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As Phoenician sailors ventured into the waters of the western Mediterranean Sea to establish new settlements in the early first millennium b.c., they deliberately brought the familiar scents of home with them, according to a statement issued by the University of Tübingen. Researchers from the University of Tübingen and the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) recently analyzed more than 50 miniature ceramic vessels found in ancient tombs, houses, and sacred areas at a Phoenician site on the island of Motya, off the west coast of Sicily. The study determined that all had been made in southern Phoenicia, near present-day Beirut,...

The Oman News Agency announced that rescue excavations carried out by the Department of Heritage and Tourism in the Al-Sabikhi region of Oman's Ibri province located at least 25 remarkable tombs dating back more than 4,000 years. The archaeological team discovered that many of them still held skeletal remains and complete pottery vessels that were carefully placed within the burial chambers. Researchers identified some of the ceramic artifacts as imports from the Jemdet Nasr culture in modern-day Iraq. The Jemdet Nasr period lasted from around 3100 to 2900 b.c. and proceeded the Uruk period, when the Sumerian civilization first began...

While the development of agriculture is often associated with the Fertile Crescent, past research has shown that farming actually developed independently at different times and places around the world, including Africa, the Americas, and eastern Asia. New evidence from a cave in southern Uzbekistan continues to show that the advent and spread of agricultural technology is more complicated than originally thought, according to a statement released by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. Recent archaeological work in Toda Cave uncovered evidence that the region's inhabitants were already engaging in sophisticated harvesting practices 9,200 years ago. Wear patterns on stone tools...

Elon Musk has said Grok, the A.I.-powered chatbot that his company developed, should be “politically neutral” and “maximally truth-seeking.” But in practice, Mr. Musk and his artificial intelligence company, xAI, have tweaked the chatbot to make its answers more conservative on many issues, according to an analysis of thousands of its responses by The New York Times. The shifts appear, in some cases, to reflect Mr. Musk’s political priorities. Grok is similar to tools like ChatGPT, but it also lives on X, giving the social network’s users the opportunity to ask it questions by tagging it in posts. One user...

Explanation: The Horsehead Nebula is one of the most famous nebulae on the sky. It is visible as the dark indentation to the orange emission nebula at the far right of the featured picture. The horse-head feature is dark because it is really an opaque dust cloud that lies in front of the bright emission nebula. Like clouds in Earth's atmosphere, this cosmic cloud has assumed a recognizable shape by chance. After many thousands of years, the internal motions of the cloud will surely alter its appearance. The emission nebula's orange color is caused by electrons recombining with protons to...

Sumer is commonly acknowledged as one of -- if not the earliest known -- human civilizations. Emerging in southern Mesopotamia between the sixth and fifth millennium b.c., the Sumerians are often credited with a number of key innovations, including the invention of writing, the establishment of human-engineered agricultural systems, and the construction of the first urban centers. According to a statement released by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, a groundbreaking new study suggests that all of these Sumerian developments may have been driven by dynamic changes in the interactions between rivers, tides, and sediments. The research shows that between 7,000 and...

A groundbreaking study reveals that human activities have pushed Earth's biosphere to a critical tipping point, threatening the planet's ability to sustain life and prompting urgent calls for immediate global action. The integrity of Earth’s biosphere is under unprecedented threat, according to a recent study that sheds light on the planet’s declining ability to maintain ecological balance. Conducted by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and BOKU University in Vienna, the research highlights critical challenges facing the plant kingdom’s capacity to regulate essential ecosystem functions. The study, published in the journal One Earth, examines the energy flows derived...

Massive 2,800-year-old Dam Discovered In Ancient Jerusalem | 32:52 Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology 44.5K subscribers | 23,824 views | August 29, 2025

How ancient Rome was excavated in Italy in the 1920s. Unique rare videos and photos. | 10:03 World Treasures | 16.8K subscribers | 582,835 views | June 11, 2021

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Olympic champion Imane Khelif has appealed against a World Boxing decision barring her from upcoming events unless she undergoes genetic sex testing. The Court of Arbitration for Sport said on Monday that the Algerian boxer filed the appeal last month. Khelif was bidding to compete in the world boxing championships which start on Thursday, but CAS added that on Monday it dismissed a request to suspend the World Boxing decision until the case was heard. Khelif won a gold medal at the Paris Olympics last year amid international scrutiny on her and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, another gold...

Explanation: Its surface is the most densely cratered in the Solar System -- but what's inside? Jupiter's moon Callisto is a battered ball of dirty ice that is larger than the planet Mercury. It was visited by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s and 2000s, but the recently reprocessed featured image is from a flyby of NASA's Voyager 2 in 1979. The moon would appear darker if it weren't for the tapestry of light-colored fractured surface ice created by eons of impacts. The interior of Callisto is potentially even more interesting because therein might lie an internal layer of liquid...

