By Franz Lidz Gouged into a barren stretch of pampa in southern Peru, the Nazca Lines are one of archaeology’s most perplexing mysteries. On the floor of the coastal desert, the shallow markings look like simple furrows. But from the air, hundreds of feet up, they morph into trapezoids, spirals and zigzags in some locations, and stylized hummingbirds and spiders in others. There is even a cat with the tail of a fish. Thousands of lines jump cliffs and traverse ravines without

By Emily Schmall There has been a barrage of bad news about food lately. Ten people died after eating Boar’s Head deli meat in a listeria...

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday evening that he had selected Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician...

By Dennis Overbye In a stunning scientific and technological feat, a group of astronomers said last Thursday that it had managed to take the first close-up picture of a star in another galaxy. Not only was the image a distance record for such cosmic intimacy, but the star, bulging like an overripe fruit, looks as if it is getting ready to explode. “For the first time, we have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own Milky Way,” Keiichi

By Sofia Quaglia It’s amazing what chimpanzees will do for a snack. In Congolese rainforests, the apes have been known to poke a hole into the ground with a stout stick, then grab a long stem and strip it through their teeth, making a brush-like end. Into the hole that lure goes, helping the chimps fish out a meal of termites. How did the chimps figure out this sophisticated foraging technique and others? “It’s difficult to imagine that it can just have appeared out of the bl

By Alyssa Ages The dumbbell is one of the oldest pieces of strength training equipment — and it has endured for good reason. With one...

By Nina Agrawal Heart disease is the leading killer of men and women in America, and it has been for more than 100 years, despite major...

By Matt Kaplan The world is split up into continents, there are seven in all. And if you get the gist, we’re going to make a list, From biggest to small … Your kids may have come home from school singing this infectious ditty, or another like it. But are there really seven continents? Anyone with a map can see that Asia and Europe are connected. They are often called Eurasia for that reason. The divide is pretty arbitrary, more culturally than scientifically defined. So, is i

By Asher Elbein A dog-size reptile slipped through fern-choked forests 237 million years ago in what is today Paraíso do Sul, Brazil. The animal had the body of a greyhound, a long neck and tail, and a small, nipping beak. Running on four, upright legs, the reptile looked remarkably like an early dinosaur. Yet it lived almost 10 million years before any other known dinosaurs. A study published last month in the journal Gondwana Research argues that this animal, Gondwanax para

By Alan Yuhas East of the town of Dos Lagunas, past the major highway cutting through Mexico’s south, the forest rises up in a dense wall of grasping roots, spindly branches and veils of brown and green. Beyond it lies the ruins of an old Maya city, barely a 15-minute walk from the busy roadway but until now unknown to archaeologists, its secrets cloaked over the centuries by unchecked foliage. “It’s humbling,” said Marcello Canuto, an archaeologist at Tulane University and o