Humans

Fish swimming off the Carmel coast in western Israel may have been alarmed last Saturday to spot a scuba diver kicking through the water with a large, barnacle-encrusted sword in hand. The diver — a hobbyist named Shlomi Katzin — had just discovered a trove of 900-year-old artifacts on the Mediterranean Sea bed, apparently dating

We design cities. We live in them. We work in them, and we have fun in them. But boy howdy are we bad at getting around them. According to mobile phone data from over 14,000 people living their daily lives, humans are terrible at calculating the shortest route through city streets. And the reason is

You may have noticed that stressful situations tend to leave a bigger imprint on our memory banks than periods of peace and contentment, and new research may have now revealed the key reason why. There had been two schools of thought about this – that these stressful memories were either stored in a significantly different

A staggering amount of Roman emperors did not die of natural causes. That’s not breaking news; it’s literally ancient history. But in those untimely and often violent deaths, scientists have now identified a new mathematical pattern: a power law that describes the fate of so many who died with an entire empire at their feet.

The patterns of activity produced by our brains are unique. They’re so unique that we can use brain connectivity maps to identify individuals just as reliably as fingerprints. “An individual’s functional brain connectivity profile is both unique and reliable, similar to a fingerprint, and it is possible, with near-perfect accuracy in many cases, to identify

The fossil of a jaw bone could prove that domesticated dogs lived in Central America as far back as 12,000 years ago, according to a study by Latin American scientists. The dogs, and their masters, potentially lived alongside giant animals, researchers say. A 1978 dig in Nacaome, northeast Costa Rica, found bone remains from the

It’s clear that a nuclear war would be catastrophic for us and our planet – but just how catastrophic? A new study models the impact that smoke from the fall-out of a nuclear conflict would have on our atmosphere – and the results are predictably bleak. The models used here are some of the most

When I wake at 3am or so, I’m prone to picking on myself. And I know I’m not the only one who does this. A friend of mine calls 3am thoughts “barbed-wire thinking”, because you can get caught in it. The thoughts are often distressing and punitive. Strikingly, these concerns vaporize in the daylight, proving

Exactly how and when people settled in North America is a topic of much fascination for experts, and now a new analysis of ancient documents is shedding light on some lesser known details of this long-contested timeline. A document written by a Milanese friar, dated to around 1345, has been found to contain what looks

You can tell a lot from a chunk of feces – and researchers analyzing human poop that’s lasted for 2,700 years have discovered that Iron Age Europeans had a fondness for blue cheese and beer not all that dissimilar from modern-day tastes. A detailed study of stool samples recovered from the Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut salt mines in

Pre-human history is immensely hard to untangle. There are no early writings from the Neanderthals handily summarizing all the differences between the Australopithecus and the Orrorin. While we’re finding more ancient bones all the time, they’re still very limited, making it difficult to analyze and catalogue fossil discoveries into one of the many species of Homo, Graecopithecus, and all the

At some point in life, you have probably enjoyed a ‘flow’ state – when you’re so intensely focused on a task or activity, you experience a strong sense of control, a reduced awareness of your environment and yourself, and a minimized sense of the passing of time.  It’s also possible to experience ‘team flow’, such

The more we look into the harsh extremes of Chile’s Atacama Desert, the more we find. Phenomena both mystifying and wonderful, occasionally bordering on alien. But in this incredibly dry place, it wasn’t just the climate that was unforgiving. Its ancient human inhabitants, making do in a parched place not best suited to hosting them,

Archaeologists recently discovered a 2,700-year-old private toilet inside the remains of an ancient royal estate in Jerusalem. It is a rare find, as thousands of years ago pooping in toilets was a luxury only for the elite. Private bathrooms were previously “found in only a very few locations in Israel and Jerusalem,” Yaakov Billig, an

US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch. ​The duo’s research, conducted independently of each other in the late 1990s and 2000s, is being used to develop treatments for a wide range of diseases and conditions, including chronic pain. ​Patapoutian, an

Many of us come away from conversations with strangers feeling that the interaction has been awkward and unwanted on both sides. But what if we’re wrong? A new study suggests that wanting to chat in depth with new people is actually a common feeling. In other words, the next time you’re talking to someone you

