret that millions of years ago, the world looked wildly different than it does today. Continents now separated by massive oceans were once next-door neighbors, and today’s frozen wilderness was temperate and green.
Researchers have spent decades looking for evidence of ancient water on Mars. As technology has progressed, more evidence has come to light that rivers, lakes and even oceans were once abundant on the red planet.
Life can thrive in a 100% hydrogen atmosphere, according to a new study. The finding could completely change our understanding of how (and where) life might exist in the universe.
Megiddo is an archaeological site that was inhabited between roughly 7000 B.C. and 300 B.C. Numerous battles were fought near Megiddo during that time, and the Book of Revelation, which refers to the site as Armageddon, prophesied that a final battle at the end of time would take place there.
In 1847, a Native American tribe provided relief aid to Irish people. Now, the favour is being returned.
A New York lawmaker recently introduced a bill to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms by removing the main active ingredient from the state’s list of controlled substances.
Image by Ralpharama~commonswiki
Like other comets, Halley is a cosmic litterbug; about every 76 years as it sweeps closest to the sun, it leaves a "river of rubble" in its wake along its orbit. When the Earth interacts with that rubble river, those comet bits race through our atmosphere at high speeds to produce the effect of "shooting stars."
In the dark ocean depths off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, a magical fairyland of towering spires and hydrothermal chimneys sprout from the seafloor, a stunning new underwater map reveals.
Gradual falls and sharp rises in temperature for millions of years have profoundly affected living conditions on the planet and, consequently, our own evolution.
A review of 100 years of fossil evidence reveals that 100 million years ago a portion of the Sahara Desert was arguably the most dangerous place on the planet, with a concentration of large predatory dinosaurs unmatched in any comparable modern terrestrial ecosystem
Ancient Mars is looking better and better as an abode for life. The famed Mars meteorite Allan Hills 84001 (ALH84001) contains 4-billion-year-old native organic molecules, the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it, a new study suggests.
Griffith researchers contributed to a new isotopic study of fossil teeth that shows the first direct evidence that human success over Neanderthals and other hominins is due to our ability to adapt to changing environments as we island-hopped across the globe.
In the late 1980s, workers excavating a new subway line in downtown Mexico City stumbled upon a long-lost cemetery.
Scenes of hunting in the Paleolithic are common, but this is only the third known instance in which the aftermath with innards on display is shown too.
Within 12 hours of going live, an e-petition to decriminalize the use of psychedelic plants and fungi in Canada had surpassed the 500 signature threshold required to be presented in the House of Commons
What is the fundamental nature of reality? Is space-time — the four-dimensional fabric of our universe — ultimately smooth at the tiniest of scales, or something else?
Scientists have long opposed the idea that dinosaurs lived in aquatic habitats. Now, an international team of researchers, supported by the National Geographic Society, has discovered unambiguous evidence that Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, the longest predatory dinosaur known to science, was aquatic and used tail-propelled swimming locomotion to hunt for prey in a massive river system.
A new article published in Nature Communications applies stable isotope analysis to a collection of fossil human teeth from the islands of Timor and Alor in Wallacea to study the ecological adaptations of the earliest members of our species to reach this isolated part of the world.
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered the ancient mummy of a teenage girl decked out in beautiful jewelry, including beaded necklaces and copper earrings.
Rock known as (52768) 1998 OR2 will pass by on Wednesday but ‘poses no danger to planet’
The Pentagon on Monday released three declassified videos that show US navy pilots encountering what appear to be unidentified flying objects.
Emitting an eerie green glow, they look like foliage from a retro computer game, but in fact they are light-emitting plants produced in a laboratory.
A team of geologists led by the University of Colorado Boulder is digging into what may be Earth's most famous case of geologic amnesia.
Petroglyphs some 7,000 years older than earlier thought with ancients artists using same style in Siberia and Mongolia.
In 2015, flooding exposed the frozen bodies of two cave lion cubs in the Yakutia region of Russia. Members of a species that vanished at the end of the last Ice Age, the pair were buried approximately 12,000 years ago when the roof of their den collapsed and trapped them in the frozen ground.
Existing findings prove that human life goes back to 6,000 years in the region.“A 14,000-year-old evidence of human social life has been identified by experts who examining rock carvings being found near Natanz, which is situated in the heart of the Iranian plateau,”
An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of York, analysed the molecular remains of food left in pottery used by the first farmers who settled along the Atlantic Coast of Europe from 7,000 to 6,000 years ago.
