Just outside of Jerusalem, archaeologists have discovered a cache of vessels and figurines inside a 2,750-year-old temple that could provide a rare window into religious rituals of the period, the Israeli Antiquities Authority announced. The finds were uncovered at Tel Motza, an archaeological site being excavated ahead of the expansion of Highway 1, the main…
In the period just before they went extinct, the American lions and saber-toothed cats that roamed North America in the late Pleistocene were living well off the fat of the land. That is the conclusion of the latest study of the microscopic wear patterns on the teeth of these great cats recovered from the La…
You’ve heard the hype a hundred times: Physicists hope to someday build a whiz-bang quantum computer that can solve problems that would overwhelm an ordinary computer. Now, four separate teams have taken a step toward achieving such “quantum speed-up” by demonstrating a simpler, more limited form of quantum computing that, if it can be improved,…
A bird listening to birdsong may experience some of the same emotions as a human listening to music, suggests a new study on white-throated sparrows, published in Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience. “We found that the same neural reward system is activated in female birds in the breeding state that are listening to male birdsong, and…
Lack of rain has left many rivers at low levels unseen for decades, and while this creates problems for river commerce, it also offers an occasional treasure trove of history. For example, a rock containing what is believed to be an ancient map has emerged in the Mississippi River in southeast Missouri, with etchings that may be 1,200 years old.
To be sure, there were calls in the days after the mass murder in Newtown for a deep and meaningful silence. But what bothered me were the attempts to find space for a loving God in the context of this misery. I don’t mean the ridiculous and easily dismissed attempt to use this tragedy as…
From Mattew Yglesias and the Slate MoneyBox blog: There’s more to life than just this, but I’ve come to think that directly transfering cash money to people in need is the most underrated tool around for fighting poverty. So I was incredibly excited to read Dana Goldstein’s profile of GiveDirectly. They take advantage of the fact that Kenya…
At Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, where excavations helped to confirm Africa was the cradle of humanity, scientists now find the landscape once fluctuated rapidly, likely guiding early human evolution.These findings suggest that key mental developments within the human lineage may have been linked with a highly variable environment. Scientists had long thought Africa went…
Scientists have found that deforestation not only affects the diversity of plants and animals, but is bad news for the forest’s microbes too. While it has long been known that deforestation in the Amazon leads to a net loss in the biodiversity of plants and animals, until now very little has been known about how…
The next time you think about having sex without birth control, The Center for Biological Diversity wants to make sure that you consider how it might affect the greater world around you. Since 2009, the non-profit has handed out 450,000 condoms with endangered species awareness messages on their wrappers. How would your next passionate evening…