Humans news stories

Close human contact only started about 3,500 years ago and birds were initially venerated, find archaeologists.

The former chief of the Australian defence force, Chris Barrie, is campaigning to remove barriers stymying doctors from using MDMA to treat veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, saying he hopes “common sense is going to prevail”.

Up to 30% of people with depression don’t respond to treatment with antidepressants…So there is an urgent need to expand the repertoire of drugs available to people with depression.

Depictions of mermaids decorate the posts of the bed. The bed also displays an image of a bird holding a snake in its mouth, a symbol of the ancient Greek god Apollo.

Archaeologists have uncovered a roughly 1,300-year-old sculpture representing the head of a Mayan maize god in ruins in southeastern Mexico.

If archaeology has shown us anything, it’s the sobering impermanence of our lives.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Italy and one in the U.S. has found that a unique Bronze Age cremation site in modern Italy holds the remains of up to 172 people who were left to the elements.

Egyptian archaeologists have revealed another massive haul of priceless artifacts from the Saqqara Necropolis, a bountiful site near Cairo that likely still holds untold secrets.

A comprehensive assessment of the benefits of medical cannabis for cancer-related pain found that for most oncology patients, pain measures improved significantly, other cancer-related symptoms also decreased, the consumption of painkillers was reduced, and the side effects were minimal.

As waters and ice recede under warming conditions, the traces of people and civilizations long gone from the mortal realm emerge.

Ready to embrace some meteoric uncertainty? The Tau Herculids meteor shower may light up the skies over North America on May 30 and 31. Or it may not.

A new study reveals that humans arriving in what is now Australia likely ate it to extinction by stealing its eggs.

Two swarms of curious, diverse space rocks — called Trojan asteroids — continuously journey around the sun, one in front of the gas giant Jupiter and one behind. Jupiter and the sun’s gravity have combined to lock the Trojans into this immutable orbit.

Scientists have detected a completely new type of magnetic wave that surges through Earth‘s outer core every seven years, warping the strength of our planet’s magnetic field in the process.

The story of the Universe is fundamentally our story, too. We want to know where it all started. Current descriptions of the origin of the Universe rest on the two pillars of 20th-century physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics. There are many questions that call for intellectual humility, and the origin of the Universe is foremost among them.

The genome of a victim of the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius over the ancient city of Pompeii has been sequenced for the first time, scientists have revealed, shedding new light on the health and diversity of those who lived in the Roman empire at the time of the disaster.