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World War II is laden with unsung heroes, and Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz certainly falls into that category. While the remarkable deeds of people like Oskar Schindler are well known, Duckwitz’s role in saving 7,000 Jews in Denmark is less so. He was one of those brave Germans that looked to damage the Nazi Party’s plans from within and risked his own life out of a desire to do the right thing.

This ancient fossil holds the oldest intact brain ever discovered, and it looks strikingly like that of a spider, © Credit: Nicholas Strausfeld Share this post A fossil found in southern China has revealed something scientists rarely get to see: the incredibly well-preserved brain and nervous system of a 520-million-year-old creature. It belonged to a now-extinct marine animal with big front claws and a body that shares surprising similarities with today’s spiders and scorpions. The fossil, part of the Alalcomenaeus genus, offers a detailed snapshot of early arthropod evolution. Researchers discovered that its nervous system, especially the brain and nerve...

For over a century, everyone believed that The Devil's Checkmate (1831), the famous painting by Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch, depicted the ultimate defeat of the human soul at the hands of the devil -- a dark scene with no apparent way out. But in 1888, chess champion Paul Morphy saw the painting... and noticed something no one else had. According to the story, he studied the board, analyzed the position of the pieces, and revealed that the young man wasn't lost after all -- he still had one move left. This discovery not only changed how we look at the...

La Brújula Verde reports that Argishtikhinili, a 2,500-year-old Urartian fortress in western Armenia, is being studied by a team of Armenian and Polish archaeologists. The excavation has yielded living areas, a storage room or pantry, and a one-and-one-half-foot-tall stone carved with human features. Mateusz Iskra of the University of Warsaw said that the well-preserved dwellings were made of earth and have intact floors made of adobe bricks and stone slabs. A room with several large vessels for storing food embedded in the floor was found within one of these large residences. An adjoining room held a stone carved with human...

Seventy-three million years ago, Alaska’s ancient rivers flowed with the early ancestors of today’s salmon and pike. Researchers have identified three new species, including Sivulliusalmo alaskensis, the oldest known salmonid. Credit: Shutterstock ================================================================ Scientists have discovered the world’s oldest salmon in Arctic Alaska’s Cretaceous fossil. During the Cretaceous Period, dinosaurs ruled the land, but the waterways of the Arctic were home to creatures that would seem surprisingly familiar today. About 73 million years ago, Alaska’s rivers and streams supported an abundance of ancient fish related to modern salmon, pike, and other northern species. According to a new study published in...

Genetic and archaeological evidence now points to Aboriginal Australians arriving around 50,000 years ago, later than once believed. Credit: Shutterstock =================================================================== A new study by a Utah anthropologist, based on genetic evidence, concludes that the colonizers of Sahul arrived later than the commonly held estimate of 65,000 years ago. Aboriginal Australian culture is recognized as the world’s longest continuous living tradition. Earlier studies estimated that the ancestors of today’s Indigenous Australians, known as the Sahul peoples, first reached the continent about 65,000 years ago. Yet new genetic research from the University of Utah, which examines traces of Neanderthal DNA in...

Tens of thousands of years ago, Homo sapiens embarked on a major migration out of Africa and began settling around the world. But exactly how, when and where humans expanded has long been a source of debate. Now, researchers have used genomic sequencing to trace what they’re calling the “longest migration out of Africa.” Over the course of many generations and thousands of years, humans from Eurasia trekked more than 12,400 miles to eventually reach the southernmost tip of South America, according to a new paper published in the journal Science. In addition to providing insight into human expansion throughout...

The First Peoples in the Americas probably came from East Asia. Image credit: APChanel/Shutterstock.com The first people to enter the Americas may have sailed from Japan around 20,000 years ago, according to a new analysis of prehistoric stone tools from 10 sites across the US. Until now, researchers had only uncovered a few tantalizing hints that humans had reached the American continent by this time, with ancient footprints in New Mexico representing the earliest evidence. However, with no widespread culture emerging in North America until the rise of the Clovis tradition some 13,000 years ago, scholars have remained divided on...

The hoof, preserved in section as a very thin clay layer, caps the end toe bone in the foot of an adult mummy of the duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosaurus annectens. Photograph courtesy of Tyler Keillor/UChicago Fossil Lab ========================================================= For the first time ever, we’ve been able to prove that some dinosaurs had hooves, thanks to two remarkably well-preserved mummified dinosaurs retrieved from Wyoming’s Badlands. The specimens are the duck-billed dinosaurs Edmontosaurus annectens that, thanks to a "fluke preservation event" are near-perfect 66 million years later. Known as “clay templating,” that process essentially encased the dinosaurs shortly after burial with a mask...

