Apr 1st, 2025 - A toddler unearthed an ancient treasure during a family outing in southern Israel earlier this month, officials said.  While visiting the archaeological site Tel Azekah, some 50 miles southeast of Tel Aviv, 3-year-old Ziv Nitzan found a scarab amulet believed to belong to Canaanite communities dating back as far as 3,800 years, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority , a national conservation agency. A site with biblical significance, Tel Azekah is a hill created from the debris of settlements built on top of one another over time. The discovery happened in early March, the ... [Read More]

Apr 1st, 2025 - The detailed relics were found in a necropolis and experts believe the woman depicted could have been an important priestess Two almost lifesize sculptures of a man and woman, who was believed to have been a priestess, have been found during the excavations of a huge tomb in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. The detailed funerary relics adorned the tomb containing several burial niches built into a wide wall in the necropolis of Porta Sarno, one of the main entrance gates into the ancient city. Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79. Experts believe the female ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - For over 165 years, scientists have puzzled over a strange fossil called  Prototaxites . Even its appearance was unusual. It stood up to 8 meters tall, and resembled a towering tree with no leaves. These curious lifeforms appeared during the late Silurian period, around 400 million years ago. Found among early ferns and horsetails, they lacked branches and looked nothing like modern trees. In 1859, Canadian geologist John William Dawson thought these fossils were decaying tree trunks. He named them "first conifer," a name that stuck even as confusion deepened. The mystery has only grown ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - Disease-Resistant Alternatives to Problem Plants Put the spray bottle down and start growing more trouble-free plants If I had a nickel for every time I've been asked what product should be used on a lilac to stop powdery mildew, I'd be on a beach somewhere tropical, or, more realistically, using my riches to feed my plant addiction. My response is to rip out the offender and plant something that doesn't need chemicals to stay healthy. I don't know many people who enjoy the expense, effort, or ecological detriments of using fungicides and other disease cures and preventatives. Even the ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - A team of Tel Aviv University researchers from the field of prehistoric archaeology has proposed an innovative hypothesis regarding an intriguing question: Why did ancient humans bring their young children to cave-painting sites—deep underground—through dark, meandering, hazardous passages? The researchers explain, "Next to many cave paintings, there is clear evidence of the presence of children as young as two years old. So far, most hypotheses have focused on the educational aspect—learning the community's traditions and customs. However, we believe that children also ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - Physicists at the world's largest particle accelerator have made a first-of-its-kind discovery about antimatter that could help solve one of the universe's biggest mysteries. The discovery — made at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN , near Geneva — has revealed that a short-lived cousin of protons and neutrons, the beauty-lambda baryon, decays at a different rate than its antimatter counterpart. Called charge-parity (CP) violation, this effect refers to particles of opposite charge, like matter and animatter, behaving differently. It's a crucial explanation for why matter ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - Avian flu, mad cow disease, hantavirus, black plague and other notorious ailments originated with animals and made the jump to humans . Now scientists at Washington State University have built a machine learning model to examine multiple indicators that increase the odds of a disease making that leap, including the ecological characteristics of the host animals, virus genetics and the animals' overlap with humans. The team at the WSU College of Veterinary Medicine's Paul G. Allen School for Global Health is focused on a specific class of zoonotic diseases called orthopoxviruses — which ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - High above Earth at an altitude of around 480km (300 miles), roughly over Brazil, is something strange. A spot where satellites go haywire, where the Hubble Space Telescope can't collect data and where even the astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) can't go on spacewalks. You can't see it, but it's there. And it's nicknamed the Bermuda Triangle of Space. Officially known as the South Atlantic Anomaly , or SAA, the strange behaviour of electronics in this region is caused by a dent in Earth's magnetic field . While the magnetic field around the planet helps keep us safe from ... [Read More]