New evidence suggests that alcohol was a surprisingly big motivator in our monumental transition from hunting and gathering to farming – but was beer really more important to us than bread?

For centuries, Europeans thought that eternal daylight saturated the cosmos. The shift to a dark universe has had a profound ...

Vladimir Brljak works at the intersection of literary history, intellectual history, and the history of science. His main current project is When Did Space Turn Dark?, a monograph exploring the shift ...

Skin fossils from a sauropod dinosaur examined with an electron microscope feature structures called melanosomes, which are ...

In a grey-walled room in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, a strange activity is underfoot. Wearing a cap covered in sensors and positioning themselves into a chair, a person places their bare feet over two ...

Australia’s unprecedented ban on social media for under 16s has finally come into force, but day one of the new law has revealed some teething problems, including the fact that some children have ...

From an incredible series of revelations about the ancient humans called Denisovans to surprising discoveries about tool ...

Scientists were amazed to discover a 507-year-old clam that was already 100 in Shakespeare’s day, but why did it live so long ...

Excavations of a workshop that was buried in Pompeii almost 2000 years ago have given archaeologists unique insights into ...

How a Finnish physicist named Karl Lemström once became obsessed with recreating the aurora borealis from scratch – and may ...

Some of the elements used by living systems are far more abundant in Cassiopeia A than we thought, hinting that some parts of ...

Screen time has been linked to all sorts of problems, from depression and obesity to poor sleep. But how worried should you really be? Jacob Aron sifts through the evidence ...