A Chinese woman has been arrested and charged over the theft of gold from the Natural History Museum in Paris, in one of several recent high-profile break-ins targeting French cultural institutions, a prosecutor said Tuesday. The theft — by what the museum's director at the time said was an "extremely professional team" — took place on Sept. 16, a little over a month before an audacious jewelry heist at the world-famous Louvre museum on Sunday. A 24-year-old Chinese woman was arrested in Barcelona on Sept. 30 over the Natural History Museum break-in and theft of gold worth more than $1...

Rose hips or “haws” are the most commonly consumed part of a plant that is best known for its aesthetic appeal. Today, you are more likely to find roses in a vase at the center of a table than on your dinner plate. There are however, a number of culinary and medicinal uses for rose hips.

The Most Important Material Ever Made | 22:22 Veritasium | 18.4M subscribers | 7,151,493 views | November 13, 2024 00:00 Glass and our place in the universe 01:23 How Gorilla Glass works 04:35 What is glass? 05:15 Is glass a liquid? 07:29 Different types of glass 09:59 Invention of transparent glass 11:56 Why is some glass transparent? 14:54 Invention of glass lenses 15:52 Development of magnification 18:02 How to make glass more durable

It was in egg-cellent condition. Argentine paleontologists found a real diamond in the rough after happening across a perfectly preserved 70-million-year-old dinosaur egg during an excavation. “It was a complete and utter surprise,” Gonzalo Leonel Muñoz, a Vertebrate paleontologist at the Bernardo Rivadavia Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences, told National Geographic of the “spectacular” find. “‘It’s not uncommon to find dinosaur fossils, but the issue with eggs is that they are much less common.” The team of paleontologists was reportedly conducting an excavation campaign in the fossil-rich region of Río Negro, when they stumbled across the primeval embryo. While dinosaur...

The clay tablet is part of a guide to exorcising ghosts held in the collections of the British Museum, reports Dalya Alberge for the Observer. Irving Finkel, a curator in the London museum’s Middle Eastern department and the author of the forthcoming book The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies, says the image on the tablet is only visible when viewed from above under a light. The museum acquired the artifact in the 19th century, but it has never been exhibited.

An amateur metal detectorist profoundly believes in that maxim and it came true when he uncovered up to 15,000 Roman coins buried in a hoard that could be Wales' biggest-ever treasure find.The BBC reports David Moss, 36, from Cheshire, made the discovery that left him in disbelief after he dug up up two clay pots in an undisclosed northern part of the country.But the epic find in a muddy field left him fearing they could be stolen, so he slept with the treasure in his car for three days before taking the coins to experts, the BBC notes.The coins are...

Welcome back to Saving Castles! Join us for an exclusive private tour of Château de Gizeux, one of the Loire Valley's most remarkable survival stories. When the French Revolution threatened to destroy this 600-year-old castle, one brave woman's ingenious plan saved priceless Renaissance treasures that remained hidden for over a century. 600 Year Old Castle's Secret: How Fake Walls Saved Priceless Art | Part 1 | 21:20 Saving Castles | 15.3K subscribers | 83,441 views | May 26, 2025 The incredible survival story of the François I Gallery's 400-year-old painted walls How false walls and ceilings protected Renaissance art from...

Long before their teeth evolved to handle tough, fibrous plants, early humans were already digging up and eating grasses, sedges, and starchy underground foods.A new fossil-tooth isotope study shows this behavior began about 700,000 years before longer molars emerged -- revealing that behavioral innovation, not anatomy, drove the change...As early humans moved from the dense forests of Africa into open grasslands, they began relying on quick, reliable sources of energy. This shift in habitat led them to favor grassy plants, especially grains and the starchy tissues stored underground.A new study led by Dartmouth researchers reveals that hominins started eating these...

Abstract: The Scythians were a multitude of horse-warrior nomad cultures dwelling in the Eurasian steppe during the first millennium BCE. Because of the lack of first-hand written records, little is known about the origins and relations among the different cultures. To address these questions, we produced genome-wide data for 111 ancient individuals retrieved from 39 archaeological sites from the first millennia BCE and CE across the Central Asian Steppe. We uncovered major admixture events in the Late Bronze Age forming the genetic substratum for two main Iron Age gene-pools emerging around the Altai and the Urals respectively. Their demise was...

The tale of Akhetaten, the ancient Egyptian city that for a brief point in the 14th century BCE was the state's capital and home of the god-king Akhenaten, is one of tragedy. It was founded in the middle of nowhere by a pharaoh who would go on to be all but stricken from the record; it was almost immediately hit by a devastating plague that left nine royals and many hundreds of commoners dead; finally, it was abandoned entirely, becoming once again as deserted as it had been just 20 years before.At least, that's what we thought happened. There's just...

The Magnificent City The Romans got for FREE | 14:39 Street Gems | 43K subscribers | 264,902 views | December 23, 2023