News Desk

What do medieval monks and volcanic eruptions have in common? According to a team of researchers led by the University of Geneva, quite a bit because chronicles from the 12th and 13th century are helping volcanologists to precisely date ancient eruptions based on descriptions of lunar eclipses. See the research here.

Image from: .scopex (Wiki Commons)

In the depths of a network of underwater caves, Julien Louys has been on the trail of some rather unusual animals. Despite the sunken setting, these creatures weren’t forms of marine life — they were giant marsupials, and they became extinct tens of thousands of years ago.

It’s being described as the most detailed ever map of the influence of dark matter through cosmic history. A telescope in Chile has traced the distribution of this mysterious stuff on a quarter of the sky and across almost 14 billion years of time.

New research into ancient populations that resided on the Tibetan Plateau has found that dairy pastoralism was being practiced far earlier than previously thought and may have been key to long-term settlement of the region’s extreme environment.

The bat skeletons unearthed in southwest Wyoming are the oldest ever found, and their discovery has sparked a reshuffle in the bat family tree. See the research here.

The eye is so complex that even Charles Darwin was at a loss to explain how it could have arisen. Now, it turns out that the evolution of the vertebrate eye got an unexpected boost—from bacteria, which contributed a key gene involved in the retina’s response to light.

A move to allow Australian psychiatrists to treat depression with psilocybin may herald a new era

Lawmakers want the DEA to clarify that the seriously ill can access psychedelics under “Right to Try” laws.

An innovative method developed by an Italian team is emerging that will revolutionize the field of archaeology and radiocarbon dating and protect our cultural heritage. The researchers have used it with surprising results on archaeological bones, making the ‘invisible’ visible.

Scientists have stitched together the most high-resolution map yet of the underlying geology beneath Earth’s Southern Hemisphere, revealing something previously undiscovered: an ancient ocean floor that may wrap around the core. See the research here.

About 1,300 years ago a scribe in Palestine took a book of the Gospels inscribed with a Syriac text and erased it. See the research here.

The hellscape of Venus is riddled with even more volcanoes than scientists thought. See the research here.

People were getting high on hallucinogenic drugs in Spain around 3,000 years ago, according to new research.

In a new study, astronomers propose that extraterrestrial life could exist in so-called terminator zones, the border between light and dark halves of an exoplanet.

See the oldest human ever found in Egypt in a stunning new facial approximation.

One of the most well-studied chemical processes in nature, photosynthesis, may not work quite how we thought it did, scientists have accidentally discovered. See the study here.