News Desk

Do animals dream? And what would proof of their dreams tell us about their consciousness? In a new episode of the University of Chicago’s “Big Brains” podcast, Peña-Guzmán talks about the science of animal consciousness.

New research published in Scientific Reports found that people who microdose psychedelics displayed greater improvements in mental health and mood over the span of 1 month compared to non-microdosers.

While studying diamonds inside an ancient meteorite, scientists have found a strange, interwoven microscopic structure that has never been seen before.

More than 11,000 years ago, young children trekking with their families through what is now White Sands National Park in New Mexico discovered the stuff of childhood dreams: muddy puddles made from the footprints of a giant ground sloth.

High above one of western Britain’s loveliest valleys, the silence is broken by the sound of gentle digging, scraping and brushing, along with bursts of excited chatter as another ancient feature is revealed or a curious visitor stops by to find out what is going on.

As the first dinosaurs were finding their feet around 230 million years ago, the ancestors of modern mammals were also emerging. Somewhere along the way they developed a remarkable ability: to generate their own warmth.

The ancient North American city of Cahokia had as its focal point a feature now known as Monks Mound, a giant earthwork surrounded on its north, south, east and west by large rectangular open areas.

Researchers wanted to know how animals learn to walk and learn from their stumbling, so they built a four-legged, dog-sized robot to simulate it, according to a new study reported in Nature Machine Intelligence.

Mummies are found all over the world and reveal the practices of long-lost peoples.

The mountain fortress of Rabana-Merquly in modern Iraqi Kurdistan was one of the major regional centers of the Parthian Empire, which extended over parts of Iran and Mesopotamia approximately 2,000 years ago.

Scientists have taken an important first step into studying the effects of the psychedelic drug psilocybin — the active substance in “magic” mushrooms — at a cellular and genetic level. Their findings, published in Scientific Reports, indicate that a single dose of psilocybin produces a long-lasting antidepressant-like effect in flies.

A dormant black hole nine times the mass of the Sun has been found outside the Milky Way for the first time, in what researchers have called a “very exciting discovery”.

Groundwater that was recently discovered deep underground in a mine in South Africa is estimated to be 1.2 billion years old. Researchers suspect that the  groundwater is some of the oldest on the planet, and its chemical interactions with the surrounding rock could offer new insights about energy production and storage in Earth’s crust.

A team of researchers with affiliations to multiple institutions in the U.S. has found that the metal content of Fermi bubble high-velocity clouds does not match with material in the Milky Way’s galactic center, suggesting that at least some of the material comes from somewhere else.

Researchers have peered back through 800 years of history to conclude that Mayapan – the capital of culture and politics for the Maya people of the Yucatán Peninsula in the 13th and 14th century CE – may well have been undone by drought.