More than 1,000 years ago in Spain’s La Rioja region, monks made notes in the margins of Latin texts. These are believed to be the Spanish language’s first steps onto the page.

A team is restoring cigar-like ancient manuscripts that pre-date other Buddhist relics by more than a millennium.

Heartfelt handwritten lines from the war poet ‘fell into the lap’ of researcher who was trawling through theatre director’s letters

On a cold December night in 1926, Agatha Christie went out in her beloved Morris Cowley roadster and didn’t return home for 11 days. Here’s how her disappearance played out.

If you had to sit still for hours, you might not be able to muster a genuine smile either.

George Orwell’s 1984 was published exactly 70 years ago today but its horrifying vision of a world in which every citizen is monitored at all times by an all-knowing, all-seeing authoritarian “Big Brother” government seems oddly closer and more threatening than ever. Driven by a combination of surveillance and data processing technologies — artificial Intelligence, deep learning, facial recognition software, Internet of Things, the world is quickly adopted the very technologies that make such a system possible.

The ship left Sligo, Ireland,172 years ago carrying 180 passengers fleeing the Potato Famine. It sank off the coast of Cap-des-Rosiers, in Gaspé, Que., killing an estimated 120 to 150 people.

It was everywhere at the turn of the 20th century. It was also inedible.

Hadrian's Wall may be older, bigger, stronger and better known, but the Unesco-listed Antonine Wall was the real final frontier of the Roman Empire.

Mary Bowser risked execution to infiltrate Jefferson Davis’s Richmond household. But she was never caught.

In the opposition stronghold of Gdansk, there’s resignation that the ruling nationalists will win again in another key election for Europe.

The men, whose story will be brought to life in Netflix’s “When They See Us,” discuss the mini-series with their onscreen counterparts.

Ernie Pyle’s dispatches offered comfort to readers back home. Then the Normandy landings — 75 years ago this week — changed his perspective on the war’s costs.

Three decades after the crackdown, Beijing is still terrified of the movement and what it stood for.

It’s a stinky job but somebody’s got to do it – enter the rat detectives.

The authorship controversy has yet to surface a compelling alternative to the man buried in Stratford. Perhaps that’s because, until recently, no one was looking in the right place. The case for Emilia Bassano.

How the 1995 inaugural happened, and how it almost didn’t

It’s been genetically unchanged for at least 900 years.

To doodle is human, as these drawings from Stephen King, Queen Victoria, and more prove.

Did technology disrupt the drug game, too?

For the past 10 years, a cadre of field researchers in France has been digging up, documenting and cataloging the physical remains of the Normandy invasion.

Doggerland once covered thousands of square miles between what is now the east coast of England and the European mainland.

Israelis tend to view the Nakba as a small, local affair that was quite restrained compared to Nazi genocide. For Palestinians, it is an ongoing dispossession. By Sam Freed.

From the archives: Does anybody remember Erwise? Viola? Cello? Let's reminisce.

Supernova explosions eons ago may be linked to bipedalism in surprising ways.

Technology reshapes the workplace in much subtler ways than simply robots stealing jobs.

Changes in plankton populations over the past centuries correlate with rising sea temperatures

A Pulitzer Prize winner at The Wall Street Journal, he wrote the best sellers “Blue Latitudes” and “Confederates in the Attic” and seven other books.

In the letter, Hamilton warns the Marquis de Lafayette about the ‘menace’ of a British fleet

At one point in time, Chernobyl was a relatively unremarkable town that happened to be the site of a nuclear power plant. The HBO series Chernobyl shows how it went from an unremarkable Russian town to becoming shorthand for the devastating effects that radiation can have on people. The death toll of the Chernobyl explosion is contested among different sources, but it can be universally agreed upon that the results of the explosion are a gruesome sign that the dangers of the radiation that comes with nuclear power is hard to mitigate.

A University of Bristol academic has succeeded where countless cryptographers, linguistics scholars and computer programs have failed—by cracking the code of the 'world's most mysterious text', the Voynich manuscript.

If a recent poll conducted by the US market research company CivicScience is to be taken at face value, roughly one out of every two Americans doesn't think Arabic numerals should be taught as part of the curriculum in US schools.

The DNA sheds light on how people moved into Scandinavia after the Ice Age.

A new documentary examines the downfall of the software company General Magic, and raises questions about Silicon Valley's philosophy on failure.

From bedding Kings to fleeing countries dressed as a pistol wielding man. Duelling her lovers, drinking, dancing and above all fighting for her independence; the life on Hortense Mancini was to be blunt, fucking insane.