Humans news stories

Northern Michigan University is offering students the chance to major in a new program called medicinal plant chemistry — marijuana analysis, basically.

Sadly, true Amazonian medicine elders are a dying breed. To be in the presence of a genuine master is a treasured experience, and those of them still with us exemplify the virtues of living a life aligned with nature, devoted to spiritual development, and focused on the well-being of others.

Researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School recently announced the development of the Dermal Abyss, a health-monitoring tattoo that can turn your body surface into an interactive display. It is a development that should excite biohackers and transhumanists, but also have potentially large mainstream applications.

While we should approach every diet with a healthy dose of skepticism, the more studies being conducted on ketosis—the state your body enters when producing elevated amounts of ketone bodies, which are constructed via fatty acid metabolism in your liver—the more the benefits are accruing.

Changes in human diets are so powerful that they can shape the way we look. In fact, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture may have transformed the shape of human skulls, according to a new study from the University of California, Davis.

The Great Trail is a staggering 14,864 miles composed of more than 400 individual trails snaking across all 10 provinces and three territories. It links the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic Ocean.

Color psychology is the study of how colors affect human behavior, mood, or physiological processes. Colors are thought to influence our buying choices, our feelings, and even our memories.

Just nine days of excavations in the Cave of El Pendo during September have been enough to confirm one of the main hypotheses of the researchers prior to entering the cave located in Escobedo last year, when the team presented its ambitious scientific project to explore the depths of cave.  In this ‘encyclopedia’ of human evolution, which is about 25 meters high and more than 80 meters deep in the chamber cavity – dimensions that at one time or another in history allowed a living area of around 600 square meters – scientists have found a key volume which reflects the leap that led to the transition from the Neanderthal species to the most sophisticated Homo sapiens.

Three indigenous Tlaxcalteca youths, Blessed Cristobal, Blessed Antonio, and Blessed Juan, will be canonized October 15, 2017, at the Vatican. They were 12 or 13 at the time of their deaths in 1529.  With the canonization, the story of the child martyrs becomes better known, and serves as an example for young people to follow nearly five centuries later.

Anatomically modern humans have been around for roughly two hundred thousand years. For most of that time, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Then, about twelve thousand years ago, came what is generally agreed to be the definitive before-and-after moment in our ascent to planetary dominance: the Neolithic Revolution.

Did iceman Ötzi have Swiss relatives? New information has emerged this week about an archaeological discovery in Switzerland that points to significant links between areas north and south of the Alps 5,000 years ago.

To help bring awareness of National Hispanic Heritage Month, this article explores Spain’s role in bringing cannabis to the Americas and its indigenous people, how hemp made its way up to California, tracks cannabis’ spread into the United States, and how a famous Mexican folk song referencing marijuana came to be.

Article spotlights several of the modern earthworks and clever landscape sculptures of Mike Petts in the United Kingdom, captured by aerial photography.

Research is picking up, with new trials not just of LSD but also of psilocybin (the active compound in magic mushrooms), MDMA (street name ecstasy), and ayahuasca (a South American brew containing a hallucinogen known as DMT). If the drugs prove to be as safe and effective as recent research suggests, we may be on the brink of what some are calling a revolution in mental health care.

Late Stone Age people got a grip thanks to honeybees. Ancient Northern Europeans attached a barbed bone point to a handle of some kind with a beeswax adhesive around 13,000 years ago. The result: a fishing spear. Using beeswax glue to make tools was common in Africa as early as 40,000 years ago. But experts say this spear is the first evidence of its use in cold parts of Europe at a time toward the end of the Stone Age when the glaciers were receding.

The researchers suggest that a multitude of human impacts have changed the course of Earth’s geological history, and the scale of these justifies developing a formal proposal that the Anthropocene — a concept improvised by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen in 2000 — should be made part of the Geological Time Scale.