Ancient Mesopotamia, the fabled land between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, was the command and control center of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. This ancient superpower was the largest empire of its time, lasting from 912 BCE to 609 BCE in what is now modern Iraq and Syria.   At its height, the Assyrian state stretched

Narwhal is by many measures a normal puppy. Caregivers say he likes to nibble on fingers and give kisses and wants to play with anyone nearby. On the other hand, he also has a second tail sprouting from his forehead – an appendage that’s prompted the nickname “unicorn puppy” and captivated dog lovers in the

There’s an unusual trend on the rise in South Korean academia: professors are naming children and teens as co-authors on their research, likely to boost their resumes for college admissions.   The practice, which first prompted government scrutiny in 2017, has only grown more common since then, according to Nature News. While the South Korean

Spread across the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico lie the ‘ghost tracks’ of long-dead mammoths. Now, researchers using a special type of scan have revealed other footprints; they belong to ancient humans walking deliberately inside mammoth tracks.   It’s a fascinating glimpse into life some 12,000 years ago at the end of the

Benjamin Schreiber is very much alive. But that hasn’t stopped him from arguing that he died four years ago. After the convicted murderer collapsed in his prison cell in 2015, doctors restarted his heart five times. Recovering back at the Iowa State Penitentiary, Schreiber filed a novel legal appeal. Because he died before he was

Forget nuclear weapons, biological warfare, and the slew of other ways humanity could cause its own destruction for a moment. If you take into account only naturally occurring phenomena — supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, and the like — researchers from the University of Oxford recently determined that the probability of our entire species going extinct

Filling your house with potted plants might make you happier and more productive, but it’s not going to make the air you breathe any cleaner. That is, unless you had a ludicrous number of indoor plants: somewhere between 10 and 1,000 for every square metre of your living space.   A critical review, drawing on

Bones are amazing. People are often surprised to learn that bone is a living tissue. It is widely understood that our bones have the ability to repair themselves after breaks and fractures.   But they are also constantly removing and rebuilding themselves in response to everyday activity, in a cellular process that we call remodelling.

Your dog may be the apple of your eye, but let’s be honest: she is an animal, with her own instincts and idiosyncrasies, and there are going to be times when she makes you want to tear your hair out.   However much you want to, however, new research suggests that you should never yell

Getting everything right all of the time might sound like the ideal scenario, but such a perfect success rate can mean you’re not actually learning anything new.  To make sure you’re learning at the optimal rate, new research finds you should be aiming to fail around 15 percent of the time – or 15.87 percent

Something strange is happening in America. Research shows fewer Americans are identifying with organised religion, but in pockets of the country, a seeming explosion in new-found faith borders on the miraculous.   Take Vermont, for example. After 2016, the number of families professing deep religious convictions spiked suddenly by over seven times, a new study

The fact we can confidently balance on top of a pair of meat-sticks without toppling over is the very symbol of human evolution. Yet just how we came to stand upright in the first place remains a hotly debated topic.   Now we have a new piece in the puzzle. Recently discovered fossils left by

How older people feel about younger people says far more about themselves than future generations. At some point in our lives, we’ve all heard or grumbled about “kids these days”. It’s a popular sentiment that’s been felt for millennia, and as it turns out, it’s probably not the youth’s fault, nor has it ever been.

Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells – known as neurons – each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some ten trillion

We invoke their name as an insult, but continuing discoveries about the extinct Neanderthal culture suggest the existence of a rich, complex symbolism we still do not fully understand. Now, we have another artefact to admire.   New archaeological research in Spain has uncovered the most modern evidence yet of a form of primitive jewellery

These days, it’s hard to know whom to trust online, and how to discern genuine content from fakery. Some degree of trust in our devices is necessary, if we’re to embrace the growing number of technologies that could potentially enhance our lives. How many of us, however, bother trying to confirm the truth, and how

From daily tooth-brushing to the 11am coffee, we all have dozens of habits that get us through our daily routine. Some are great – weekly gym visits are often encouraged – others not so much, like smoking a pack a day, or dialling the number of the pizza place way too often.   Because we

