Humans news stories

Sapphire Medical Clinic, located in Stirling, is the first medical cannabis clinic authorised by Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS) to provide safe access to medical cannabis for patients in Scotland.

About 8500 years ago, hunter-gatherers living beside Eagle Lake in Wisconsin hammered out a conical, 10-centimeter-long projectile point made of pure copper.

As the fire dwindles in the hearth, a family picks through the remains of their feast, turning over the bones for any remaining flesh. It is about 3000BC in Skara Brae, a small neolithic settlement on the west coast of Orkney’s Mainland, Scotland.

Scientists in Denmark believe the psychedelic substance psilocybin might produce rapid and lasting antidepressant effects in part because it enhances neuroplasticity in the brain.

Fish school, insects swarm and birds fly in murmurations. Now, new research finds that on the most basic level, this kind of group behavior forms a new kind of active matter, called a swirlonic state.

As the Arctic warms much faster than everywhere else on the planet in response to climate change, the findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may not only be a glimpse of the past but a snapshot of our potential future.

The use of magic mushrooms, ecstasy and other psychedelic drugs to treat mental illnesses, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, may be a step closer in Australia, with clinical trials given a $15m grant.

Six-millennia-old skeleton of child also unearthed during dig in Judean Desert by Israeli archeologists

Stop your sobbing – because scientists can do it for you. Using stem cells, Dutch researchers have grown miniature human tear glands capable of “crying”.

Four stars in the night sky have been formally recognised by their Australian Aboriginal names.

When Neanderthals, Denisovans and homo sapiens met one another 50,000 years ago, these archaic and modern humans not only interbred during the thousands of years in which they overlapped, but they exchanged ideas that led to a surge in creativity, according to a leading academic.

A powerful hallucinogenic drug known for its part in shamanic rituals is being trialled as a potential cure for depression for the first time.

Over the course of the Pleistocene epoch, between 2.6 million years ago and 11,700 years ago, the brains of humans and their relatives grew. Now, scientists from Tel Aviv University have a new hypothesis as to why: As the largest animals on the landscape disappeared, the scientists propose, human brains had to grow to enable the hunting of smaller, swifter prey.

A digital model has revealed a complex planetarium on the ancient device’s face. “Unless it’s from outer space, we have to find a way in which the Greeks could have made it,” researchers say.

Sobek, crocodile-headed god of the Nile; Sekhmet, leonine goddess of war; Anubis, jackal god of the underworld; and Hathor, mother goddess with a cow’s horns: The ancient Egyptian pantheon of gods was filled with divine animals.