News Desk

A mission to create the largest ever 3D map of the universe has revealed more than 900m galaxies in its first major data release together with about 15,000 potential cases of a phenomenon that could help unlock the secrets of the “dark universe”.

Newly discovered artifacts are evidence of the earliest known example of a tradition of making clay figurines in the Middle East—and challenge long-held beliefs about when and how clay began to be used for symbolic purposes in the region, according to a study published in PLOS One.

The liminal space between sleeping and waking could be where the human brain conjures the uncanny. It’s there, in a state that is somehow both or neither, that the sleeping brain may extend tendrils into consciousness, or the waking mind jostle uncomfortably at the edges of sleep. The research has been published in Consciousness and Cognition.

A fresh excavation of the eastern deposit at Riparo Mochi, a rock shelter near today’s French–Italian border, has pushed back the timeline for when Ice Age hunter-gatherers from Spain first entered Italy… A study of a recent excavation published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports uncovered several new things from the site, including an intact ancient hearth surrounded by marine shells, Noailles burins and tools used for domestic activities and butchery.

It’s not easy to extract iron from its ore. But the peoples of the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe—the capital of a thriving kingdom in southern Africa between A.D. 1000 and 1700—were masters.

A new study by Tel Aviv University researchers suggests that this practice stretches back approximately half a million years, with important consequences for the evolution of memory. The study was published in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews.

To understand how societies might react to climate change, archaeologists look at social responses to extreme climate events in the past—and in some places, that included measures as drastic as human sacrifice. Mass ritual sacrifices along the desert coast of northern Peru have been linked to catastrophic flooding caused by El Niño, which made researchers wonder if such sacrifices were part of a rise in violence driven by resource scarcity. But a new survey of the Lambayeque Valley suggests that violence was extremely rare, even during periods of ecological upheaval.

Most asteroids are pretty predictable. They just do what they’re told, pushed and tugged by external forces such as gravity or radiation pressure from the Sun. Not 1998 KY26. KY26 is hooning about like a ne’er-do-well – that is, accelerating in a way that defies expectations for how a well-brought-up asteroid ought to behave. The research has been published in Icarus.

Geologists say they are getting closer to solving mystery as tests suggest stone may have come from elsewhere in Scotland, northern England or even Ireland…But the prehistoric monument tends to yield its secrets reluctantly, and a new scientific report reveals that the origin of Stonehenge’s altar stone remains elusive. The study, Searching for the origin of the Stonehenge altar stone, is published in the Journal of the Geological Society

“This study is particularly insightful because it combines the analysis of plant remains with molecular traces in the human body,” says Caspari. The study has been published in the journal Science.

“DNA sequences do not tell us directly which language people spoke. But by combining ancient DNA with linguistic and archaeological evidence, we can begin to trace how languages spread and changed over thousands of years,” explains geneticist Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen. In two complementary papers published in Nature, Willerslev and team trace the spread of Germanic and Celtic languages across ancient Europe.

Models of early population migrations assume people moved to places with easy access to water. But this assumption has left us with a fascinating mystery in ancient Arabia. Despite evidence that monsoon rains once filled lakes and supported grasslands in the vast sandy interior, evidence of early human occupation is concentrated almost entirely around the desert margins. The findings are published in a paper in the journal Nature.

Researchers asked 50 people to draw maps of the spaces they remembered encountering during near-death experiences, an intriguing pattern emerged: The geometry of those spaces appeared to be linked to the colors people recalled seeing. The research has been published in Frontiers in Psychology.

Scientists are getting astonishingly good at extracting ancient human DNA from mere dirt and dust, even when there are no physical remains left…No bones, no teeth, no fossils. A small scoop of sediment from a cave in Spain has now offered up ancient DNA from several individuals who lived roughly 22,000 years ago. The findings from the study, led by researchers at the University of Vienna in Austria, are published in Science Advances.

Usually, people associate archaeological studies with bones, pottery and primitive tools, but archaeologists often find other clues about how ancient people lived hidden throughout a site. A new study, published in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology, focuses on bits of charcoal and their spatial organization to get a glimpse of Neanderthal life in Abric Romaní, an ancient rock shelter near Barcelona.

Ketamine and MDMA treatment were associated with changes in DNA methylation, a chemical modification that can influence gene activity, at genes linked to neuroplasticity and immune processes, according to a study published in Translational Psychiatry. The changes were measured in blood and saliva samples from people treated for depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.