The desert is one of the harshest environments to live in. It can be extremely hot during the day and freezing cold at night. There is sparse vegetation and little shade. The terrain is often rough, and to top it all off, there is minimal water. Desert inhabitants must be adaptable to survive these harsh conditions. As humans, to thrive in desert life, we must find ways to stay hydrated, stay out of the sun, and find food and shelter. It’s much easier to survive in the desert now, with modern ...read more

To the Stone Age agriculturalists on Bornholm, a Danish island off the coast of Sweden, the best way to deal with bad weather was to sacrifice stones. That’s according to recent research in Antiquity, which reimagines the island’s sun stone artifacts as summons for the sun.The stones appeared at the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, site of Vasagård approximately 4,900 years ago, at around the same time as a devastating volcanic winter in Northern Europe. The objects may have been sacrificial do ...read more

When the German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse built the world’s first programmable computer in war time Berlin, it performed floating point arithmetic at a clock speed of between 5 and 10 Hz. The machine was deemed unnecessary for the German war effort and never used for everyday calculations. In 1943, it was destroyed during an Allied air raid. Nevertheless, the Z3, as it was called, gave Zuse a strong claim to be the inventor of the modern computer. After the war, the clock speed of computers ...read more

Hot yoga is a relatively intense exercise regime favored by millions, including celebrities and athletes who have helped it garner a level of popularity. It usually involves a series of yoga poses conducted in temperatures of up to 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) and humidity of around 40 percent, intended to recreate the tropical clime of Kolkata, India. Previously known as Bikram yoga, it is now referred to as hot yoga due to a series of serious allegations against its founder. Des ...read more

The year in space is off to a strong start for 2025 as two lunar landers from private companies — Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and Tokyo-based iSpace — have officially launched from Earth and are now headed for the moon. This moment represents the first time two landers from different nations have launched on the same rocket, having taken to the sky on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket during the early hours of January 15, 2025 at 1:11 a.m. EST.The Flight of the Blue Ghost The Firefly lander kicks o ...read more

Contemporary snow leopards are rare — and fossils of their ancient ancestors are even more scarce. Researchers have now identified and examined million-year-old bones of the big cat and have come to some surprising conclusions about how it adapted to the Ice Age and survived as a species since then. Their analysis has been published in the journal Science Advances.Learning About Snow Leopard SurvivalThe skull of the leopard of Algar da Manga Larga, deposited at the Geological Museum of Lisbon. ...read more

New findings published in the journal Nature suggest that women were at the top of British Iron Age societies. After examining ancient genomes uncovered in a cemetery in Dorset, an international research team determined that this community had a strong female-line descent, which may be a first for early Europe. Uncovering Ancient GenomesDurotrigian burial of a young woman from Langton Herring sampled for DNA (c) Bournemouth University. She was buried with a mirror (right panels) and jewellery, ...read more

Years of experiments at rock art sites in Finland have revealed that the echoes produced by smooth cliff faces may have influenced the neolithic people in that area. The artists behind the rock art and the people that later came to admire the figures would have experienced an spiritual sound, according to a recent study published in Sound Studies.“We almost know nothing about sound in prehistoric times,” says Riitta Rainio, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki.Stone Age Rock Art in ...read more

When Homo neanderthalensis first came in contact with Homo sapiens around 50,000 years ago, in what’s now the Middle East, they encountered a host of diseases for which humans had no immunity for because they had never experienced them before. But, interbreeding would change the human genome, which likely continued until Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years ago. And even today humans are left with some Neanderthal genes, many of which pertain to the immune system.Interbreeding and Hu ...read more

In their battle against antibiotics, bacteria are gaining an edge, becoming more and more resistant to antibiotic attacks. But a new paper published in PLOS Biology suggests that computer models could contribute to making more targeted antibiotics, with a reduced risk of increasing bacteria’s antibiotic resistance.According to the authors of the paper, these laser-like antibiotics could attack specific bacteria in specific areas of our bodies once created, reducing our overall contact with ant ...read more