News Desk

For archaeologists, there’s something wonderfully strange about ‘Cave 338’, high up in the Pyrenees mountains in southwestern Europe. As remote and inhospitable as it is, it seems that prehistoric people returned time and time again to the spot… Now, new research is beginning to shed light on what prompted multiple return trips around 5,500 years ago. The research has been published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

Ötzi the Iceman has long been treated as a frozen messenger from the Copper Age. But his remains might not be completely preserved in time, a new study suggests.

Researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) have created a database of carbon-14-dated samples that has aided in building a chronological framework of human occupation throughout the Holocene at the Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park (PNAESM). The study was published in Archeologica Data.

Magic mushrooms are better known for producing hallucinations and altering people’s sense of reality than for treating brain diseases. Most people associate them with tripping, rather than Alzheimer’s disease. But a report on an individual patient has prompted scientists to ask whether psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, could have unexpected effects on the aging brain.

A recent study published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry suggests that a single dose of psilocybin, paired with psychological support, may rapidly and safely reduce chronic suicidal thoughts in adults with severe depression. The findings provide evidence that psychedelic-assisted therapy tends to offer lasting relief for individuals who have not responded to standard psychiatric treatments.

Earth’s underground fungal network is so vast that, if it were in outer space, it would span roughly 10% of the Milky Way if placed in a straight line, a new study finds. The study was published Thursday (June 11) in the journal Science.

The figurine, dated to between 750 and 650 B.C., was excavated at the ancient Mesoamerican site of La Blanca, located on Guatemala’s Pacific coast. The study, published in Latin American Antiquity, argues that the dots may be an early form of number writing that hints at the link between numbers, bodies and identity in ancient Mesoamerica. If true, this would make the figurine a key piece of evidence in understanding the murky history of the origins of writing in this region of the world.

From the air, you see it only through the constant jolt, tilt, and shudder of the low-flying Cessna aircraft…It feels random, almost unreadable. Only gradually does the pattern resolve itself: raised causeways or paths fanning out to link the forest islands, and a dense, scattered web of canals threading the terrain. Slowly, you realize it’s a structured network of intersecting lines, enclosures, and roads—the imprint of past human design.

Somber, still, and timeworn, Stonehenge looms large in humanity’s mythos – an ancient, enigmatic monument that has stood sentinel over southern England for millennia…Now, a new analysis shows that at least part of the journey had to be aided by human effort. The paper was published in the Journal of Quaternary Science.

Our Solar System may once have housed an extra world that no longer exists. This long-lost world may have been almost as big as Mars before it suffered a cataclysmic end. This research was published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Scientific dating proves streaks on walls of Bacon Hole, near the Mumbles in south Wales, is Palaeolithic rock art… Archaeologists have used the latest scientific means to date the rock art, discovering that it was in fact created 17,100 years ago – making it the oldest example in Britain as well as north-western Europe. International academics have just published a scientific paper on their research in the journal Quaternary.

How was iron produced 2,000 years ago in Senegal? A recent study at the Didé West 1 archaeological site, in the Falémé Valley in eastern Senegal, sheds light on an ancient iron production technique.

The 4,000-year-old skull of a Bronze Age child buried in what’s now Uzbekistan bears scars from a cranial surgery known as trepanation. It is the oldest documented evidence of surgery in Central Asia and one of the oldest examples of surgery in all of Asia, the researchers report.

Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the nineties shooter game “Doom” and say they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing.

Nearly every animal on this magnificent planet has blood… but where the heck did it come from? Now, in an ambitious effort, an international team led by Kyoto University in Japan has traced the evolutionary history of blood cells back 700 million years – and discovered that they weren’t created from scratch after the rise of multicellular life. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bizarre Venus surface formations (or coronae) are likely key to understanding our twin planet’s heretofore inscrutable interior. Using NASAMagellan spacecraft data from decades past, Anna Gulcher, an earth and planetary scientist at Germany’s University of Freiburg, have created innovative new 3D models of the largest coronae to better understand Venus’ puzzling geodynamics