Through countless eons of birth and death, our ancient ancestors have passed down their burial and funerary practices to the present day. Some of these customs have remained the same, while others have faded into history. Yet, regardless of whether these practices still exist today, some of the graves and cemeteries left behind by historical humans, from those located in caves or beneath giant, towering monuments, have lived on for millennia. Learn more about some of these graveyards, as well a ...read more

The search for Earth-like planets around other stars is one of the great endeavors in modern science. Astronomers have discovered numerous candidates that orbit other stars in the Goldilocks zone where liquid water is likely to exist. The next step is to study the atmosphere of these exoplanets, looking for evidence that they are Earth-like. The huge distances of these planets, their tiny sizes and the even smaller signatures from their atmospheres make this a horrendously difficult task. Which ...read more

Roads are symbols of a functioning society. They make the transportation of people and goods possible and they date back to 4000 B.C. Sumerians built the first known stone-paved roads in Mesopotamia —modern-day Iraq. And since then roads have held societies together and made trade between other civilizations possible. Here are some of the oldest and most fascinating roads in history. The Silk Road(Credit: Dimitrios Karamitros/Shutterstock) The Silk Road wasn’t actually a road. Even the name ...read more

An unhealthy lifestyle is a common culprit for chronic diseases from heart disease to lung cancer, but Graves’ disease, on the other hand, is an autoimmune condition that evades such a straightforward explanation. When it comes to what causes Graves’ disease, the root of the autoimmune disorder, is widely unknown. Andrew Gianoukakis, professor of medicine at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and chief of the division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism at Harbor-UCLA Medical ...read more

To understand more about Neanderthal small-game cooking techniques, a group of scientists went to the birds. They recreated how early humans butchered, prepared, and roasted pigeons, based on archeological evidence dating back 90,000 years from sites in Portugal. The chef-scientists reported their findings in in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.“Studying a variety of small prey can give us a better understanding of the diverse diet of Neanderthals and their adaptability to different envi ...read more

Most people know how to eat a fish taco. Not as many understand how an ancient aquatic organism shaped like a taco ate. Scientists revisited a fossil collection of the 500-million-year-old creature and determined that it used pincer-like mandibles to chew its food, according to a report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences.Revisiting an Ancient FossilAlthough the organism Odaraia had been discovered in the Burgess Shale over 100 years ago and described in the 1980s, several ...read more

In 2016, word came out about the discovery of a downright strange astrophysical object, somewhere in the constellation Cygnus. It wasn’t another Earth, but rather, a star.Citizen scientists had been combing through the data from four years of NASA’s Kepler mission when they encountered the star, officially named KIC 8462852. And it was an oddball. It randomly dimmed, like a flickering lightbulb, and could stay that way for several days. It fluctuated intensely and erratically, sometimes drop ...read more

We like the idea that elephants are scared of mice because it’s comically endearing to imagine a 7-ton behemoth cowering before a furball the size of its toenail. Unfortunately the cartoons lied — it isn’t true. But there’s another creature, even smaller, that really does strike fear into the hearts of pachyderms everywhere: the humble honey bee.Since the turn of the century, study after study has detailed how the sight, sound, and even smell of bees has the power to repel elephants. In ...read more

A large hydrothermal (steam) explosion rocked the Biscuit Basin Geyser near Black Diamond Pool on July 23 during the peak of tourist season. The blast does not appear to have injured anyone, but people on the boardwalk got quite a shock when the explosion occurred. Video of the blast show how violent it was, throwing a dark cloud of debris into the sky near onlookers.The video (posted on Facebook) is quite astonishing, showing what starts out as a potentially normal geyser eruption but quickly e ...read more