In 1532, in the city of Cajamarca, Peru, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and a group of Europeans took the Inca ruler Atahualpa hostage, setting the stage for the fall of the Inca Empire.
Before this fateful attack, Pizarro’s brother,…
A smooth, white stone dating from the Roman era and unearthed in the Netherlands has long baffled researchers.
Now, with the help of artificial intelligence, scientists believe they have cracked the mystery: the stone is an ancient board game…
Being attacked by a bear often ends in tragedy, and this is certainly no exception for prehistoric victims. One person who lived in Paleolithic-era Italy — a teenager known by archaeologists as “Il Principe” — may have fallen prey to a…
If you’ve ever considered practicing meditation, you might believe you should relax, breathe, and empty your mind of distracting thoughts. Novices tend to think of meditation as the brain at rest, but a new international study concludes this…
Just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, galaxies were expected to be small, chaotic, and still forming stars. Instead, astronomers have found enormous, mature-looking systems that appear to have assembled far earlier than current theories…
Don’t be fooled by this harmless, cute-looking jelly bobbing around the waters of Venice’s lagoon. Comb jellies present some odd behaviors and characteristics, such as performing cannibalism and lacking a permanent anus.
Recently, this small…
On the desert coast of southern Peru, wealth didn’t glitter. It grew in cornfields. Hundreds of years before the Inca Empire rose to power, the Chincha Kingdom thrived in one of the driest regions on Earth. Their secret wasn’t gold or silver…
Once a year, a waterfall at Yosemite National Park ignites into a can’t-miss natural phenomenon — the Firefall. For a few minutes on select evenings in mid to late February, Horsetail Fall, usually overlooked by many Yosemite visitors,…
Researchers are uncovering the evolutionary steps that set the stage for dinosaurs to rule the planet
