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.

A massive star explosion 2.6 million years ago may be the reason we walk on two feet.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Grant's role in reconstructing the USA after the Civil War

AMIRA AL-SHARIF HAS been displaced by Yemen’s civil war. Though the photojournalist longs to go home, conflict, disease, and the constant threat of arrest for her work have driven her away from her country for now.

The next generation of U.S. buyers isn’t shopping like their parents.

When José Capriles arrived in 2008 at the Cueva del Chileno rock shelter, nestled on the western slopes of Bolivia’s Andes, he didn’t know what he would find within. Sweeping aside layers of fresh and ancient llama dung, he found the remains of an ancient burial site: stone markers suggesting a body had once been interred there and a small leather bag cinched with a string. Inside was a collection of ancient drug paraphernalia—bone spatulas to crush the seeds of plants with psychoactive...

Nearly 20 years after To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee was living out of the public eye, drinking and suffering from writer’s block. Then she came across the sensational case of a murderous preacher. By Casey Cep.

Soon we will recognize the 50th anniversary of the first humans to walk on the moon. We remember and celebrate the heroism of the Apollo 11 crew: the humility of Neil Armstrong making those first bootprints; the cool bravado of Buzz Aldrin during the critical moments of the Eagle lander’s final descent; and, the lonely vigil of Michael Collins in orbit above his mates, waiting to bring them back home.

For more than a century, one family has helped transform the way Europe eats.

Paleontologist Dan Fisher is challenging scientific consensus about when people first came to the continent and how they may have changed the world around them.

Modern humans and Neanderthals may have diverged a long, long time ago, at least 800,000 years back.

The officer stood over the freshly exhumed grave with a pencil and ledger in his hands. He told others to search the remains as he struggled to decipher the crude etching on a weath…

Recent archaeological finds of ancient preserved apple seeds across Europe and West Asia combined with historical, paleontological, and recently published genetic data are presenting a fascinating new narrative for one of our most familiar fruits. The apple was originally spread by ancient megafauna and later as a process of trade along the Silk Road. When previously separated varieties came into contact, hybridization and grafting allowed for the development of the varieties that we know today.

Three decades after the first elections after Communism, a struggle over control of the narrative of the past could determine the country’s future.

To have Trump commemorate the Normandy landings is to understand the word impostor.

Another song that makes me happy, a beautiful voice.

How should we read Thucydides? By Johanna Hanink.

The Satanic Temple is now officially recognized by the IRS as a tax-exempt church. It is as legitimate as a religion can get in the United States.

It's not the best layout, so why do most of us still use it?

Between the years 1095 and 1291 A.D., Christian invaders fought a series of religious wars against Muslim armies in the Near East—primarily to secure control of important holy sites—in what we refer to today as the Crusades. Now, a DNA study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics has cast new light on this tumultuous era and the interactions that the Crusaders—who numbered in the hundreds of thousands—had with local populations.

Less than two weeks after the infamous reactor meltdown at Chernobyl, officials decided to risk the lives of three men to potentially save millions of lives. A larger disaster could have spread radioactive fallout across Europe.

An asteroid slammed down and did away with all the dinosaurs, paving the way for such developments as the human race, capitalism, and posting on the internet: it’s the story we all know and love. Yet if things had shaken out differently—if the asteroid had stayed in its place, and the dinosaurs allowed to proceed with their business—what would things have looked like?

Thousands of hours of Marion Stokes's personal recordings will now be digitized, one tape at a time.

An oral history of the subscription service that changed online shopping forever.

Extreme fluctuations in atmospheric oxygen levels corresponded with evolutionary surges and extinctions in animal biodiversity during the Cambrian explosion, finds new study led by UCL and the University of Leeds. The Cambrian explosion was a crucial period of rapid evolution in complex animals that began roughly 540 million years ago. The trigger for this fundamental phase in the early history of animal life is a subject of ongoing biological debate.

On the surface, the expansive Sky Atlantic mini-series Chernobyl does exactly what the title indicates: Unspool the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant over the course of five nail-biting episodes. But creator Craig Mazin thinks Chernobyl also tells an urgent story about the idea of truth. After the Chernobyl plant went into meltdown, the Soviet government covered up the extent of the disaster and later, its cause.

How the Romans introduced liquefied iron into the streets at Pompeii remains a mystery.

We went a long way since the first time two people decided to exchange goods. At the dawn of civilisation, barter was the only peaceful…

The scientific legacy of a quest to prove the Book of Mormon

Alien is still an exceptional horror 40 years later

In 1978, a Harvard Business School student named Dan Bricklin was sitting in a classroom, watching his accounting lecturer filling in rows and columns on the blackboard. Every time the lecturer changed a figure, he had to work down and across the grid on the board, erasing and rewriting other numbers to make everything add up, just as accounting clerks all over the world did every day in the pages of their ledgers.

The Sphere 1 was a personal computer from 1975 built around the Motorola 6800 CPU. It was built by Sphere Corporation, located in Bountiful, Utah. Marketed as the first real computer (due to having a built in keyboard and monitor) targeted at consumers, it ran PDS (program development system) and included an editor, assembler and an edition of BASIC. The first few editions came as a kit, later on fully assembled units were available.

Rare photos and testimonies from 1989 portray a bold youth movement that helped shape where China is today and how the world sees it, in spite of authorities' efforts to erase the memory.

Pastoralism is a central part of many Africans' identity. But how and when did this way of life get started on the continent? Ancient DNA can reveal how herding populations spread.

Physicists used to search for the smallest components of the universe. What if that’s not the point?