At first, it was just part of a floor. During the 2023 excavation season at Naachtun, an ancient Maya city…
Author: Editors of ScienceNewsToday
The Master Navigators Who Conquered the Pacific 60,000 Years Ago
Long before maps, compasses, or recorded history, the world looked very different. During the last Ice Age, when sea levels…
Scientists Discover the World’s Oldest Mummies Weren’t Built for Religion—They Were Born from Grief
Along the dry coast of what is now northern Chile, thousands of years ago, a small community lived between the…
Scientists Uncover the 1,000-Year-Old Secrets of Argentina’s Forgotten Arsenal
For a long time, the bone tools of the Sierras de Córdoba sat in silence. They rested in museum drawers,…
The 1,000-Year-Old Mystery of the Ancient Canyon’s Secret Macaw Sanctuary
In the quiet ruins of Chaco Canyon, where sandstone walls still hold the memory of voices long gone, a different…
Evidence of Africa’s Oldest Ritual Cremation Discovered—And It’s Missing the Skull
About 9,500 years ago, at the base of Mount Hora in what is now northern Malawi, a fire burned unlike…
Scientists Resurrect Millions-of-Years-Old Enzymes to Solve the Mystery of Cannabis
For decades, the names THC, CBD, and CBC have floated through public conversation as if they were fixed, timeless features…
The Marine Heat Wave That Traveled 2,000 Kilometers and Sank to the Deep Ocean
The North Atlantic does not change gently. Its ecology shifts with seasons and currents, but every so often it lurches,…
We Thought Flowering Plants Had a Double Genomic Advantage. We Were Wrong
Flowering plants are everywhere. They lace forests with color, fill fields with grain, and quietly support almost every terrestrial ecosystem.…
Astronomers Solve the 800-Year-Old Mystery of the 1181 “Guest Star”
Most stars that end their lives in explosions do so with overwhelming finality. They tear themselves apart, scattering their remains…
The Ghost Planet: Astronomers Just Captured a World Wandering the Dark Without a Sun
In the vast architecture of the universe, most planets are creatures of routine. They circle their stars with dependable regularity,…
Millions of Years Ago, Japan and the Americas Were Connected—By This Microscopic Shrimp
In the far north of Japan, where land meets cold seas and layers of ancient sediment lie quietly beneath the…
Only 21 Species on Earth Can Do This, and Colorado is Home to Four of Them
Winter in Colorado is not just a season. It is a test. Snow deepens, temperatures plunge, and the familiar colors…
Why Your Brain is Hardwired to Make Mistakes—And Why That’s a Good Thing
In a quiet computational space, far from cages and electrodes, a brain learned to see. It looked at patterns of…
The “Shower Analogy” Explaining Why Cancer Treatments Fail
For doctors and scientists, one of the most haunting questions in medicine never fully goes away. Why does cancer sometimes…
The 100-Year-Old Chemical Secret That Just Got a Sunlight-Powered Makeover
Ammonia is everywhere and almost nowhere at the same time. It is colorless, easy to miss, and yet deeply woven…
This New Compound “Exhales” Captured Carbon at Just 70°C
In a chemistry department in Helsinki, something ordinary and invisible became the focus of a long, patient experiment. The air…
The “Leak” in Your Cells: Scientists Discover Why Some Calories Just Disappear
Deep inside every living cell, tiny engines hum away, turning the food we eat into the energy that keeps us…
The “Quantum Second Law” Was Resting on a Lie—Until Now
For years, a particular mathematical statement sat quietly at the foundation of quantum information theory, rarely questioned and widely relied…
Scientists Observed a “Quantum Conversation” Between Two Materials That Should Be Enemies
Separate two superconductors with a thin barrier, and physics does something quietly astonishing. The property that allows electricity to flow…
Quantum Computers Are Finally Fixing Their Own Mistakes, and the Results Are 70x Better
Quantum computers are often described as machines of the future, but in reality they already exist, humming quietly in laboratories,…
Scientists Turn Extreme Cold and Powerful Magnets Into a New Way to Listen for Dark Matter
The story begins with something that has never been seen. Dark matter does not glow, does not reflect, and does…