An abstract artist’s impression of what the fossilized worm, Cardiodictyon catenulum, may have looked like. (Image credit: Nicholas Strausfeld/The University of Arizona) (opens in new tab) A 525 million-year-old fossilized worm unearthed in China has what is likely the oldest example of a brain ever discovered. The surprising shape of the brain offers clues about […]
Sign up for a full digest of all the best opinions of the week in our Voices Dispatches email Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered several ancient tombs containing mummies with golden tongues in their mouths. The mummies were found in the ancient cemetary of Qewaisna about 40 […]
Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a mysterious vessel that could be one of Norway’s oldest shipwrecks, during an effort to locate tons of unexploded ammunition dumped on the bottom of a lake near Oslo. Sonar images show the hull of the 33-foot-long (10 meters) wooden ship at a depth of about 1,350 feet (410 […]
Astronomers have discovered a black hole as it spaghettified a hapless star. The intermediate-size black hole, located 850 million light-years from Earth in the galaxy SDSS J152120.07+140410.5, snared and shredded the star after it wandered too close, sending out a powerful beam of light that astronomers used to locate it. Researchers spotted the flare, […]
NASA has confirmed that debris found on the ocean floor off Florida’s Atlantic coast comes from the fallen space shuttle Challenger, which exploded on Jan. 28, 1986, killing all seven astronauts on board. Divers discovered the 20-foot (6 meters) section of Challenger’s hull while searching for downed World War II-era aircraft as part of a […]
Tucked into a mountain-ringed cove in southwest Crete are the ruins of Lissos, an ancient town whose archaeological remains are accessible only by sea or a long hike. Because of its isolation, Lissos had not been investigated by archaeologists for several decades. New work at Lissos, though, has uncovered an odeon, similar to a modern […]
Astronomers have discovered the nearest known black hole to Earth, and it’s twice as close as the previous record holder. The space-time singularity, named Gaia BH1, is 1,566 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus and is roughly 10 times more massive than our sun. It’s close enough to our planet to be considered “in our […]
It’s a simple sentence that captures the hopes and fears of modern-day parents as much as the bronze age Canaanite who owned the doubled-edged ivory comb on which the words appear. Believed to be the oldest known sentence written in the earliest alphabet, the inscription on the luxury item reads: “May this tusk root out […]
The body of a woman in Indonesia was recently discovered in the stomach of a massive, 22-foot-long (6.7 meters) python, which had killed and swallowed its victim whole. The woman, a 54-year-old grandmother named Jahrah, went missing in Jambi province on the island of Sumatra on Oct. 23, according to CNN Indonesia (opens in new […]
A river longer than England’s Thames flows beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, draining an area the size of France and Germany combined, new research reveals. This under-ice river was discovered using ice-penetrating radar mounted on aircraft. In a series of aerial surveys, researchers discovered a river system snaking 285 miles (460 kilometers) and draining into […]