They were expert engineers, way ahead of the curve on underfloor heating, aqueducts and the use of concrete as a building material. Now it turns out that the Romans were also masters at recycling their rubbish.
Psychedelic pharmaceutical company MindMed has announced the development of a novel compound designed to stop the effects of an LSD experience. The compound is claimed to function as an “off-switch” for LSD, allowing clinicians a way to make psychedelic therapy sessions safer if patients become uncomfortable.
Image by William Rafti of the William Rafti Institute
A physics paper proposes neither you nor the world around you are real and that the universe self-simulates itself in a "strange loop".
Images from the Library of Congress (Wiki Commons)
Archaeologists in Germany found a throwing stick that might have been used by a species that preceded Neanderthals.
During the late middle Pleistocene—between 400 000 and 150 0000 years ago—the populations occupying Earth, and Africa specifically, looked very differently from what they do now.
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At the start of 2020, more than a dozen states seemed very likely to legalize marijuana for recreational or medical purposes by the end of the year. Now that a coronavirus pandemichas overwhelmed just about every aspect of American life, it seems only a handful of states will be able to enact marijuana reform.
Two bright nebulas in a galaxy 163,000 light-years away are very pregnant with stars.
Lebanon has become the first Arab country to legalise cannabis farming for medical and industrial purposes – a move that could generate lucrative exports and foreign currency as the country struggles to cope with a financial crisis.
Humans across cultures are drawn to the mystery of horizons. This impulse has led to perilous voyages across land, oceans, and into outer space, but it has yet to unlock the secrets of the ultimate boundary: the cosmological horizon, or the edge of the observable universe.
Author Michael Pollan on whether drugs that comfort the terminally ill can also help people mourning the climate future.
It is the first modern amphibian on the continent and sheds light on the temperate forest ecosystem that once existed on Antarctica.
New findings on procedures and meanings of human heart sacrifices in Mesoamerica.
Florida and Georgia archaeologists have discovered the location of Fort San Antón de Carlos, home of one of the first Jesuit missions in North America. The Spanish fort was built in 1566 in the capital of the Calusa, the most powerful Native American tribe in the region.
If you think you got your freckles, red hair, or even narcolepsy from a Neanderthal in your family tree, think again. People around the world do carry traces of Neanderthals in their genomes. But a study of tens of thousands of Icelanders finds their Neanderthal legacy had little or no impact on most of their physical traits or disease risk.
In Dourados, indigenous people are fighting to keep their children, who are being removed from their families at an alarming rate.
Image from NASA’s globe software World Wind
Hunter-gatherer groups living in the Baltic between seven and a half and six thousand years ago had culturally distinct cuisines, analysis of ancient pottery fragments has revealed.
A research team led by Harvard researchers looked for clues in ancient rocks (older than 3 billion years) from Australia and South Africa, and found that these plates were moving at least 3.2 billion years ago on the early Earth.
Galaxies grow large by eating their smaller neighbours, new research reveals.
You may not be able to see the moon in the sky tonight, but if you look up for long enough at a dark, clear sky, you may catch some "shooting stars."
The first known comet to visit us from another star system has an unusual make-up, according to new research.
When you step outside at night and look to the sky, what do you see: black velvet accented by hundreds of stars, or a bluish glow dotted by a few lights that turn out to blink or dart across the sky?
“Mushrooms are here to help us — they’re a gift,” college student Katy Ayers said. “They’re our biggest ally for helping the environment.”
During the transitional period between the Pleistocene epoch(or the Ice Age, from 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago) and the Holocene epoch (from 11,700 years ago until today), the Earth's temperature underwent massive change.
Ancient pirates left no archaeological records. The historical evidence for what they did, why they did it, and the attempts that were made to quell them is obtained entirely from written sources. These help build a picture of the threat that pirates presented and reveal that the practice was prevalent throughout antiquity.
Image from NASA’s globe software World Wind
A charity in Australia has said that psychedelic drugs should be used as treatment to tackle the psychological impact of coronavirus quarantine.
The retreat of a Norwegian mountain ice patch, which is melting because of climate change, has revealed a lost Viking-era mountain pass scattered with “spectacular” and perfectly preserved artefacts that had been dropped by the side of the road.
Scientists analyzing data gathered by Kepler, which NASA retired in November 2018, just found a hidden gem: an Earth-size world that may be capable of supporting life as we know it.