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Wood planks unearthed during subway construction in Rome show just how far the empire's trade networks spread.

Despite good motor skills, deep brain stimulation may be causing Parkinson's patients to sink.

Astronomers say this new way to find black holes could expand the small number discovered so far in our Milky Way galaxy.

A study of people's minds as they take DMT reveals a curious commingling of brain patterns.

The human brain contains "maps" of the body, but where do they come from?

Photographic do-overs are showing scientists the ways our world is changing.

Colonizing space means reproducing there. We still don't know if that's possible.

An archaeologist is using Burning Man — the world's biggest pop-up community — to decode humanity's past settlements.

Gemini-style pouches epitomize the food many people still associate with space travel, thanks to the inexplicable popularity of freeze-dried astronaut ice cream, ever a hit among kids passing through museum gift shops. In actuality, those dried foam cubes made it into space only once before being abandoned because of their grotesque texture and ill flavor. […]

It's no accident that glowing eyes around a campfire make our hearts jump: some fears are the lingering result of natural selection.

Scientists finally find the neurons that produce the sensation of itch.

They could create a plethora of pet universes, vastly outnumbering the real cosmos. This thought led philosopher Nick Bostrom at the University of Oxford to conclude in 2003 that it makes more sense to bet that we're delusional silicon-based artificial intelligences in one of these many forgeries, rather than carbon-based organisms in the genuine universe. […]

A marine biologist recalls a jarring underwater confrontation.

One night in August 2005, Scott Killingsworth, a 35-year-old software designer in Atlanta, dragged his dining-room table out to the porch and lay down on it. The house he'd just rented — on 2 acres in an upscale suburb north of the city — was meant to be relatively free of man-made chemicals, his refuge […]

Marin County Headlands Sausalito, Calif. 37d 50′ 05″ N 122d 31′ 51″ Wmarinemammalcenter.org Just five miles west of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, there's a hospital where no patient has insurance and fish is always on the menu. Tucked into the scenic Marin County Headlands, the Marine Mammal Center treats Pacific harbor seals, […]

Next time you see the F-word, remember you're in good company.

It is cosmology's most fundamental question: How did the universe begin? The question presupposes that the universe had an actual starting point, but one might just as well assume the universe always was and always will be. In that case, there would be no beginning whatsoever — just an ever-evolving story of which we're […]

Gravity is probably weaker that you think and weirder than you imagined.

When Louis Leakey sat down to recount the discovery of what may be the earliest sign of cancer in the genus Homo, the first thing he remembered was the mud. It was March 29, 1932, midway through the Third East African Archaeological Expedition, and it had rained so long and so hard that it took […]