When people think of ancient structures, they often think of the Egyptian pyramids or the standing stones of Stonehenge. They might think of the Olmec colossal heads in Mexico or the hundreds of statues on Easter Island.The Neolithic temples of Malta, however, are older than all of these famed sites and were constructed between 5,600 and 4,500 B.C.E. Despite their ancient age, many have survived.Although the buildings have endured, an understanding of how the structures were once used has been l ...read more

It’s heartbreaking to lose a beloved dog. And that heartbreak is almost inevitable. While lifespans vary from breed to breed, dogs live about 10 to 15 years, with small breeds living longer than large breeds. Meanwhile, humans can live 80 years or more. So, yes, the odds are good that if you love a dog, one day, you’re going to have to say goodbye.But what if you cloned your dog? It can be done. In fact, dogs are one of the most successfully cloned animals. Would that mean you could bring ba ...read more

To determine trends in trade and cultural exchange, sometimes historians must follow the money. A team did just that by showing that Byzantine silver found its way into Anglo Saxon coins by A.D. 700, according to an article in Antiquities. Historians had known for decades that, from around A.D. 660 to 750, Anglo-Saxon England saw a surge in silver coins, after the area had long relied on gold. But from where the silver had entered the currency stream remained a mystery. Now a team of researchers ...read more

In the summer of 2022, when the James Webb Space Telescope relayed its first batch of images from the depths of space, it revealed something unexpected: The early universe was full of massive, bright galaxies — teeming with an astonishing numbers of stars — long before anything like them should have existed. At that early stage of cosmic evolution, less than a billion years after the Big Bang, researchers argued, these stars simply shouldn’t have had time to get so big. As Jorryt Matthee, ...read more

Stars like the Sun are remarkably constant. They vary in brightness by only 0.1% over years and decades, thanks to the fusion of hydrogen into helium that powers them. This process will keep the Sun shining steadily for about 5 billion more years, but when stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, their deaths can lead to pyrotechnics.The Sun will eventually die by growing large and then condensing into a type of star called a white dwarf. But stars more than eight times more massive than the Sun die vi ...read more

When you hear the words “reptilian” or “cold-blooded”, the first thing that comes to might be a miserly politician or an uncaring boss — in other words, probably not an actual crocodile or lizard. That’s because for decades, reptiles have been characterized as cold, unfeeling, and even primitive creatures.  But scientists agree that reptiles aren’t emotionless — they’re misunderstood. Extensive research has shown that reptiles experience a wide range of emotions, and that the ...read more

In 2022, we reported the DNA sequences of 33 medieval people buried in a Jewish cemetery in Germany. Not long after we made the data publicly available, people started comparing their own DNA with that of the 14th-century German Jews, finding many “matches.” These medieval individuals had DNA fragments shared with thousands of people who have uploaded their DNA sequence to an online database, the same way you share DNA fragments with your relatives.But what type of a relationship with a medi ...read more

Deep in the rainforests and eucalyptus woodlands of Australia and New Guinea lives an enigmatic creature known as the striped possum. Quiet, cute, and nocturnal, its favorite activity is boring holes into the trees and using its elongated fingers to extract ants and termites from the trunks within. While the striped possum is hard to spot in the wilds of Australia, it’s much more common in the lowlands of New Guinea. The Striped Possum: A Curious CreatureThe striped possum is less than a foot ...read more

Were Stone Age humans the first geologists?Humans living in what is now South Africa 70,000 years ago possessed a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the various kinds of rock that made up their world, indicates a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.Not only did hunter-gatherers of the time know how to make finely crafted stone tools, but they understood exactly which rocks would yield the best combinations of ease of ...read more

In the age of air travel, the Calanais Standing Stones (or Callanish, in the anglicized spelling) are not so hard to get to, and yet, the site feels remote.The ancient stone megaliths are perched at the edge of the village that shares their name, on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, part of the Outer Hebrides chain of islands that sits off the northwestern coast of Scotland. Having read of Calanais’ status as the “Stonehenge of the North,” I was determined to make the journey; it had be ...read more