An Australian anti-vaxxer mum has reportedly said she was giving trick-or-treaters chicken pox-tainted lollipops for Halloween, claiming the candies would help give kids the infection that her son has so they can get the chicken pox over with and be immune for life, according to a post shared in a pro-vaccine group called “Light for

To this day, the Khmer Empire is remembered for its magnificent capital Angkor, but the legendary Southeast Asian empire moved its seat of power around quite a bit, sometimes with uncertain results.   The ancient city of Koh Ker had a very brief spell as the capital and centre between 928-944 CE, and now archaeologists think they have

What started as a meme is now an international movement toward reforestation. When the YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson ⁠- aka MrBeast ⁠- hit 20 million subscribers on YouTube in May, a fan suggested there was something he could do to commemorate the milestone and “single handedly save Earth” at the same time.   “Petition for

When bitten on the finger by a venomous snake, a farmer in China took the only recourse he thought available to him: he lopped the digit right off before undertaking a journey to the nearest city with a hospital.   But, according to the doctors who treated the patient once he arrived, he needn’t have

Have you ever wondered how long it would take for the entire world to become vampires? Let say we started out with the set-up from your favourite vampire novel: Do Bram Stoker’s Dracula vampires take over the world faster than vampires in True Blood or those in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles?    Dominik Czernia, a physicist

What goes on in our minds is usually a private affair, but sometimes, our eyes can betray our thoughts. When someone is thinking of a bright image, their pupils will noticeably shrink, researchers have found, even if there’s nothing to look at and they weren’t anticipating light.   The finding builds on previous research that

A group of researchers say they have pinpointed the ancestral homeland of all humans alive today: modern-day Botswana. In a new study published in the journal Nature, scientists analysed mitochondrial DNA – genetic information that gets passed down the female line – from more than 1,200 people across myriad populations in Africa.   By examining

The days of Sesame Street’s resident counting vampire are numbered. It turns out toddlers a little older than a year already have a good sense of simple accounting – they can tell apart quantities of hidden blocks after hearing them being counted.   That doesn’t mean they can do your taxes, but it does suggest

Pumpkins are, first and foremost, a food. Right? Well, in the UK and the US, the vast majority of pumpkins actually end up in landfill – right after October 31. Of the nearly 2 billion pounds of pumpkin grown in the United States in 2014, an estimated 1.3 billion pounds were simply trashed instead of eaten or

Have you ever sat down to complete your morning crossword or Sudoku and wondered about what’s happening in your brain? Somewhere in the activity of the billions of neurons in your brain lies the code that lets you remember a key word, or apply the logic required to complete the puzzle.   Given the brain’s

Rats in a University of Richmond lab have learned to do something many Americans struggle with every day: successfully drive themselves to pick up food. The furry drivers were taught to navigate a custom-built rat car and the findings suggest rats may possess a greater ability to learn tasks than previously thought.   The experiment, first

There’s something in the air we breathe that might make us less inclined towards crime, a new analysis suggests. When pollen is at its highest and hay fever is presumably at its worst, health economists have found a strange decline in urban violence.   Comparing local pollen counts with daily crime reports in 17 US cities,

The scientific community is in danger of overstepping (or may have already breached) its ethical responsibilities in a rush to study and understand the mysteries of the brain via experimentation with artificially grown substitutes, researchers warn.   Mini-brains, also known as organoids, have in recent years become a hugely important resource in neuroscience and related

The Egyptian government is hailing the discovery of more than 20 wooden coffins as “one of the largest and most important” archaeological finds in the past few years. The coffins were found in Assasif, a necropolis on the west bank of the Nile River.   Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities tweeted images of the “intact and

You might have heard the idea that being an only child means you’re more likely to be selfish, spoilt, and self-centred – but the results of a new study show no link between being an only child and being more narcissistic.   It’s an important finding for parents and policy makers alike – whether you’re

