Evidence from the Pilbara region suggests Earth in its youth behaved very differently to how it does today, and had more water within it than previously thought.

In the fall of 1853 Salvador de Castro Jr., a leading Cuban slave trader, traveled to Manhattan to arrange an expedition to West Central Africa

More than 150 years before Oprah and Reese Witherspoon, women began reading together in groups, seeking wisdom from the books and from one another.

Medieval Europeans were fanatical about a strange fruit that could only be eaten rotten. Then it was forgotten altogether. Why did they love it so much? And why did it disappear?

For thousands of years, mathematicians were calculating Pi the obvious but numerically inefficient way. Then Newton came along and changed the game.

People working on mining sites in the Eastern Alps during the Bronze Age had cooked, bread-based meals delivered to them during the day

Medieval and early modern lawyers chose to write on sheepskin parchment because it helped prevent fraud, new analysis suggests. Experts have identified the species of animals used for British legal documents dating from the 13th to 20th century, and have discovered they were almost always written on sheepskin, rather than goatskin or calfskin vellum.

Even before the recent mass shootings, violent crime was surging to its highest rate in 30 years. Patrick Sharkey illuminates what’s happening.

A piece of the Wright brothers’ first airplane is on Mars.

See how Mathematica was used to solve one of the cryptograms sent in a letter by the Zodiac Killer.

Whalers’ logbooks show rapid drop in strike rate in north Pacific due to changes in cetacean behaviour

Exactly 60 years ago, on 17th January 1961, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 35-year-old Patrice Lumumba, was tortured and then assassinated by members of the Belgian Secret Service. Four months earlier, he had been ousted in a coup that was led by Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, his former Chief of Staff of the Army, and backed by Belgium, the United States, and the United Nations. Shortly before he was killed, Lumumba wrote the following letter to his wife, Pauline Opango.

It was a dry day, like most days in the Judean Desert. It was the 1940s in the West Bank region of Qumran, where a group of Bedouin men were herding goats in the hills just west of the Dead Sea, so named because the water is so salty that very few organisms can survive in it. In the course of their day, the Bedouins noticed a nearby cave, in which they discovered clay jars filled with ancient leather scrolls. They had no idea they were about to forever change our understanding of Biblical history.

Since the advent of analog TVs, channel 37 has always been static. Here's why.

Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to tarnish the national myth – as I found when hosting a Cambridge debate about his murkier side, says academic Priyamvada Gopal

How a Cold War effort to conquer Greenland's ice revealed humanity's vulnerability to climate change.

In 1975 and 1982, 4 of the Soviet Union’s Venera probes captured our only images of Venus’ surface.

A Chinese scientist helped not one but two superpowers reach the moon, writes Kavita Puri, but his story is remembered in only one of them. In Shanghai there is an entire museum containing 70,000 artefacts dedicated to one man, "the people's scientist" Qian Xuesen.

In a former royal forest, tree surgeons on Monday began felling centuries-old oak trees which will be used to rebuild the wooden-framed spire of Notre-Dame de Paris after it was destroyed by fire.

It wasn’t just photos of dazzling Seoul skyscrapers and luxurious Samsung watches: There was a time when South Korean propaganda leaflets — designed to make North Korean soldiers envy their capitalist neighbor — featured smiling, bikini-clad women to entice potential defectors.