Some 425 million years ago, leggy creatures called myriapods crawled onto land and never looked back. Today, the 13,000 species of centipedes, millipedes and other living myriapods (from the Greek words for “countless” and “legs”) are found in nearly every terrestrial environment on Earth, including caves, houses and the leaf-strewn grounds of Central Park. Some…
When the messenger Pheidippides ran from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over the Persians in the 5th century B.C., he did it without shoes. His time was not officially tracked. Millenniums later, at the London Marathon on Sunday, Sabastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha became the first to break the…
A newly identified species of ancient snake, Vasuki indicus, may rank among the largest snakes to ever exist. The massive reptile lived around 47 million years ago in what is now Gujarat, India, according to research published in Scientific Reports. Scientists estimate it reached an extraordinary length of about 11 to 15 meters (36 to…
When a 125,000-year-old elephant skeleton, pierced by a wooden spear, was discovered in an ancient lake bed in Germany in 1948, it was assumed that the Neanderthals who inhabited Europe at that time were not sophisticated enough to hunt such massive megafauna. Skeptics argued that the spear found with the bones in the Lehringen lake…
The real value of this odd little memoir is not his dissent, but that it offers us something more unique: the story of a staff officer who labors in a war he never witnesses. He knows almost nothing of it, and indeed never sees combat. He spends all but a few hours of his tour…
Astronomers call ancient star clusters like NGC 1786 “time capsules” for their galaxy, preserving some of its oldest stars. A new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope offers an unprecedented close-up of this dense cluster 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Hubble’s data show that NGC 1786 contains stars of different ages –…
A new archaeological find proves that ritual cleansing was a component of religious practice at an ancient sanctuary in northern Israel in the time of the kingdom of Israel. The sanctuary was equipped with a unique bathhouse, thought to have been used by the priests for ritual bathing. There, the diggers discovered two spaces — one room…
Shorouk Express Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Police are investigating the felling of a centuries-old oak tree that has “more ecological value than the Sycamore Gap” amid outrage from local…