There’s a chance we’re overestimating how much children understand about the minds of others – in fact, we might be expecting too much of kids at too young an age. For decades now, psychologists have largely agreed that a human child acquires a ‘theory of mind’ during preschool. Experiments indicate that by age five, most

In this day and age, it’s harder than ever before to disconnect from work. Once a person has signed off for the day, they might feel pressured to reply to an after-hours email that pops up on their phone, even if it’s not urgent. A new psychology study by researchers from the London Business School in

Research exploring how people forget things appears to have unintentionally stimulated better memory among its participants, a new study suggests. The experiment was originally conducted in 2012 and was supposed to explore the role of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in voluntary forgetting. While the 2012 experiment successfully demonstrated forgetting was something actively managed

A cave chamber sealed off by sand for some 40,000 years has been discovered in Vanguard Cave in Gibraltar – a finding that could reveal more about the Neanderthals who lived in the area around that time. “Given that the sand sealing the chamber was [40,000] years old, and that the chamber was therefore older, it must

Modern-day imaging technology is able to uncover ancient buildings and structures not visible on the surface, and we just got another excellent example: the discovery of a hidden neighborhood in one of the biggest historical Maya cities. The city in question is Tikal, now in Guatemala. Thought to have been one of the most dominant

The Vinland Map, once thought to be one of the earliest depictions of North America after its discovery by Europeans, has gone from being famous to being infamous: It turns out that the map is a complete fake. That’s the verdict of researchers who analyzed the ink on the map and found that it comes

DNA evidence has finally ended the debate about where the ancient Etruscans – an ancient civilization whose remains are found in Italy – came from. According to almost 2,000 years worth of genomic data, collected from 12 sites across Italy, these enigmatic people did not emigrate from Anatolia (a region that’s now part of Turkey), but

They’re incredible. Amazing. Magical. But perhaps the most fantastic thing about lucid dreams – in which the dreamer becomes aware they’re dreaming – is how realistic they seem. Sadly, only about half of us ever experience lucid dreams in our lives, and efforts to trigger the phenomenon have delivered mixed results. But a study published

Culturally, this is an era in which people are held in high esteem when they stick with their beliefs and negatively labeled as “flip-floppers” or “wishy-washy” when they change what they think. While the courage of convictions can be a plus in situations where people are fighting for justice, sticking with beliefs in a dynamic

Nobody ever said parenting was easy, but depending on circumstances, some people can find it much harder than others. In recent years researchers have begun to recognize ‘parental burnout‘ – a condition in which exhausted parents become overwhelmed by their role as primary carers, potentially leading to emotional distance from their children, parental ineffectiveness, neglect,

A new discovery offers definitive evidence that humans were in North America far earlier than archaeologists previously thought – a whopping 7,000 years earlier. Fossil footprints found on the shore of an ancient lake bed in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park date as far back as 23,000 years ago, making them the oldest ever

Microplastics are everywhere. Even what should be untouched wildernesses – the icy plains of Antarctica, the crushing depths of the deepest ocean chasms – has been polluted by our garbage. So it’s no surprise that we ingest plastic, too; it’s been found in our feces, probably as a result of eating from plastic containers. But a

Easter Island’s famous megaliths have relatives on islands thousands of miles to the north and west – and so did the people who created them, a study said Wednesday. Research showed that over a 250-year period separate groups of people set out from tiny islands east of Tahiti to settle Easter Island, the Marquesas and

Catchy songs that ‘go viral’ are downloaded in a way that closely resembles the spread of an actual virus, according to new research out of Great Britain. The data was collected before the days of streaming music, but the findings suggest some tunes are downright infectious, jumping from one host to another in a similar

About 1,500 years ago, Maya builders crafted a massive pyramid out of rock that had been ejected by a volcano, in an eruption that was so powerful it chilled the planet, scientists recently discovered. Around 539 CE, in what is now San Andrés, El Salvador, the Ilopango caldera erupted in what was the biggest volcanic

Modern roads and developments share more similarities with ancient urban centers than we often realize – which is certainly the case with the sprawling Teotihuacan settlement, once located around 40 kilometers (25 miles) northeast of Mexico City. Researchers have used LIDAR (“light” and “radar”) scanning to reveal that the contours of Teotihuacan – much of

