Rickets is mostly seen as a 19th-century disease, but research has revealed that the Romans also had a big problem with getting enough vitamin D. Researchers from Historic England and McMaster University in Canada examined 2,787 skeletons from 18 cemeteries across the Roman empire and discovered that rickets was a widespread phenomenon 2,000 years ago.

A distant galaxy appears filled with dark matter. The outermost stars in the Cosmic Seagull, a galaxy 11.3 billion light-years away, race too fast to be propelled by the gravity of the galaxy’s gas and stars alone. Instead, they move as if urged on by an invisible force, indicating the hidden presence of dark matter, astrophysicist Verónica Motta of the University of Valparaíso in Chile and her colleagues report August 8 at arXiv.org.

For thousands of years beneath Egypt’s desert sands a solidified whitish substance sat in a broken jar. Scientists now say it’s “probably the most ancient archaeological solid residue of cheese ever found.” Archaeologists came across the finding while cleaning the sands around a 19th-dynasty tomb at the vast Saqqara necropolis of the ancient city of Memphis. The tomb of Ptahmes, the mayor of ancient Memphis, was initially discovered in 1885 but had been swallowed by shifting sands until its rediscovery in 2010.

Weeks of dry, hot weather have exposed the outlines of several archeological sites across the U.K., dating back thousands of years. Drier soil conditions have allowed archeologists to capture aerial photographs of previously hidden features from ancient times, to reveal farms, burial monuments, ditches, walls and vegetation patterns, or cropmarks. The patterns of these structures can be seen from the air as the vegetation dies back in dry conditions.

Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles – by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles. The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug.

Sequencing the wheat genome – once considered by scientists to be an insurmountable task – has been achieved through a worldwide collaboration of researchers spanning 13 years. On Friday the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC) published a detailed description of the genome of bread wheat in the journal Science.

An international team of scientists has found strong evidence of a high-energy neutrino with the help of a particle detector buried deep beneath the Antarctic ice. The neutrino’s source was traced back to a galaxy known as a blazar, 4 million light-years from Earth.

Though still in preliminary stages, scientists welcome 'big step forward' in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas levels and curtail climate change.

Meet the Milky Way’s elderly neighbours. It turns out that the faint galaxies orbiting our own are among the oldest in our universe – a discovery hailed as the equivalent to finding the remains of the first humans that inhabited Earth. These satellite galaxies, including Ursa Major and Bootes I, are thought to be more than 13 billion years old. The closest is probably Segue-1, some 75,000 light-years away, says Sownak Bose of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

New observations of the hottest known planet have revealed temperatures similar to those typically seen at the surface of a star, as well as an atmosphere of vaporised iron and titanium. The findings add to the diverse and, in some cases, extreme conditions seen on planets far beyond our own solar system. Kevin Heng, a professor at the University of Bern, and co-author of the latest work, said: “The temperatures are so insane that even though it is a planet it has the atmosphere of a star.”

After nearly 20 years, the record of the most distant radio galaxy ever discovered has been broken. A team led by Ph.D. student Aayush Saxena (Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands) has found a radio galaxy from a time when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at a distance of 12 billion light-years.

In separate studies published online in Nature on Aug. 1, two independent research teams report the discovery of a new, rare type of cell in the human airway. These cells appear to be the primary source of activity of the CFTR gene, mutations to which cause cystic fibrosis, a multiorgan disease that affects more than 70,000 people worldwide.

The first-ever discovery of an ancient snake embryo, preserved in 105-million-year-old amber, provides important new information on the evolution of modern snakes, according to a new study led by University of Alberta paleontologists. “This snake is linked to ancient snakes from Argentina, Africa, India and Australia,” explained paleontologist Michael Caldwell, lead author and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. “It is an important—and until now, missing—component of understanding snake evolution from southern continents, that is Gondwana, in the mid-Mesozoic.”

Long before Aladdin Sane or Ziggy Stardust, a skinny 16-year-old with ambitions to be a saxophonist agreed to do lead vocals on a demo track, in a small studio in south London. Now the only known recording of the resulting session, with David Bowie singing I Never Dreamed with his first band, The Konrads, has resurfaced in an old bread basket, and is expected to fetch £10,000 at auction.

An astonishing stash of 2,800-year-old gold jewellery has been unearthed by archaeologists in Kazakhstan. Some 3,000 golden and precious items were found in a burial mound in the remote Tarbagatai mountains. The treasure trove - described as 'priceless' - is believed to belong to royal or elite members of the Saka people who held sway in central Asia eight centuries before the birth of Christ.

A UCF physicist has discovered a new material that has the potential to become a building block in the new era of quantum materials, those that are composed of microscopically condensed matter and expected to change our development of technology.

Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for a minimum of 65,000 years, a team of archaeologists has established - 18,000 years longer than had been proved previously and at least 5000 years longer than had been speculated by the most optimistic researchers. The world-first finding, which follows years of archaeological digging in an ancient camp-site beneath a sandstone rock shelter within the Jabiluka mining lease in Kakadu, Northern Territory...

