Humans began burying objects with their deceased loved ones long before anybody started recording history.Archaeological excavations of the Qafzeh and Skhul Caves in Israel have discovered graves dating back as far as 100,000 years that contain grave goods such as flint artifacts, animal bones, seashells and lumps of red ochre. Fast forward 75,000 thousand years and burials included decorative clothing, jewelry, weapons, animal carvings and other ornamental objects.Although there are a number of ...read more

Of all the weird, tiny organisms out there, tardigrades might just be the cutest.“Under a microscope, what you would see is this little critter that kind of looks like either an eight-legged Gummi bear, or an eight-legged manatee,” says Thomas Boothby, a molecular biologist at the University of Wyoming.To top it off, these lovable micro-animals are known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets.What Is a Tardigrade?(Credit: Shutterstock/Oleh Liubimtsev)Biologically speaking, tardigrades a ...read more

The age of dinosaurs was a trying time for survival. Vicious carnivores lived amongst enormous herbivores. The climate was often unforgiving. During the Triassic period, for example, the planet was hot, dry and covered in desert. And there were no polar ice caps to escape the burn. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions were a plenty, eventually breaking up the global continental block of Pangea. All the while, theropods tried their best to hold on to their status at the top of the food chain. Th ...read more

In a not-so-distant future, when a burbling stream cascading down the Rocky Mountains appears in your dreams, you might be skeptical of who planted it there. While the notion of a corporation seeding dreams in the sleeping mind sounds like a science fiction plot, some consumers began taking the idea seriously in 2021.That’s when Molson Coors ran an online video touting its “targeted dream incubation” campaign. The premise of the project was to plant images of Coors beer into the dreams of� ...read more

New York City (NYC) residents are masking up again, but not to protect against a virus. East Coast residents awoke Tuesday morning (June 6) to their cities and towns shrouded in a thick, smokey haze from the current wildfires in Quebec, Canada. The smoke is so thick that NYC moved up to number one on the World Air Quality Index (AQI), according to IQAir, with a rating of over 200 — which is considered “very unhealthy.” The rating has since dropped to 161 – “unhealthy” — and the c ...read more

The word “engineer” is somewhat of a modern marvel. It was used in the military during the American Revolution to describe officers and soldiers assigned to build fortifications. Civilians began using it in the 1800s, and the first professional engineering association was founded in the U.S. in the 1840s.The ancient world didn’t have the term engineer to describe the scholars and scientists whose discoveries contributed to the advancement of engineering. But ancient engineers helped to c ...read more

An enduring astronomical mystery has deepened yet again. Peculiar one-dimensional strands that extend up from the galactic core are not alone, according to a new paper out today. Astronomers have discovered shorter, dashlike horizontal strands as well. Like the others, they are difficult to explain.Northwestern University astronomer Farhad Yusef-Zadeh discovered the vertical strands, or filaments, in the 1980s and greatly expanded their known ranks in 2022, to about 1,000. When he found the hori ...read more

Renowned for her intellect, political strategy and irresistible charm, Cleopatra was also the lover of Julius Caesar and the mother of his child. She married Marc Antony, bearing three of his children as well. Most importantly, she was the last and most famous queen of ancient Egypt — seen by her people as the human embodiment of Isis, the Goddess of healing and magic — and according to legend, she took her own life by biting a poisonous snake to escape being captured by Rome. But of all th ...read more

Most people were unprepared when the 2004 tsunami hit South Asia. Tsunamis weren't as common in the Indian Ocean as in the Pacific, and there wasn't a warning system in place.Tsunamis have long devastated coastal areas and continue to be a threat in many parts of the world. Two of the most devastating tsunamis have occurred in the last two decades. Here are five of the worst tsunamis in history.Worst Tsunamis in History[embedded content]1. Indian Ocean Earthquake and TsunamiDecember 26, 2004 ...read more

On June 2, 2023, when the first livestream of Mars started, the red planet looked a bit like a blurry peanut butter cookie.Every 48 seconds, a new image beamed from the humble Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) attached to the Mars Express orbiter. Better described as a security camera than a scientific instrument, the VMC was originally attached to the probe to keep an eye on the detachable Beagle-2 lander (which went missing on Mars in 2003).The VMC “was there for one reason,” Simon Wood, an e ...read more