The constant ebb and flow of hormones that guide the menstrual cycle don't just affect reproductive anatomy. They also reshape the brain, and a study has given us insight into how this happens. Led by neuroscientists Elizabeth Rizor and Viktoriya Babenko of the University of ...

"They took a dead man and cast him into the well, and then filled it up with stones." So declares the 800-year-old Norse Sverris Saga, an accounting of the rise and reign of King Sverre Sigurdsson, who went on to rule Norway from 1184 until his death in 1202 CE. Now, thanks to the ...

In the outer Solar System, far from the light and warmth of the Sun, things can get a little… hinky. There, clusters of rocks have been orbiting in weird loops that some astronomers have attributed to the presence of a large, unseen planet lurking on the Solar System's fringes. So far, ...

A ruined building in Kafr El Sheikh was where ancient Egyptians once stood, gazing at the stars above. More than 2,500 years ago, the building constituted the largest astronomical observatory known in Egypt in the 6th century BCE, part of what we now call the Temple of the Pharaohs in the ...

The body is pretty good at repairing itself, but some parts of our anatomy struggle to bounce back after an injury. One such material is cartilage – the spongy yet firm connective tissue that keeps our bones from rubbing and jarring against each other. Over time, the translucent or ...

Every now and again, our planet ponies up a fossil so spectacular that almost all you can do is gape in wonder. Sometimes those fossils are the magnificent remains that once trod Earth's surface with thunderous feet. Sometimes, they are mere motes, particles at which you may not look twice ...

Once upon a time, Earth was barren. Everything changed when, somehow, out of the chemistry available early in our planet's history, something started squirming – processing available matter to survive, to breed, to thrive. What that something was, and when it first squirmed, have been ...

A little over a decade ago, a robotic rover on Mars finally uncovered an answer to a pressing question. It's now clear that the red planet does, indeed, have organic material buried in the sediment of its ancient lakebeds. Since then, we've continued to find organic molecules on Mars ...

Saturn has its famous hexagon, and Jupiter has just now been caught throwing mad shapes too. High up in its atmosphere, astronomers have identified strange, glowing new features, in the region above the tempestuous Great Red Spot. There, in the ionosphere, concentrations of ionized ...

For hundreds of thousands of years, the wooly mammoth thrived on Earth, measuring its stately tread across the frozen reaches. Then, something happened. Earth changed. And in a remarkably short time, the mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) were gone, the last of them dying out 4,000 years ...

We've received a strange signal from across the galaxy, and astronomers are struggling to understand what it means. They know what's emitting the signals. It's a neutron star named ASKAP J193505.1+214841.0 (ASKAP J1935+2148 for short), located in the plane of the Milky Way, some 15,820 ...

Amidst a cache of glittering golden treasures from the Iberian Bronze Age, a pair of corroded objects might be the most precious of all. A dull bracelet and a rusted hollow hemisphere decorated with gold are forged, researchers have found, not out of metal from beneath the ground, but with ...