Month: March 2022

We stick calendars on the wall or load them up on our phones, but the people of the third millennium BCE used giant rocks, new research suggests. A new study explains how Stonehenge may have originally been used to keep track of a solar year (aka tropical year) of 365 and a quarter days, which

Scientists discovered remnants of an Old Stone Age culture, less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Beijing, where ancient hominins used a reddish pigment called ochre and crafted tiny, blade-like tools from stone. The archaeological site, called Xiamabei, offers a rare glimpse into the life of Homo sapiens and now-extinct human relatives who inhabited the region some 40,000

Researchers in Japan are investigating the origins of a nightmarish, 300-year-old mummified ’mermaid‘, which has been worshipped for centuries due to its supposed medicinal properties. The haunting remains are most likely a gruesome amalgam of a monkey’s torso sewed onto a fish’s tail, potentially embellished with hair and nails from a human.  Hiroshi Kinoshita, board member of

Across the world, girls are more likely than boys to blame academic failure on a lack of talent, according to a large study on gender stereotypes published Wednesday.  Paradoxically, the idea that males are inherently more brilliant was most entrenched in countries that are more egalitarian.  Such stereotypes have been explored in the past, but

The Achilles tendon – the largest tendon in the human body – acts like a rubber band connecting the calf muscle to the heel bone. While we know it works like a spring that stores and releases energy as we move our legs, what’s not clear is precisely how it responds to exercise and training,

Prehistoric sites are full of stone tools that appear to have two life cycles: They’ve been crafted, used, and discarded before being picked up a second time and used again. A new study puts forward an interesting hypothesis as to why this is. The research suggests that the recycling of these tools is about them