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Wayne May tells the story of two 4000 year old Cuneiform Tablets made from the same era found in America. One by Native American Chief Joseph and the other by a woman in Georgia who found it while gardening. Chief Joseph and his 4000 year old tablet | 3:09 Hidden in the Heartland | 5.76K subscribers | 234,927 views | Premiered December 17, 2025

For more than half a century, Americans have been urged to shy away from saturated fats, found mainly in animal products. We have been told to cook with canola oil instead of butter, select skim instead of whole milk, and to fill our plates with pasta instead of steak. Paradoxically, decades of adherence to this advice has coincided with rising levels of chronic disease. As people cut more saturated fat from their diets, the nation grew heavier and sicker — not healthier. Put plainly, the war on saturated fat, rooted in the hypothesis that it causes heart disease, has never...

The identity of Jack the Ripper is the greatest mystery in the history of British crime. Swedish journalist Christer Holmgren has sifted through over 120 years of clues, searching for proof that will reveal the true killer. He believes he's finally found his man, and he's off to London to prove it. The Missing Evidence: Jack the Ripper (Full Episode) | 46:15 Smithsonian Channel | 4.28M subscribers | 2,473,885 views | August 23, 2015

Explanation: What's happening in the sky? Lightning. The most commonly seen type of lightning involves flashes of bright white light between clouds. Over the past 50 years, though, other types of upper-atmospheric lightning have been confirmed, including tentacled red sprites and ringed ELVES. Although both last only a small fraction of a second, sprites are brighter and easier to photograph than their more common electrical-discharge cousins. ELVES are rapidly expanding rings that are thought to be created when an electromagnetic pulse shoots upward from charged clouds and impacts the ionosphere, causing nitrogen molecules to glow. Capturing either form of lightning...

You think you’re being watched by satellites and smartphones—but the real surveillance network is perched on power lines above your head. Scientists recently trained artificial intelligence on thousands of hours of crow vocalizations, expecting meaningless animal noise. Instead, the AI detected structured language, syntax, planning behavior, and something far more disturbing: humans are the primary subject of crow communication. This documentary explores how crows recognize individual human faces, assign identifiers, share reputations across generations, and coordinate warnings through a global avian network. From facial recognition experiments and tool-making intelligence to crow funerals, justice systems, and possible encrypted communication, the evidence...

According to a statement released by the Public Library of Science, a new study of the 2,400-year-old Hjortspring boat, discovered with a cache of weapons in the early twentieth century on Denmark's island of Als, suggests that it may have been constructed in the Baltic Sea region. First, Mikael Fauvelle of Lund University and his colleagues radiocarbon dated cording and caulk found with the boat to the fourth or third century B.C. Then, they used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to determine that the caulk had likely been made of animal fat and pine pitch. At the time, there were...

Explanation: Spanning light-years, this suggestive shape known as the Seahorse Nebula floats in silhouette against a rich background of stars and glowing hydrogen gas. Seen toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus, the dusty, dark nebula is part of a Milky Way molecular cloud some 1,200 light-years distant. It is also listed as Barnard 150 (B150), one of 182 dark markings of the sky cataloged in the early 20th century by astronomer E. E. Barnard. Packs of low mass stars are forming within, but their collapsing cores are only visible at long infrared wavelengths. Still, the luminous depths of the...

Archimedes, one of ancient Greece’s most famous and influential physicists and engineers, left a legacy of writings that had been thought to be lost to time. Much of his work only survived through copies and translations by scribes. One of the most famous fragments of Archimedes’ writings was the Palimpsest, a manuscript which by the 12th century a monk had overwritten and repurposed as a book of prayers. To discover the writings of Archimedes in the manuscript, scientists recently used the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center to reveal the iron content of the ink written under the monk’s prayers. The method...

The infamous Black Death -- a pandemic that killed as many as one third to one half of Europeans within just a few years -- may have been aided in its devastation by an unknown volcanic eruption.That's the hypothesis presented in research published December 4 in Communications Earth & Environment, which argues that the eruption triggered several seasons of climate instability and crop failures. That instability, in turn, forced several Italian states to import grain stores from new sources -- specifically, from regions surrounding the Black Sea. Riding along on those grain stores, the researchers posit, were fleas infected with...

Explanation: Yesterday the Sun reached its southernmost point in planet Earth's sky. Called a solstice, many cultures mark yesterday's date as a change of seasons -- from autumn to winter in Earth's Northern Hemisphere and from spring to summer in Earth's Southern Hemisphere. The featured image was taken just before the longest night of the 2025 northern year at Stonehenge in United Kingdom. There, through stones precisely placed 4,500 years ago, a 4.5 billion year old large glowing orb is seen setting. Even given the precession of the Earth's rotational axis over the millennia, the Sun continues to set over...

