News Desk

Picture this: You’re enjoying a delicious bowl of mushroom soup, when suddenly you notice hundreds of tiny people dressed in cartoonish clothing marching across your tablecloth, jumping into your bowl, swimming around, and clinging to your spoon as you lift it for another taste. You’re not dreaming — you’ve just experienced the effects of a mushroom known scientifically as Lanmaoa asiatica. It belongs to an entirely different class of Fungi than the more commonly known “magic mushrooms” and remains far more mysterious.

Image from Villa Grisebach Auktionen (Wiki Commons)

Study on skull of Altamura Man could be blow to adaptation theories about Neanderthals and their extinction.

A new discovery of baked sediments, artifacts, and pieces of firelighting pyrite in a UK claypit suggests that humans already had the capacity to create fire more than 400,000 years ago. This researcher was published in Nature.

A new study published in Nature Neuroscience provides a detailed look at how the psychedelic drug psilocybin facilitates the unlearning of fear in the brain

A group of scientists are studying the Cyclades, an island group in Greece’s Aegean Sea, looking for signs of early human activity. They are using technology such as laser scanning and magnetometry, which may be more effective and non-invasive than traditional archaeological methods. One of these methods is magnetometry—the subject of a recent publication in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Bleached clay rocks found on the Martian surface suggest that the Red Planet was once home to heavy rainfall and tropical conditions, new Perseverance observations hint. The study was published Dec. 1 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Years ago, humanity lost one of its last surviving hominin cousins, Homo floresiensis (also known as “the hobbit” thanks to its small stature). The cause of its disappearance, after more than a million years living on the isolated volcanic island of Flores, Indonesia, has been a longstanding mystery. Now, new evidence suggests a period of extreme drought starting about 61,000 years ago may have contributed to the hobbits’ disappearance.

Caves can preserve tens of thousands of years of genetic history, providing ideal archives for studying long-term human–ecosystem interactions. The deposits beneath our feet become biological time capsules.

Extinct relatives of modern humans, like Neanderthals and Homo erectus, that lived in the Levant around 120,000 years ago, did not engage in mass hunting but preferred selective and strategic hunting of wild cattle. A recent study was published in Scientific Reports.

Conch-shell trumpets discovered in Neolithic settlements and mines in Catalonia make a tone similar to the French horn, says the lead researcher. Their article was published in the journal Antiquity.

The research examined the pivotal period between 18,000 and 7,500 years ago, spanning the end of the last Ice Age and the transition to the warmth of the modern Holocene era. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An isolated burial in Sudan has revealed the first evidence of an unknown funeral ritual that took place nearly 4,000 years ago in a little-known African kingdom, a new study finds. The study was published Nov. 13 in the journal Azania.

A rock on Mars spilled a surprising yellow treasure after Curiosity accidentally cracked through its unremarkable exterior.

Is time real, or an illusion? The best answer may be neither: Both physics and philosophy suggest that time is a projection of the mind onto a timeless reality.

Archaeologists are to resume digging at the Ness of Brodgar on Orkney after 3D radar technology led to an “extraordinary discovery”.

The presence of an extraordinary circle of yawning pits created by Neolithic people near Stonehenge has been proved, thanks to a novel combination of scientific techniques, a team of archaeologists is claiming.