Scientists have rediscovered an ancient city of the Khmer Empire, hidden for centuries by the lush jungle topography of modern-day Cambodia. Mahendraparvata, sometimes dubbed the ‘lost city of Cambodia’, was an early capital city of the Khmer Empire, a Hindu-Buddhist regime of Southeast Asia that lasted from the 9th to 15th centuries of the common

Psychologists have identified an important trait that could be shared by truly humble people – something called ‘hypo-egoic nonentitlement’. That simply means that you don’t believe your positive qualities and life achievements entitle you to any kind of special treatment from others.   That’s slightly different to having a tendency to downplay your strengths and your

A kazoo might seem a world away from the spoken word. But our ability to produce its buzzing, Donald Duck-like sound at will was key in us ever developing the ability to speak at all.   And while our capacity for speech is unique, my colleague Robert Shumaker and I have used the novelty instrument

The amount of close and comforting contact that young infants get doesn’t just keep them warm, snug, and loved. A 2017 study says it can actually affect babies at the molecular level, and the effects can last for years.   Based on the study, babies who get less physical contact and are more distressed at

Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, described the horror of the authoritarian regime of Gilead. In this theocracy, self-preservation was the best people could hope for, being powerless to kick against the system.   But her sequel, The Testaments, raises the possibility that individuals, with suitable luck, bravery and cleverness, can fight back. But can

Unlike some creatures, humans can’t regenerate their limbs – but a new study suggests we do have a hidden ‘salamander-like’ ability to regrow cartilage in the body, a finding which could help treatment for joint injuries and even arthritis.   Using mass spectrometry techniques on 18 specimens, researchers were able to identify a mechanism by

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino for the development of lithium-ion batteries. “We have gained access to a technical revolution,” said Sara Snogerup Linse, a chemistry professor and member of the award committee, sweeping her finger at the reporters gathered at the Royal

Blind people who use echoes to map their surroundings, akin to how bats or dolphins navigate, have an adapted brain region that allows them to ‘see’ with sound, a new study suggests.   The primary visual cortex is where the human brain normally interprets signals from the eyes, but that doesn’t mean it can only

Research suggests there could be a good scientific reason why some of us struggle to look someone in the eye and hold a conversation with them. It turns out we’re not just awkward, our brains actually can’t handle the tasks of thinking of the right words and focussing on a face at the same time.

Twinship has become a cultural phenomenon in the United States over the past three decades, with a higher proportion of twins living among us than at any other time in known history.   There are twin conventions, twin parenting books, twin Halloween costumes, and debates on local school boards over whether to separate — or

A new study comparing human skulls with those of other animals claims that the dimensions of our heads appear to follow the golden ratio – that special number with a controversial reputation for being the “formula for beauty”.   Usually symbolised by the irrational number phi, or roughly 1.618, the golden ratio is amongst the

It’s hard to imagine how a thin papyrus scroll could survive a volcanic eruption. Even harder is imagining how such an artefact can be read some 2,000 years later without unrolling it at all.   An international team of researchers now claims we are closer than ever before to ‘virtually’ unravelling and reading the only

Archaeologists have recovered a rare and tantalising treasure off the coast of Mallorca in Spain. Not gold or jewels, but 93 jug-like terracotta vessels called amphorae from a Roman ship that sank 1,700 years ago.   Most of these beautiful jugs are still intact and sealed, which means there’s a very good chance their contents

What’s the ultimate exit strategy if the worst happens? Like a sudden global pandemic, or some other kind of existential crisis that threatens humanity with extinction? The sad truth is, if an apocalyptic outbreak comes, there may be no escape. But if you’re in the right place when the catastrophe hits – like an island

When ancient burials are discovered in the sands of Egypt, the stories we hear are usually similar. High-ranking officials and nobles buried with rich grave goods, elaborate coffins, and often cartouches naming the deceased, so we know who they were. But a recent discovery paints a rather different picture.   Archaeologists have found dozens of 2,000-year-old

Cormac McCarthy knows a thing or two about good writing. He’s the visionary who gave us The Road, No Country for Old Men, and a list of other acclaimed novels. He’s won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and just about every other literature award; film adaptations of his works have been seen by