News Desk

Could LSD, Ketamine and ayahuasca revolutionise mental health treatment? The Brave New World podcast speaks to experts David Nutt and Amanda Feilding about the psychedelic renaissance. (10 min clip).

Image from: Justin Cooke (Wiki Commons)

Scholars of antiquity believe they are on the brink of a new era of understanding after researchers armed with artificial intelligence read the hidden text of a charred scroll that was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago.

The evidence comes from a chemical analysis of more than 100 tiny pieces of rock entrained within the White Continent’s ice, researchers report in the Feb. 1 Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Recent research…points to rapid development in the Middle East, in the region known as the Fertile Crescent. The innovations that came about there subsequently spread, and were adopted by hunter gatherer communities in the Anatolian peninsula (present day Turkey).

New research suggests that low doses of MDMA can help to reduce the challenging effects associated with psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin, the active component in magic mushrooms. The findings, published in Scientific Reports, shed new light on the effects of “candy flipping” and “hippy flipping”…

Rare tree fossils preserved with their leaves have an architecture unlike any plant known today and represent the earliest evidence of smaller trees growing beneath the forest canopy. See the study, published in the journal Current Biology.

New evidence from the fossilised skulls of a 6-million-year-old ape called Lufengpithecus has revealed important clues about how our quadrupedal ancestors made the transition to walking on two legs. The analysis is published in the journal Innovation.

Scientists are finding ever-earlier examples of artistic expression in the archaeological record that reshape what we know about the cognitive abilities of our archaic human relatives, such as Neanderthals.

MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) appears to have positive effects on mental processes related to self-experience, such as emotional awareness and self-compassion, which are often linked to poor treatment outcomes in traditional therapies, according to new research published in PLOS One.

A surprise discovery of human remains in a German cave has “fundamentally changed” the story of our species’ migration into Europe. Their findings were published across three major research papers in the journal Nature.

Archaeologists have discovered a 1,700-year-old royal tomb in Guatemala that’s overflowing with funeral offerings, including an intricately designed jade mask depicting a Maya deity.

A pair of historians at the University of Tübingen have found evidence that an ancient baton, thought to be a work of art created by early humans thousands of years ago, is actually a device to assist with making rope. The study is published in the journal Science Advances. 

Studying ancient gravesites is a fascinating (if morbid) way of peering into the past, though some searches can raise more questions than answers. Take for instance these Early Neolithic skeletons found in a Swedish tomb, which are all missing their skulls. See the research here.

A study has found that playing a soundscape to a common, plant-promoting fungus found in soil caused it to grow more rapidly than fungi that weren’t exposed to sound. The novel ‘eco-acoustic’ approach has the potential to restore damaged ecosystems.

Image from: Plogeo (Wiki Commons)