News Desk

In a decision that shocked some observers, key advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) voted that the effectiveness of the party drug MDMA for treating post-traumatic stress disorder is unproven.

Details of the “highly unusual” neutron star’s discovery is published in Nature Astronomy. There have been more than 3,000 radio-emitting neutron stars discovered.  The newly found star’s spin is well outside what astrophysicists predict of neutron star behaviour.

New research led by geologists at Western Australia’s Curtin University provides evidence that fresh water emerged on Earth about 4 billion years ago – half a billion years earlier than previously thought. The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Archaeologists have fully mapped a series of ancient rock art in Venezuela and Colombia, including the world’s largest monumental engraving, using photography and drone footage. The study was published on Tuesday (June 4) in the journal Antiquity.

Researchers have explored how the River Nile evolved over the past 11,500 years and how changes in its geography could have helped shape the fortunes of ancient Egyptian civilisation. The research is published in Nature Geoscience.

Image by: Marc Ryckaert (MJJR – Wiki Commons)

An uncle and nephew buried in two of the richest burial mounds, along with evidence of first-cousin inbreeding, point strongly toward matrilineal dynasties of elite power, according to the study, which was published Monday (June 3) in the journal Nature Human Behaviour

New research published in the journal Science Advances might explain the Earth-shaking processes that led to the end-Cambrian mass extinction.

Despite decades of study, this Ice Age mystery remains unsolved. Researchers simply don’t have sufficient evidence at this point to rule out one scenario or the other—or indeed other explanations that have been proposed (e.g. disease, an impact event from a comet, or a combination of factors)… A new work published in Frontiers in Mammal Science set out to address this information deficit.

A new study from Tel Aviv University identified the earliest appearance worldwide of special stone tools, used 400,000 years ago to process fallow deer. The paper was published in Archaeologies.

The rich human occupation  of Mediterranean island Cyprus has been pushed back thousands of years by new research led by Cypriot and Australian archaeologists. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA shows the first human occupation on Cyprus between 14,257 and 13,182 years ago.

A new study of stick insects suggests that evolution may sometimes repeat itself in a predictable manner, which could help our understanding of how organisms may change in response to selection pressures. The study has been published in Science Advances.

French archaeologists have uncovered nine large graves containing the remains of horses from up to 2,000 years ago, in a find described as “extraordinary”.

The ancient Egyptians were remarkably sophisticated and advanced in the field of medicine – so noted for their skills and knowledge that we’re still learning from them thousands of years later. The findings have been published in Frontiers in Medicine.

In the face of a deepening mental health crisis, more police officers and public servants are turning to psychedelics for relief and healing from work-related trauma.

At some point hundreds of millions of years ago, dinosaur scales evolved into feathers. New research published in Nature Communications might help explain how and when that transition occurred.

Mars’ moon Phobos may actually be a comet — or at least part of one — that was gravitationally captured by the Red Planet long ago, a new preprint study based on previously unpublished photos suggests.