The annual clock of the seasons – winter, spring, summer, autumn – is often taken as a given. But our new study in Nature, using a new approach for observing seasonal growth cycles from satellites, shows that this notion is far too simple. We present an unprecedented and intimate portrait of the seasonal cycles of Earth's land-based ecosystems. This reveals "hotspots" of seasonal asynchrony around the world – regions where the timing of seasonal cycles can be out of sync between nearby locations. .....

How cutting-edge technology, novel search techniques, and persistence paid off Rarely seen images, video, and audio of the discovery can be found here.Woods Hole, Mass. (August 8, 2025) – On September 1, 1985, the wreck of the RMS Titanic was discovered about 12,500 feet (3,800 meters) beneath the surface of the North Atlantic by an international team led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the French oceanographic institution, IFREMER. The expedition, led by Robert Ballard–then head of WHOI’s Deep Submergence Lab–used innovative technology and search techniques that helped spawn a new era in deep-sea exploration and discovery.Deep ocean technology...

Sometimes you just have to look at a thing to know it’s nuts. Other times, you have to extrapolate a thing out to its inevitable end to know it’s nuts, but then there it is: it’s nuts. Lefties have trouble extrapolating. They clearly have trouble with what is real and obvious (i.e., X/X = Female, X/Y = Male), but the things you need only think through just a little bit elude them, too. Have you noticed? They simply don’t extrapolate. Even a little. They’re often so anti-science, so counter-factual, so self-destructive that it goes beyond simply not following “the science.”...

Explanation: What created this unusual planetary nebula? Dubbed the Pillow Nebula and the Flying Carpet Nebula, NGC 7027 is one of the smallest, brightest, and most unusually shaped planetary nebulas known. Given its expansion rate, NGC 7027 first started expanding, as visible from Earth, about 600 years ago. For much of its history, the planetary nebula has been expelling shells, as seen in blue in the featured image by the Hubble Space Telescope. In modern times, though, for reasons unknown, it began ejecting gas and dust (seen in brown) in specific directions that created a new pattern that seems to...

Toward the end of the last Ice Age around 8,500 years ago, melting glaciers caused sea levels to rise as much as 6.5 feet per century. This altered life in northern Europe, as hunter-gatherer communities were forced to move inland and rising waters submerged existing coastal settlements. Many of them would be lost forever. The Associated Press reports that Danish underwater archaeologists have located a Mesolithic coastal settlement about 25 feet below the surface of the Bay of Aarhus. Divers have excavated an area of around 430 square feet. The investigation has uncovered animal bones, stone tools, arrowheads, a seal...

Explanation: A young crescent moon can be hard to see. That's because when the Moon shows its crescent phase (young or old) it can never be far from the Sun in planet Earth's sky. But even though the sky is still bright, a slender sunlit lunar crescent is clearly visible in this early evening skyscape. The telephoto snapshot was captured on August 24, with the Moon very near the western horizon at sunset. Seen in a narrow crescent phase about 1.5 days old, the visible sunlit portion is a mere two percent of the surface of the Moon's familiar nearside....

BUENOS AIRES - They look like ordinary foals, docile with honey brown coats and white facial patches, content to spend their days munching alfalfa in a cordoned-off pasture in rural Buenos Aires province. But these five 10-month-olds are the world’s first genetically edited horses: cloned copies of a prize-winning horse named Polo Pureza, or Polo Purity, with a single DNA sequence inserted using CRISPR technology with the aim of producing explosive speed. Kheiron Biotech, the Argentine company that created the horses, says gene-editing has the potential to revolutionize horse breeding. While cloning creates a genetically identical copy, CRISPR functions as...

It started with a quiver deep down in the Martian crust weak, barely detectable, yet bearing 4.5-billion-year-old echoes. Those seismic waves, recorded by NASA's InSight lander from 2018 to 2022, have revealed a remarkable discovery: giant preserved fragments of Mars' primordial crust, trapped in the planet's mantle since the formation of the Solar System.The discovery emerged from the painstaking analysis of eight exceptionally clear marsquake events by a team led by Constantinos Charalambous of Imperial College London. Using the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), InSight recorded how primary (P) and secondary (S) waves traveled through the planet, reflecting and...

Health officials upgraded a recent travel warning amid a concerning surge of a mosquito-borne illness that causes pain potentially lasting for years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a Level 2 travel warning for Guangdong Province in China, advising visitors to “practice enhanced precautions” due to an outbreak of chikungunya. The outbreak has shaken the province, with Foshan city at the epicenter, sparking an aggressive response from authorities that some are comparing to early COVID-era measures. Thousands of people in China have been infected with the painful virus. It’s an illness that is spread when a mosquito...