Are we alone in the universe? What prerequisites are there for supporting life on another planet? Are there any other planets out there that fit the bill? We may now be closer to solving some of these puzzles thanks to a recent report published in “Science Advances”, in which a team of researchers have highlighted the conditions required for a similar phenomenon to take place on another planet.

Scientists have discovered 12 previously unknown moons orbiting Jupiter, and one of them is a real oddball. While hunting for the proposed Planet Nine, a massive planet that some believe could lie beyond Pluto, a team of scientists, led by Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution for Science, found the 12 moons orbiting Jupiter. With this discovery, Jupiter now has a staggering 79 known orbiting moons — more than any other planet in the solar system.

Neanderthal man knew how to make a fire by striking stone to create sparks, researchers said Thursday after analyzing several tools found at sites in France dating from 50,000 years ago. It was already known that Neanderthals used fire but it was mostly thought to have occurred by natural causes such as lightning or volcanic eruptions, although perhaps they did know techniques for creating a flame.

Archeologists in Mexico have discovered sets of human remains from the early ancestors of the Mayan civilization that could be as much as 7,000 years old, officials reported on Tuesday. According to archaeologists at a Mexico City news conference, three sets of human remains were unearthed at the Puyil cave in the Tacotalpa municipality of Tabasco state, located in southern Mexico.

Fossil enthusiast Philip Mullaly was walking along the beach in Victoria Australia when he saw it: a glint in a boulder with quarter of a tooth exposed. "I was immediately excited, it was just perfect and I knew it was an important find that needed to be shared with people," Mullaly explained.

It took 20 years to find his stomach. Now researchers know what was inside—in excruciating detail. ÖTZI THE ICEMAN'S stomach wasn't where it was supposed to be. The misplaced organ eluded researchers for some 20 years. But in 2009, while looking at new radiographic scans, they finally found it—inexplicably pushed up under his ribs, where the lower lungs usually sit. What's more, it was completely full.

Raising over €200,000 from the public, volunteer archaeologists have explored a German World War I trench fortress that was about to be bulldozed for a housing development. They found more than 100 fallen soldiers.

For decades, researchers believed early humans first settled in the Western Hemisphere around 13,500 years ago. However, the discovery of 150,000 'unique' stone tools northwest of Austin, Texas, now suggests humans were living on the continent as far back as 20,000 years ago. The latest research pushes back the earliest human habitation of North America back by almost 6,500 years.

Charred remains of a flatbread baked about 14,500 years ago in a stone fireplace at a site in northeastern Jordan have given researchers a delectable surprise: people began making bread, a vital staple food, thousands of years before they developed agriculture.

Egyptian archeologists have opened a 30-tonne black granite sarcophagus to find three decomposed mummies after sewage water apparently leaked inside. “The sarcophagus has been opened, but we have not been hit by a curse,” said Mostafa Waziry, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Antiquities, in response to news reports warning of maledictions hidden inside the tomb in the port city of Alexandria.

Astronomers using cutting-edge skywatching devices have identified an extremely fast-growing black hole, cataloging it as a ‘monster’ that eats the mass equivalent of our sun every two days.

Scientists say they have found evidence of dunes of frozen methane on Pluto. The research, which is published in the journal Science, suggests that the distant world is more dynamic than previously thought. Pluto's atmosphere was believed to be too thin to create the features familiar in deserts on Earth.

Mysterious streams of microwaves that come from far across the galaxy have been traced to immense clouds of spinning diamonds that swirl around newly-born stars. Astronomers have been stumped by the strange waves since they were first spotted more than 20 years ago, but now appear to have solved the puzzle after training US and Australian telescopes on rings of dust that circle stars about 500 light years from Earth.

Astronomers Seppo Mattila and Miguel Pérez-Torres usually study the natural deaths of stars, but they weren’t going to pass up the chance to investigate a stellar murder. A new paper in Science describes how they nabbed photographic evidence that a supermassive black hole in a relatively nearby galaxy tore apart and consumed part of a star in a phenomenon called a tidal disruption event (TDE), spewing jets of material in the process. Scientists have observed these cosmic crime scenes before, but this was the first time anyone managed to get such detailed images of the jets and their changing structure over time.

The discovery changes our understanding of the basic mechanism of photosynthesis and should rewrite the textbooks. It will also tailor the way we hunt for alien life and provide insights into how we could engineer more efficient crops that take advantage of longer wavelengths of light.

A new analysis of data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft indicates the presence of large organic molecules on Enceladus, something not found on the moon before. Using two instruments aboard the now-perished orbiter, an international team of researchers looked at molecules erupting with plumes of water vapor streaming from beneath Enceladus’ surface. Though similar experiments have been performed in the past, this time, the researchers found organic molecules much bigger, and thus more complex, than any found before.

Using mass spectrometry data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists found that large, carbon-rich organic molecules are ejected from cracks in the icy surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Southwest Research Institute scientists think chemical reactions between the moon's rocky core and warm water from its subsurface ocean are linked to these complex molecules.

Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that all objects fall the same way, no matter how massive — even zombie stars with extreme gravity, a new study finds.