Researchers have rewritten Japanese history after uncovering a third, and previously unknown, group of ancestors that migrated to Japan around 2,000 years ago, of modern-day Japanese populations. Ancient Japan can be split into three key time periods: the Jomon period (13,000 BCE to 300 BCE), a time when a small population of hunter-gatherers who were

Sleep is one of the most vital things a human does, but millions of us don’t do enough of it. Some of the distractions that prevent us from getting enough sleep are obvious. Others are less so, remaining mysterious and debated – even if they’ve probably been disrupting human shut-eye for thousands of years. In

There are around 7,000 human languages that we know of worldwide, and while they’re all unique, they’re also more similar than you might have realized – particularly when it comes to the grammar, or the way that sentences can be formed and used. That might be because of certain genetic tendencies, scientists have theorized, or

Dogs often seem uncannily shrewd about what we’re trying to tell them. A handful of recent studies offer surprising insights into the ways our canine companions are hard-wired to communicate with people. The most recent of those studies, published last week in the journal Scientific Reports, found that dogs can understand the difference between their owners’ accidental

Scientists have found what may be the earliest evidence of clothing manufacture in a cave in Morocco, dating back 120,000 years. It can be easy to take clothing and their origins for granted, as putting on an outfit at the start of the day is such an ingrained part of what it means to be

Two polished stone balls shaped about 5,500 years ago – linked to a mysterious practice almost unique to Neolithic Britain – have been discovered in an ancient tomb on the island of Sanday, in the Orkney Islands north of mainland Scotland. Hundreds of similar stone balls, each about the size of a baseball, have been

Incredibly well-preserved tracks of prehistoric baby elephants have revealed a crucial, ancient stomping ground for one of the largest animals to walk on Earth’s surface since the dinosaurs. On a beach in what is now southwest Spain, archaeologists have identified 34 sets of footprints belonging to the straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus). These huge land animals

Since the 1970s, sex-selective abortions in China, India, and ten other nations have caused between 23 and 45 million women to go ‘missing’. By 2030, a new study predicts those very same nations will ‘lose’ another 4.7 million female births, skewing their sex ratios even more. This study uses a model based on 3.26 billion

The history of the Incas was written by their conquerors, and as we’re coming to find out, the story we know is not necessarily accurate. Modern radiocarbon dating now suggests Machu Picchu is at least two decades older than historical records have indicated. According to interpretations of 16th century documents by the American archaeologist and

An ancient fragment of clay tablet dating back to 3,700 years ago, during the Old Babylonian period, contains what is now the oldest known example of applied geometry, a mathematician has discovered. That’s more than a millennium prior to the birth of Pythagoras. And this history-altering artifact, known as Si.427, had just been sitting in

Childbirth can trigger a number of odd body changes, but for a woman in Portugal, post-pregnancy symptoms were particularly curious: She started to lactate from her armpit, according to a new report. The 26-year-old woman told doctors that she developed pain in her right armpit two days after giving birth, according to the report, published July

Neurotransmitters are chemical substances crucial to the proper functioning of the brain, responsible for carrying messages between neurons and other kinds of cells. As such, they’re a fundamental part of how neurons relay signals to other cells, but not just that – according to a new study, neurotransmitter activity can even indicate how good (or

Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday. The issue had roiled the paleoarchaeology community ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ocher pigment found on the stalagmitic dome of Cueva

Over 20 ‘hunger hotspots’ around the world are expected to encounter an increase in severe food insecurity over the next four months, according to a new report from the United Nations (UN). Two UN bodies – the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) – published the advice last week, warning these

There’s a widespread belief that your testosterone can affect where you end up in life. At least for men, there is some evidence for this claim: several studies have linked higher testosterone to socioeconomic success. But a link is different to a cause and using DNA, our new research suggests it may be much less

A new analysis of Neanderthal genomes suggests the ancient blood that once pumped through this long-extinct population of archaic humans had more in common with modern human blood than scientists realized. While it was long assumed that Neanderthals all possessed blood type O, a new study of previously sequenced genomes of three Neanderthal individuals shows