[snip] We generated a genomic time transect spanning the past 11,000 years and found that cats previously identified as carrying a F. l. lybica mtDNA clade from Neolithic and Chalcolithic southeast Europe and Anatolia, dated between 9500 and 6300 years ago, were F. silvestris wildcats whose ancestors hybridized with F. l. lybica. Ancient genomes revealed an increasing trend of African wildcat ancestry ranging from 9 to 34% eastward, from Bulgaria to central Anatolia.The earliest cat belonging to the genetic cluster of as F. l. lybica and F. catus in Europe originates from the site of Genoni, in Sardinia (Italy), and...

Explanation: Shiny NGC 253 is one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, and also one of the dustiest. Some call it the Silver Coin Galaxy for its appearance in small telescopes, or just the Sculptor Galaxy for its location within the boundaries of the southern constellation Sculptor. Discovered in 1783 by mathematician and astronomer Caroline Herschel, the dusty island universe lies a mere 10 million light-years away. About 70 thousand light-years across, NGC 253 is the largest member of the Sculptor Group of Galaxies, the nearest to our own Local Group of Galaxies. In addition to its spiral dust lanes,...

Explanation: Can you tell that today is a solstice by the tilt of the Earth? Yes. At a solstice, the Earth's terminator -- the dividing line between night and day -- is tilted the most. The featured time-lapse video demonstrates this by displaying an entire year on planet Earth in twelve seconds. From geosynchronous orbit, the Meteosat 9 satellite recorded infrared images of the Earth every day at the same local time. The video started at the September 2010 equinox with the terminator line being vertical: an equinox. As the Earth revolved around the Sun, the terminator was seen to...

Explanation: Is this what our own Milky Way Galaxy looks like from far away? Similar in size and grand design to our home Galaxy (although without the central bar), spiral galaxy NGC 3370 lies about 100 million light-years away toward the constellation of the Lion (Leo). Recorded here in exquisite detail by the Hubble Space Telescope, the big, beautiful face-on spiral is not only photogenic, but has proven sharp enough to study individual stars known as Cepheids. These pulsating stars have been used to accurately determine NGC 3370's distance. NGC 3370 was chosen for this study because in 1994 the...

A woman long believed to be the 'first Black Briton' was in fact white and had local ancestry from southern England, according to a new genetic study that overturns more than a decade of public perception.For years, scientists believed the woman, known as the Beachy Head Woman, came from sub-Saharan Africa. Her remains were discovered near the cliffs of Beachy Head in East Sussex and were widely presented as early evidence of African presence in Roman Britain...Her remains were first rediscovered in 2012 in Eastbourne Town Hall, stored in a box suggesting they were originally excavated in the 1950s. At...

The body of a man missing for 28 years has been found in a melting glacier in Pakistan's remote and mountainous Kohistan region.A shepherd stumbled upon the body, which was remarkably well-preserved, with its clothing intact, in the so-called Lady Valley in the country's east..."What I saw was unbelievable," the shepherd who found the body, Omar Khan, told BBC Urdu. "The body was intact. The clothes were not even torn."As soon as police confirmed that it was Naseeruddin, locals began offering more information, Mr Khan added.Naseeruddin had a wife and two children. He was travelling with his brother, Kathiruddin, on...

An artist's illustration of what exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b might look like. Because of its extremely tight orbit, the planet’s entire year—the time it takes to go around the pulsar—is just 7.8 hours. (Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)) ================================================================ Nothing about this planet makes sense. And that’s both confounding and exciting for astronomers. In A Nutshell * Astronomers discovered a Jupiter-sized planet with an atmosphere unlike anything seen before, dominated by carbon molecules in ratios that defy current planetary formation theories. * The planet orbits a pulsar (a dead star’s ultra-dense core) every 7.8 hours and is blasted with...

Stanford Medicine investigators have unearthed the biological process by which mRNA-based vaccines for COVID-19 can cause heart damage in some young men and adolescents — and they’ve shown a possible route to reducing its likelihood. Using advanced but now common lab technologies, along with published data from vaccinated individuals, the researchers identified a two-step sequence in which these vaccines activate a certain type of immune cell, in turn riling up another type of immune cell. The resulting inflammatory activity directly injures heart muscle cells, while triggering further inflammatory damage. The mRNA vaccines for COVID-19, which have now been administered several...

Explanation: The word solstice is from the Latin for Sun and to pause or stand still. And in the days surrounding a solstice the Sun's annual north-south drift in planet Earth's sky does slow down, pause, and then reverse direction. So near the solstice the daily path of the Sun through the sky really doesn't change much. In fact, near the December solstice, the Sun's consistent, low arc through northern hemisphere skies, along with low surface temperatures, has left a noticeable imprint on this path to the mountain town of Peaio in northern Italy. The morning frost on the road...

In this feature-length Special, Derek and Lawrence return to Thessaly in Central Greece for a summer of excavation. They join an international team – headed by archaeologists from Greece and Sweden – to investigate the remains of the ancient city of Vlochos. This season, the team are digging what is thought to be a temple from the Hellenistic era – a golden age of antiquity. But is all as it seems? The team have just three weeks to find out! The Big Ancient Greek Dig Time Team X Crew (Vlochos) | LIVE (currently 2:54 pm) Time Team Official | 350K...