These were plenty of legends of societies that once thrived in a distant time and place. Some have been found and excavated so that we can begin to understand how these civilizations of yesteryear might have lived. But some exist only in legend. Real or fantasy, here are some of the ancient societies that inspired many, and some that were never found. 1. Machu Picchu(Credit: Sharan Prasad Anumolu/Shutterstock) High in the mountains of Peru stands Machu Picchu, a 15th-century citadel that was a ...read more

Mars is between 33 and 249 million miles away from Earth, depending on the time of year you make the journey. That comes out to about two years of travel.Once you get there, conditions on the Red Planet are brutal, with temperatures ranging from around -248 degrees Fahrenheit to 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Just getting there is a feat that seems difficult to imagine, yet once astronauts make the trek, they’re in for an intense workload.According to NASA, plans are in the works for travel to Mars as ...read more

From crucial vaccines to new insights about diseases, nearly all biomedical research starts with the study of human cell samples in a lab.  All of these samples are originally taken from human patients. But when they make their way to the lab, most of these samples — including the HeLa cell line, one of the world’s most prominent cell samples — are viewed independently from the person they were sampled from. Who Was Henrietta Lacks?These samples don’t exist in a vacuum. Notably, the H ...read more

The concept of sunken treasure has captivated the imagination of pirates, divers, and the general public for likely as long as ships have sunk to the bottom of the sea. Part of the draw is that there are purportedly still a plethora of famous lost shipwrecks out there, such as the undiscovered Portuguese Flor do Mar, a treasure ship that was sunk in 1511 off the coast of Indonesia bearing dozens of chests of gold, precious gems and perfumes that might be worth billions today.But other lost treas ...read more

Snakes seem like relatively simple creatures—basically a glorified sock with holes on either end. Yet, these creatures have managed to adapt to nearly every continent on the planet over the past 100 million years.But how exactly did snakes evolve, and what made these slithery creatures so successful across the planet today? It was likely a combination of three factors that all arose at roughly the same time. “It all happens in one singular evolutionary burst around 100 to 110 million years a ...read more

Three o’clock in the morning — for some people, it’s the most anxiety-producing time. It’s when they wake up after just a few hours of shut-eye and then fail to fall back asleep.For other people, it’s the dreaded hour when they realize they have yet to fall asleep. The clock is ticking toward their wake-up time, and they haven’t even hit a dream cycle.Missing sleep can lead to more than just a sluggish day. Sleep medicine scientists have established that poor sleep is related to poor ...read more

To ensure that a satellite orbiting an asteroid was indeed two moons stuck together, the astronomers observing it needed to take a second look. That double take confirmed that they were seeing this phenomenon for the first time, according to a report in Nature.Last November, NASA’s Lucy — a spacecraft launched to explore asteroids as far away as Jupiter — sailed past its first target, Dinkinesh (which drew the nickname Dinky). Astronomers following the spacecraft’s data transmission noti ...read more

Consumers’ love for avocados in the United States seems to know no bounds. From 2001 through 2020, consumption of this fruit laden with healthy fats tripled nationwide, rising to over 8 pounds per person yearly.On average, 90% of those avocados are grown in the southwest Mexican state of Michoacán. As with other foods that have become trendy, such as acai berries, or widely used, such as palm oil, intensive avocado production is causing significant environmental damage.My research on 20th-cen ...read more

Paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner wasn't expecting an ancient revelation during a routine examination of a Paleolithic shin bone in 2017. She observed clean, carved cuts on a human tibia that mirrored processed animal food remains, hinting that a human may have butchered and consumed the bone. And this wasn't a one-off find. Across the English Channel, evidence from the Magdalenian culture echoed Pobiner's find. Here, a staggering 42 percent of prehistoric human bones bore human teeth marks wit ...read more

When a star is born or dies, or when any other very energetic phenomenon occurs in the universe, it emits X-rays, which are high-energy light particles that aren’t visible to the naked eye. These X-rays are the same kind that doctors useto take pictures of broken bones inside the body. But instead of looking at the shadows produced by the bones stopping X-rays inside of a person, astronomers detect X-rays flying through space to get images of events such as black holes and supernovae.Images an ...read more