In southern Mexico, remote sensing technology has recently provided a snapshot of a 15th century archaeological site in its heyday, revealing a bustling city built by the pre-Columbian Zapotec culture. The site, known as Guiengola, was initially thought to be a fortress occupied by soldiers, but one researcher has found that it was actually an entire city complete with a network of internal roads and amenities like temples and ballcourts. The updated perspective of Guiengola, featured in a Nove ...read more
Centuries of votive offerings cast into a lake in Denmark and other archaeological discoveries have revealed that barbarian warriors may have indulged in psychotropic drugs to stimulate themselves during battle against the Romans and other enemies.These warriors may have used small spoons — dozens of which have been discovered attached to Barbarian belts — to ingest or measure magic mushrooms, an organic precursor for LSD or other substances.“The lack of fatigue or inhibition, and the mobi ...read more
Most of us hope we’ll be healthy into our late 80s or early 90s and then die peacefully in our sleep, preferably after a wonderful evening with loved ones. But that’s rarely the way it works out. All too often, our later years are plagued with ill health. Life expectancy has been steadily increasing throughout the world since 1900, but “those gains have not been matched by equivalent gains in health,” says Armin Garmany, a researcher who studies regenerative medicine at the Mayo Clinic. ...read more
An asteroid carrying some of the basic building blocks of life has been reported in the journal Nature Astronomy. This finding opens the possibility that life on Earth could have been seeded by chemicals in the cosmos billions of years ago.“Asteroids provide a time capsule into our home planet’s history, and Bennu’s samples are pivotal in our understanding of what ingredients in our solar system existed before life started on Earth,” Nicky Fox, a NASA official, said in a news release. ...read more
Although Mars is known for being a dry and desolate desert, its landscape hasn’t always been so hostile. Rivers and lakes were once present on the Red Planet before it began to dry up somewhere around 3 billion years ago. The latest research has explored evidence from this distant chapter of Mars’ past, revealing ancient sources of water in the Gale crater region that evaporated and left behind wave ripples. Researchers have investigated these geological clues in a recent study published in ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine