News Desk

Betelgeuse is one of the weirdest stars in the sky, but astronomers can now explain one of its most enduring mysteries. A small companion star has been confirmed, revealed by the wake it leaves as it plows through the red giant’s atmosphere. The study has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, and is currently available on the preprint server arXiv.

In the murky first chapters of the human story is an unknown ancestor that made the profound transition from walking on all fours to standing up tall, an act that came to define us. Details are published in Science Advances.

New analysis of the first humans outside Africa could finally settle a decades-long debate…The latest study, published in the journal PLOS One, seeks to decide the issue.

A new analysis of clinical trial data indicates that psilocybin, when administered alongside psychotherapy, may provide rapid relief for patients suffering from cancer-related anxiety and depression. This study, which synthesized data from prior randomized controlled trials, was published in The International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine.

Scientists have reconstructed the head of an ancient human relative from 1.5 million year-old fossilized bones and teeth. But the face staring back is complicating scientists’ understanding of early human evolution and dispersal, according to a new study.

Archaeologists have discovered the 3,300-year-old cremated remains of at least eight people who were buried in five urns in Scotland. While it’s unknown how they died, it was likely during some sort of catastrophic event. The new study was recently published in Archaeology Reports Online.

The newly excavated 4,500-year-old valley temple from ancient Egypt holds a “public calendar” and a roof for astronomical observation.

A new study takes a deep dive into the findings of the two test pits in the Pahon Cave, which recovered 1,131 lithic artifacts and 1,045 faunal remains. The new study is published in the journal PLOS One.

One of the most famous hominin fossils may not be as familiar as we thought. The specimen, affectionately dubbed “Little Foot”, could represent an entirely new species. The research was published in The American Journal of Biological Anthropology.

The unique dog burial was identified during construction work for a high-speed railway in the hamlet of Gerstaberg, about 22 miles (35 kilometers) southwest of Stockholm. Experts with the Swedish group Arkeologerna (The Archaeologists) announced the find in a statement and blog post Monday (Dec. 15).

Recent analysis of federal health data suggests that the recreational use of LSD is associated with a lower likelihood of alcohol use disorder. This finding stands in contrast to the use of other psychedelic substances, which did not show a similar protective link in the past year. The results were published recently in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs.

Archaeologist Paula García Medrano, researcher at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), has just published in Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology a study on the lithic industry from the Paleolithic site of Terra Amata (Niza, Francia), one of the key locations in western Europe for understanding the evolution of human behavior 400,000 years ago.

According to the research team’s findings, which appeared this month in Astronomy & Astrophysics, Uranus and Neptune may be more rocky in their cores and less ‘icy’ than previously thought.

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.