Humans news stories

The findings suggest that the short-acting drug may foster long-term improvements in overall well-being and quality of life for people who do not respond to standard depression treatments. The study was published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Scientists have crunched, and re-crunched, and crunched the numbers again for good measure, and they’re as certain as they can be that Apophis poses no imminent threat to the inhabitants of Earth. But do the inhabitants of Earth pose a threat to Apophis? Well, the answer to that question is a surprising maybe, according to a paper published in The Planetary Science Journal.

A once-anonymous Maya scientist now has a name. Sak Tahn Waax, or “White-Chested Fox,” is credited as the author of a calendrical formula painted in Maya glyphs on the wall of a ruin in Guatemala, researchers report July 14 in Antiquity

A new study published in Human Brain Mapping suggests that a single high dose of psilocybin, the active compound in “magic mushrooms,” changes how information flows through specific brain circuits up to a month later.

A chance find of rare rock crystal tools a century ago paved the way for a better understanding of Neanderthals today.

Now, a new LIDAR survey suggests that civilization was even larger than archaeologists imagined, hinting at a people that built as many as 30,000 earthworks and had a peak population of up to 3 million people around 200 CE. The findings have been published in Nature.

Built from stones weighing between 2 and 25 tonnes (2 to 28 tons), the structure of Stonehenge demonstrates a scale of construction hard to imagine before the invention of the wheel. The mystery deepens when you consider that the stones are not from the local bedrock. So why these stones, and how did they get there? Recent work I carried out with geochemist Anthony Clarke from Curtin University in Australia might have an answer to these two questions for Stonehenge’s most far-traveled stone—the Altar Stone.

Newly excavated bones from Gran Dolina cave in Spain reveal an ancient human relative practiced cannibalism on adults and children, but researchers still don’t know why.

A new study published in Neuroscience Bulletin suggests that mescaline, a chemical found in certain cacti that can cause hallucinations, may alter how the brain responds to incoming sensory information.

A new skull-based analysis of Neanderthal brains suggests that these ancient hominins’ range of intelligence largely overlapped with our own. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

The GunaiKurnai, an Australian Aboriginal nation, are the acknowledged traditional custodians of Gippsland and the southern Victorian Alps. Within their territory are caves known from 19th-century ethnographic reports and oral traditions to have been settings for magic, healing and cursing rituals by powerful learned women and men called “mulla-mullung,” as well as by other spiritual practitioners. The new study was published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

Recent scientific exploration into psychedelics provides evidence that these powerful substances can profoundly reshape human brain function and mental health. A wave of new research suggests that lysergic acid diethylamide, widely known as LSD, alters electrical brain rhythms to promote mental flexibility, elevate mood, and even protect against neurological damage.

From the May issue of Frontiers in Neuroscience comes the truly remarkable case study of a woman crippled by Alzheimer’s recovering speech, bladder control, and motor function after a single dose of psilocybin mushrooms.

This particular altar, found in the former Toltec capital of Tula – known in Nahuatl as Tollan – and tentatively dated to the city’s Tollan phase between 950 and 1100 CE, gave researchers a macabre surprise.

For decades, scientists have disputed the meaning of the weapons found in the burial chambers of some ancient Egyptian princesses. Were they symbolic or practical tools? Now, a reassessment of five royal women’s mummies from the Middle Kingdom has shown that some princesses buried with weapons could use them. The research was published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology

Joël Lapointe was using Google Maps to plan a camping trail through Quebec’s Côte-Nord region when he stumbled across a large indentation. Now, scientists have confirmed that the pit was indeed a meteor impact crater that dates back roughly 390 million years.