Discoveries in the past decade have revealed more about the people for whom Stonehenge and nearby monuments held great meaning.Credit...Adam Stanford/Aerial-Cam AMESBURY, England — About 6,300 years ago, a tree here toppled over. For the ancients in this part of southern England, it created a prime real estate opportunity — next to a spring and near attractive hunting grounds. According to David J

In a dozen years orbiting Saturn, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has changed our understanding of liquid in the outer solar system.CreditCredit...NASA Where there is water, is there life? That’s the $64 billion question now facing NASA and the rest of lonely humanity. When the New Horizons spacecraft, cameras clicking, sped past Pluto in July, it represented an inflection point in the conquest of the s

Ben A. Potter, left, and Joshua D. Reuther of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, at the Upward Sun River site where the discovery of a pair of children in a ceremonial grave offered glimpses at the history of the first Americans.Credit...Ben A. Potter/University of Alaska Fairbanks Researchers have long wondered how people settled the Americas, particularly the path they took to the new territor

Part of the laboratory setup for an experiment at Delft University of Technology, in which two diamonds were set 1.3 kilometers apart, entangled and then shared information.Credit...Frank Auperle/Delft University of Technology In a landmark study, scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands reported that they had conducted an experiment that they say proved one of the most fund

A career in science has never been easy to pursue. There are all those years of graduate school, postdoctoral research positions that don’t necessarily lead to a faculty appointment, long hours and competition for grant money. Two Japanese researchers have taken dedication to new heights, however. For the purposes of testing ape memory, they wrote, directed and starred in two short videos made for

­Evacuated patients at a hospital near the Fukushima power plant after the nuclear accident in 2011. No one has been killed or sickened by the radiation, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. But about 1,600 died of causes related to the evacuation.Credit...Daisuke Tomita/Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press This spring, four years after the nuclear accident at Fukushima, a small g

If spiders had nightmares, the larvae of ichneumonid wasps would have to star in them. The wasp lays an egg on the back of an orb weaver spider, where it grows fat and bossy, and occupies itself with turning the spider into a zombie. As Keizo Takasuka and his colleagues point out in The Journal of Experimental Biology, this is a classic case of “host manipulation.” Using more colorful language, he

transcript When the Venus Flytrap Snaps ShutA snail’s journey through a Venus flytrap comes to a predictable conclusion, courtesy of The Naked Landscaper. As a refined Victorian gentleman, Charles Darwin naturally gravitated toward the macabre, and few things fascinated him like those floral flouters of the conventional food chain: carnivorous plants. He experimented with them and wrote a major tr

Recently, a team of pathologists at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands carried out an experiment that might seem doomed to failure. They collected tissue from 26 women who had died during or just after pregnancy. All of them had been carrying sons. The pathologists then stained the samples to check for Y chromosomes. Essentially, the scientists were looking for male cells in femal

transcript Dr. Oliver Sacks, Explorer of the BrainDr. Oliver Sacks was a neurologist and best-selling author who explored the brain’s strangest pathways. His work touched Hollywood, theater, even opera, and his legacy lasts in the stories he told. Dr. Oliver Sacks was a neurologist and best-selling author who explored the brain’s strangest pathways. His work touched Hollywood, theater, even opera,

The deep volcanic crater, top, was produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815 - the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history.Credit...Iwan Setiyawan/KOMPAS, via Associated Press In April 1815, the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history shook the planet in a catastrophe so vast that 200 years later, investigators are still struggling to grasp its repercus

“There’s the plan and then there’s what happens,” Dr. Don Neiffer, the zoo’s chief veterinarian, said in a phone interview on Monday, adding, “It’s a moving target.” Though Dr. Neiffer said the zoo’s panda team was encouraged by the cubs’ behavior so far — they are vocalizing, suckling their mother and moving around — they present big challanges. First, panda cubs are extremely fragile — tiny and

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft caught up with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko a year ago and dropped the Philae lander onto its surface in November. Today the comet reached perihelion, its closest approach to the sun. Aug. 13: Perihelion Comet 67P/C-G reached perihelion, the closest point to the sun in the comet’s six-and-a-half-year orbit. Rosetta took this image an hour before pe

Christina Kobb learned a 19th-century piano technique that forced her to hold her body differently, producing a more fluid and subtle sound.Credit...Fredrik Solstad for The New York Times Classical piano pieces by such composers as Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin likely sounded much different when the masters first performed those works than they do today. Pianos themselves have changed considerably

After nine years and three billion miles, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zipped past Pluto and its five moons early Tuesday morning. Just Passing Through The Pluto system is tipped on its side, like a target facing the sun. New Horizons did not carry enough fuel to go into orbit around Pluto, so it had only one chance to study the dwarf planet up close.

A sense of perspective is unavoidable from 22,000 miles out. Looking down at Earth from that distance — almost three times farther than the diameter of the planet itself — allows a view of the globe as a massive organic system, pulsing with continuous movement. Below, images from the Himawari-8 weather satellite's first official day paint a living portrait of the western Pacific, with Typhoons Cha

A scene from “Jurassic World.” Credit Universal Pictures As “Jurassic World” hit theaters on Thursday with its gang of velociraptors and fictitious hybrid rex, paleontologists braced themselves for a wave of misinformation. “I feel like paleontologists fear they may get a lot of dumb questions because of the dinosaurs in this film,” said Brian Switek, a fossil enthusiast and author of the book “My

A male skeleton associated with the Yamnaya culture near Samara, Russia.Credit...Pavel Kuznetsov For centuries, archaeologists have reconstructed the early history of Europe by digging up ancient settlements and examining the items that their inhabitants left behind. More recently, researchers have been scrutinizing something even more revealing than pots, chariots and swords: DNA. On Wednesday in

The retraction by Science of a study of changing attitudes on gay marriage is the latest in a growing number of prominent withdrawals of the results of studies from scientific literature. Related Article Haruko Obokata, the lead scientist of a retracted stem cell study, at a news conference last year. Credit Kimimasa Mayama/European Pressphoto Agency The retraction by Science of a study of changin