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Explanation: This stairway in Chile brings you only a little bit closer to heaven. But ooh, the sky above it makes you wonder. For example, you may wonder about the dark lane of our own Milky Way galaxy rising behind the expansive Atacama Desert in Chile, the band of zodiacal light on the upper left, the green and red airglow just above the horizon, the star Spica in the zodiacal light stripe, and, at the very top on the right, the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy. The Desert Staircase sculpture is in the foreground, and this image was timed to catch...

While we often picture ancient Athens as a quintessentially Greek city, it was actually a bustling, diverse hub deeply connected to the broader Mediterranean. This video explores the fascinating lives of Phoenician immigrants who lived, worked, and died in the Greek world. From the introduction of the alphabet and the Orientalizing period of Greek art to bilingual tombstones and the founding of Stoicism by Zeno of Citium, discover how the Phoenicians didn't just trade with the Greeks -- they integrated into their communities, permanently shaping the culture, religion, and philosophy of the classical world. The Hidden Phoenicians of Ancient Athens...

Did you know that the birthplace of democracy relied on foreign nomads to keep its citizens in line? In this video, we explore the fascinating and peculiar history of the Scythian archers in ancient Athens. Discover who these fierce warriors from the Eurasian steppe were, how they became the city's primary force for crowd control, and why Athens entrusted such a critical role to complete outsiders who had no political stake in the city at all. Scythians in Athens: The Steppe Archers Who Enforced Democracy | 12:32 History with Cy | 303K subscribers | 4,296 views | October 13, 2026

Science in Norway reports that a rescue excavation on southeastern Norway’s Svinesund Plateau, which was led by Carine Rosenvinge of the Museum of Cultural History Oslo, has uncovered a Neolithic gallery grave lined with stone slabs. The bottom of the grave was paved with smaller stones. The structure has been dated to about 4,000 years ago, when early farmers moved into the region. Flint daggers and arrowheads are usually found in such graves and attributed to warriors, Rosenvinge explained. This grave, however, only contained one arrowhead and no daggers. An amber bead, a pottery fragment, and evidence of burning were...

According to a statement released by the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology (LDA) Saxony-Anhalt, pieces of worked wood dated to some 10,500 years ago have been recovered from sediments in central Germany's Lake Arendsee. "The finds shed a completely new light on the Mesolithic period, for which traces of buildings in central Germany have so far only been known in the form of soil discolorations," said state archaeologist Harald Meller. The pieces of wood include a five-foot post bearing felling marks, and split boards measuring up to about four feet long. It is not yet known if the...

Luxury Brands of Ancient Rome | 10:13 toldinstone | 652K subscribers | 18,829 views | October 10, 2026

The structure was concealed just beneath the forest floor in the foothills of the eastern Taunus Mountains, on the northern outskirts of Frankfurt, according to a September 25 announcement from the Hesse State Office for Monument Preservation. The temple is rectangular and measures about 16 feet long. Inside, it appears to have contained a smaller, square chamber with just three roughly 20-inch-thick walls, Thomas Kurella reports for Hessenschau... Archaeologists unearthed this temple during ongoing excavations of the Kapersburg fort -- a Roman military fortification thought to date back to the second century... likely constructed under the reign of Emperor Trajan...

On Thursday afternoon, October 8, a guy named Oscar Belgal was shot by ICE agents in the very most northern neighborhood of Manhattan known as Marble Hill. Belgal suffered a non-life-threatening injury to his neck, and received treatment at the uptown campus of the New York Presbyterian Hospital. Here is a picture of Belgal from the New York Post: The shooting immediately set off a round of protests from local activists, calling for abolition of ICE as well as various other of the usual demands. Here (again from the New York Post) is a picture of demonstrators outside the hospital...

Explanation: Scientists are melting holes in the bottom of the world. In fact, almost 100 holes melted near the South Pole are now being used as an astronomical observatory. Astronomers with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory lowered a long string knotted with basketball-sized light detectors into each vertical lake. The water in each hole soon refreezes. The detectors attached to the strings are sensitive to blue light emitted in the surrounding clear ice. Such light results from fast-moving secondary particles liberated when high-energy neutrinos emitted by powerful processes out in the universe collide with ice molecules. IceCube has now detected many...

Can we still see evidence of the Bible today? Biblical archaeology uncovers ancient objects that help connect the people and the events of the Bible to the real world. Join Dinesh D’Souza on a thrilling journey through thousands of years of biblical history, available as a full-length documentary or a 12-part series.

