News Desk

Mayflies are among the world’s oldest winged insects, emerging roughly 300m years ago – long before dinosaurs walked the Earth. Even the Mesopotamian poem the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest pieces of literature, makes reference to the short-lived mayfly. Over the epochs, the insect’s basic design has changed very little compared with the fossils of their ancestors.

Prehistoric humans in Africa may have avoided areas infested with malaria-spreading mosquitoes, a new study suggests —published April 22 in the journal Science Advances

A recent study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, presents and discusses the earliest burial site in Patagonia and one of the earliest pieces of evidence of Early Holocene human settlement on the South American Atlantic coast.

There’s a new contender for the universe’s earliest first-generation stars. A bright clump seen about 450 million years after the Big Bang has the chemical hallmarks of first-generation stars — notably that it appears to have no elements heavier than helium. This identification, reported in a trio of papers submitted on March 20 to arXiv.org, pushes the evidence for these pristine stars much earlier than for previous candidates.

A single dose of the psychedelic compound psilocybin, when paired with behavioral counseling, helped smokers quit at substantially higher rates than a standard nicotine patch paired with the same counseling. The results suggest that psychedelic treatments might offer a highly effective new approach for people struggling to overcome tobacco addiction. The findings were recently published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

The exact origin of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) is still a mystery, but researchers believe they are edging closer to the source of one of the most important food staples worldwide. Using genetic studies and ancient plant remains, an international team of scientists has narrowed the location and timeline to the Neolithic period(around 8,000 years ago) in Georgia, in the South Caucasus. They present their findings in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

There’s been a lot of buzz in recent years about bee cognition, but not all scientists are convinced. Now, new research has added a fresh ingredient to the mix: Accounting for how bees actually see the world, rather than relying on human assumptions…And guess what? The bees still seem to be able to count.The research has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Some fungi can produce proteins that freeze water, which may allow them to reach into the atmosphere and trigger rain. Now, scientists have discovered the secret to this process: a gene from ancient bacteria. The new study was published March 11 in the journal Science Advances.

In 1857, the German anatomist Hermann Schaaffhausen analysed a human fossil with “an extraordinary form”… The remains were to become known as the world’s first Neanderthal, and from the very start, Schaaffhausen decided the skull was at a “low stage of development”.For more than a century, that stigma has stuck around. Even today, a commonly accepted hypothesis is that humans outsurvived Neanderthals because of our better brains. An international team of anthropologists has now found evidence to the contrary. The study was published in PNAS.

Paving roads in the Amazon rainforest has long brought deforestation that threatens the people who live there. The same roadwork, however, has also allowed archaeologists to get glimpses of the region’s past long before Europeans arrived to reshape it.

On April 18, President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to accelerate the development of psychedelic drugs as medical treatments. The order calls for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to give expedited consideration to psychedelics that meet certain criteria. It also calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to direct $50 million to match investments made by state governments into researching psychedelics as treatments for mental-health conditions.

New genetic results reveal a previously unknown wave of people settled in South America 1,300 years ago, and that Indigenous Americans carry remnants of a “ghost lineage.” The study was published Wednesday (April 22) in the journal Nature.

Nasa’s Curiosity rover has detected organic molecules on Mars, including chemicals widely considered building blocks for the origin of life on Earth.

This snapshot is just a small part of one of the most comprehensive and spectacular views yet of the universe — a web-like structure formed by millions of galaxies, stretching back to near the dawn of time.

Members of the Atapuerca Research Team from the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES), the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), the University of Burgos, and the Center Européen de Recherche et d’Enseignement des Géosciences de l’Environnement (CEREGE) are involved in a study published in Quaternary Science Reviews reporting the earliest known evidence of the classic Acheulean in the Iberian Peninsula.

In our research, published today in Current Biology, we show that when some animals spot a predator, they issue a warning cry that is picked up by others and spread through the rainforest canopy. For a time, different species are linked into a shared information network, and parts of the forest briefly fall silent.