Humans news stories

As if cracking open a cosmic Russian nesting doll, astronomers have peered into the center of the Milky Way and discovered what appears to be a miniature spiral galaxy, swirling daintily around a single large star.

In the quest to discover the most effective psychedelic medicines for treating mental health conditions, some have pointed to DMT as a potential tool for treating depression. Now, a new study published in Nature lends credence to using DMT as a rapid-acting antidepressant.

“It’s a lesson in the unexpected,” Jones said. “When you’re looking for things, you’re not necessarily going to find the thing you’re looking for, but you might find something else very interesting.”

What Alida Bailleul saw through the microscope made no sense. She was examining thin sections of fossilised skull from a young hadrosaur, a duck-billed, plant-eating beast that roamed what is now Montana 75m years ago, when she spotted features that made her draw a breath.

The ancient Maya enjoyed filling their teeth with gemstones. A new study reveals how the procedure was done and how it didn’t kill them.

A forest is home to billions of living things, some of them too small to be seen by the naked eye. Collectively, these micro-scale species contribute more to our planet than most of us could imagine.

The varied surface of asteroid Psyche suggests a dynamic history, which could include metallic eruptions, asteroid-shaking impacts, and a lost rocky mantle.

Items found during an archaeological dig near Stornoway have revealed people lived there thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

Image from: Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa) (Wiki Commons)

Scientists have tracked down the oldest wildfires ever detected thanks to 430-million-year-old charcoal deposits from Wales and Poland. They give us valuable insight into what life on Earth was like during the Silurian period.

Embryonic and fossil evidence proves that the human middle ear evolved from the spiracle of fishes. However, the origin of the vertebrate spiracle has long been an unsolved mystery in vertebrate evolution.

Mars object thought to be piece of thermal blanket from when Perseverance touched down on planet

Mastering fire cleared the way into whole new worlds for early humans – from accessing more nutrients through cooking (fueling an increase in brain size), to making the dark hours useful, and surviving migrations into harsher climates.

A team led by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object’s strong gravitational field—so-called gravitational microlensing.