News Desk

A recent study published in Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry sheds light on how psilocybin alters human brain activity, shifting it from a resting state to a highly engaged pattern of processing.

A landmass that once connected Britain to mainland Europe had temperate forests that could have sustained Stone Age people for millennia before the landmass was flooded, a new study suggests. The results were published on March 10 in the journal PNAS.

According to an article published in Antiquity by Dr. Svitlana Ivanova and her colleagues, the Yamna culture’s repurposing of older ritual spaces reflects a deliberate appropriation and continuation of sacred spaces

Neanderthals probably used birch tar for multiple functions, including treating their wounds, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS One by a team of researchers led by Tjaark Siemssen of the University of Cologne, Germany, and the University of Oxford, U.K.

An international team of archaeologists…has uncovered the earliest known clay ornaments in Southwest Asia, revealing a forgotten chapter in the story of how humans began to express identity, belonging, and meaning through material culture. The findings, published this week in Science Advances, push back the symbolic use of clay in the region by thousands of years.

A joint Egyptian-German archaeological mission between the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the University of Tübengen has uncovered an astonishing 13,000 new ostraca at Atreps(ancient Athribis) in Sohag, Egypt. This brings the total recovered since 2005 to around 43,000, making Atreps the site with the largest known collection of ostraca in the world.

CERN scientists have uncovered a new proton-like particle, the Ξ_cc⁺, revealing a heavier and long-predicted member of the subatomic world.

It sounds like the opening of a sci-fi film, but US scientists recently uploaded a copy of the brain of a living fly into a simulation. In San Francisco, biotechnology company Eon Systems created a virtual insect that knew how to walk, fly, groom and feed in its virtual environment. Researchers in Australia, meanwhile, have taught a petri dish containing 200,000 human brain cells to play the iconic 90s shooter Doom. One experiment has pushed a brain into a computer; the other has plugged a computer into brain cells.

A new genetic study published in the journal Cell is filling in some important details about the earliest inhabitants of Palau, an island nation in the western Pacific Ocean consisting of approximately 340 islands.

Astronomers have identified a planet composed of molten lava, suggesting the existence of an entirely new category of liquid planet. The distant world, known as L98-59d, is about 1.6 times the size of Earth and orbits a small red star 35 light years away.

Around 4,000 years ago, one of the world’s oldest civilizations emerged: The Indus Valley Civilization, flourishing in what is now Pakistan, western India, eastern Iran and parts of Afghanistan. In addition to building sizable cities, its people created a written script that consists of hundreds of signs that remain undeciphered…Could recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) help with decipherment?

A new study may have solved a long-standing mystery about the Moon’s magnetism: Why do lunar rocks brought back by the Apollo missions show evidence of an intense magnetic field sometimes rivaling or exceeding that of Earth today? The research has been published in Nature Geoscience.

A new study published in Scientific Reports suggests that the therapeutic effects of psychedelic mushrooms likely rely on a complex interplay of multiple chemical compounds rather than just a single active ingredient.

The partnership between ravens and wolves goes back to Norse mythology – Odin’s birds scouted ahead and led prey to the god’s canines, a relationship that provided food for all. The myth has some roots in reality: when wolves have a successful hunt, ravens are often observed first on the scene – and new research published Thursday in the journal Science put the legend to the test.

A new study, published in JAMA Network Open, reports the outcome of a clinical trial out of Johns Hopkins University assessing the effectiveness of psilocybin as a treatment for smokers attempting to quit. The trial compared the effectiveness of one dose of the “magic mushroom” drug to months of the common nicotine patch, combined with cognitive behavioral therapy in both groups. The results might push psilocybin into the limelight as a more effective addiction treatment.

The comet formed in a cold and distant part of the early Milky Way up to 12 billion years ago, potentially putting it just under 2 billion years the age of the universe.