Rare evidence of medieval Rome's thriving community of Anglo-Saxons has been found close to the city's Palazzo della Rovere near the Vatican, according to a statement released by the University of Cambridge. The team has unearthed 20 coins, including 19 silver pennies and one halfpenny, minted by a son and grandsons of the Anglo-Saxon king -- and first king of England -- Alfred the Great. Scholars have long known about the Anglo-Saxon enclave in Rome. There are modern place names that preserve this legacy, including the embankment between the Tiber and the Vatican that is still called the Lungotevere in...

Explanation: Tidally locked in synchronous rotation, the Moon always presents its familiar nearside to denizens of planet Earth. From lunar orbit, the Moon's farside can become familiar, though. In fact this sharp picture, a mosaic from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's wide angle camera, is centered on the lunar farside. Part of a global mosaic of over 15,000 images acquired between November 2009 and February 2011, the highest resolution version shows features at a scale of 100 meters per pixel. Surprisingly, the rough and battered surface of the farside looks very different from the nearside covered with smooth dark lunar maria....

A weapon discovered in 2023 on Mount Geumseong in southwestern South Korea has been identified by researchers from the Naju National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage as a Hwangja Hwatong, a handheld gunpowder weapon that fired arrows or pellets, ZME Science reports. The 600-year-old bronze weapon measures about nine inches long and weighs about two pounds. Engravings on the handle record the weapon’s name, weight, manufacturing supervisor, craftsman, and an incomplete date. When researchers compared the inscription with historic records of firearm production, they determined that this weapon was made in either 1377 or 1437. “It comes from a crucial...

Statement on Trump Suspending Microsoft from the PERM Program: This is a crucial issue for me as the top Democrat on the Immigration Subcommittee, the only member of Congress to have actually had an H-1B visa, and the Representative for tens of thousands of Microsoft workers. The administration has been consistently working to take away legal pathways for immigrants to contribute their talents to our country, and this is yet another of those attacks. The PERM program is the first step toward an employment-based green card for countless workers who want to contribute to this country, and it lays out...

According to a statement released by the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), a study conducted by scientists from UCSB and Stanford University has determined that the forager-farmer Tsimané people of lowland Bolivia and the hunter-gatherer Hadza people of Tanzania have highly diverse yet similar gut microbiomes, sharing more than 1,200 bacterial species. More than 60 percent of these bacterial species are rare or absent in the microbiomes of people living in industrialized populations. The researchers were surprised because the Hadza consume mammals, birds, fish, and foraged fruits and vegetables, while the Tsimané eat more fiber in the form of...

Seven ancient coffins containing human remains — including a toddler’s — were mysteriously discovered near the North Dakota’s governor’s residence by archaeologists, state officials confirmed. The caskets and an empty wooden box were found while contractors were performing security upgrades at the Bismarck property and resulted in a months-long excavation process, according to the state Office of Management and Budget. The remains appear to be that of two women, two men, two teenage boys and one toddler, People magazine reported. The shocking discovery was made in the area of what was Bismarck’s first cemetery from 1873 to 1877, but many...

La Brújula Verde reports that a camp used by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers has been found just underneath artifacts left by the first farmers of the Neolithic period in intact archaeological layers in Tina Jama, a mountain cave on the northern coast of the Adriatic Sea. Federico Bernardini of Ca’ Foscari University, Elena Leghissa of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and their colleagues suggest that farmers arrived in the region some 7,500 years ago. Prior to the arrival of farming in the region, hunter-gatherers built a hearth in the most sheltered part of the cave. They also closed off the...

According to a report in La Brújula Verde, a bronze signet ring engraved with an image of the Lighthouse of Alexandria has been recovered from the submerged island of Antirhodos, in what was Alexandria’s Eastern Harbor, by a team from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology. The ring could have been used to press a raised image of the lighthouse into wax or soft clay in order to seal letters or amphoras, or to validate documents. Hisham El-Leithy of the Supreme Council of Antiquities said that the image of the lighthouse resembles depictions of...

Explanation: Stickney Crater, the largest crater on the martian moon Phobos, is named for Chloe Angeline Stickney Hall, mathematician and wife of astronomer Asaph Hall. Asaph Hall discovered both the Red Planet's moons in 1877. Over 9 kilometers across, Stickney is nearly half the diameter of Phobos itself, so large that the impact that blasted out the crater likely came close to shattering the tiny moon. This enhanced-color image of Stickney and surroundings was recorded by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as it passed within some six thousand kilometers of Phobos in March of 2008. Even though...

Student-led protests over France’s struggling education system descended into chaos in Paris as fires broke out and chemical irritants were deployed. Student groups claimed 100,000 people protested in the capital, while the Interior Ministry put the nationwide turnout at around 266,000.