A recent DNA analysis on 777 ancient genomes from across the so-called Southern Arc, namely Southern Europe and West Asia, redirects the cradle of Indo-Europeans and sheds light on the Proto-Greek prehistoric past.

As is well known, the Greek language belongs to the Indo-European language family, and, as far as the latest genetic analysis shows, the area of Greece is highly significant in terms of this language family’s origin and its dispersal throughout other areas—yet, what does new DNA research say about Proto-Greek speakers and the first Indo-Europeans? 

Most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered have been in relatively tight orbits around their host stars, allowing us to track them as they repeatedly loop around them. But we’ve also discovered a handful of planets through a phenomenon that’s called microlensing. This occurs when a planet passes between the line of sight between Earth and another star, creating a gravitational lens that distorts the star, causing it to briefly brighten.

The key thing about microlensing compared to other methods of finding planets is that the lensing planet can be nearly anywhere on the line between the star and Earth. So, in many cases, these events are driven by what are called rogue planets: those that aren’t part of any exosolar system at all, but they drift through interstellar space.

Some 9,500 years ago, a community of hunter-gatherers assembled to cremate a small woman in a ceremonial pyre at a rock shelter near Mount Hora in Malawi. 

Millennia passed. Many things happened. And now, at the dawn of the year 2026, scientists report the unearthing of the ashy remains of this ritual at a site, called HOR-1, which is "the oldest known cremation in Africa” and “one of the oldest in the world,” according to their study.

“Archaeological evidence for cremation amongst African hunter-gatherers is extremely rare, with no reported cases south of the Sahara,”  said researchers led by Jessica I. Cerezo-Román of the University of Oklahoma. “Open pyre cremations such as that at HOR-1 demand substantial social and labor-intensive investment on behalf of the deceased. Thus, cremation is rarely practiced amongst small-scale hunter-gatherer societies.”

Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world, and rich countries have their fingerprints all over the nation's stunted development.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 30, 2025 – Library and education advocates urged the Federal Communications Commission Tuesday to reconsider its rollback of federal support for off-campus Wi-Fi hotspots and school bus connectivity.

The filings respond to petitions for reconsideration of the FCC’s Sept. 30 order rescinding earlier decisions that had allowed schools and libraries to use E-Rate funds for hotspot lending and Wi-Fi on school buses.

Ashlie Crosson was named the 2025 National Teacher of the Year for the Council of Chief State School Officers. A first-generation college student, she teaches English and journalism in rural Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, where she also grew up.

Our conversation below covers the importance of a global education in rural schools, the value of school journalism programs, and the pleasures of returning home.

The Supreme Court’s inaction hands governments new power to pull titles, and puts Americans’ First Amendment rights at risk.

Imagine that you decided to go to your local library to check out a book but you couldn’t find it on the shelf. You ask the librarian for help locating it, but they inform you it’s not available—not because someone else has checked it out, but because the government has physically removed it after deciding they don’t want you to read it.

This isn’t the plot of a dystopian novel, it’s the reality that the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed in its recent decision to not hear arguments in the book ban case: Leila Green Little et al. v. Llano County. In leaving the Fifth Circuit ruling in place,

SCOTUS effectively granted state and local governments in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas the authority to determine what materials you can and cannot read. This means people in these states do not have the same First Amendment rights as the rest of the country. And that should raise alarm for everyone. 

The story of the Jutes in Britain is an often overlooked chapter in the island’s early Dark Age history. While the Angles and Saxons tend to dominate narratives of post-Roman Britain, the Jutes played a significant role in shaping the cultural and political landscape of what would eventually become England.

Origins and Migration

The Jutes were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Britain after the departure of the Romans in the 5th century CE. According to the Venerable Bede, an 8th-century English monk and historian, the Jutes were one of the three most powerful Germanic nations to settle in Britain, alongside the Angles and Saxons.

Traditionally, the Jutes were believed to have originated from the Jutland peninsula in modern-day Denmark. However, recent archaeological evidence has cast doubt on this assumption. Analysis of grave goods from the period shows strong links between East Kent, southern Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight, but little connection to Jutland. Some historians now suggest that the Jutes who migrated to Britain may have come from northern Francia or Frisia (now the Netherlands) instead.

The Coming of the Saxons

Traditional accounts, such as those provided by the 8th-century monk Bede, paint a dramatic picture of the Saxon arrival. According to Bede, the first significant influx occurred in 449 AD, when a British king (possibly named Vortigern) invited Germanic mercenaries to help defend against the Picts and Scots.

However, modern historians and archaeologists paint a more complex picture. Evidence suggests that Germanic peoples had been settling in Britain since at least the 3rd century AD, often as Roman auxiliaries. The “invasion” was likely a gradual process of migration and settlement rather than a single, dramatic event.

The Saxons, originating from what is now northern Germany and the Netherlands, were one of the main groups of these Germanic settlers. They were joined by the Angles from southern Denmark and the Jutes from Jutland. Together, these groups would come to be known as the Anglo-Saxons, though the term “Saxon” was often used more broadly to refer to all these Germanic settlers.

Christmas traditions like stockings and yule logs are beloved parts of the holiday season today, but they actually date back to pre-Christian Europe.

Aside from Easter, Christmas is perhaps Christianity’s most sacred date. As a celebration of Christ’s birth, the holiday is often rife with nativity scenes and holy hymns. However, many of the most beloved Christmas traditions actually have pagan roots.

Wreaths, mistletoe, holly, and yule logs all date back to pre-Christian times. Mistletoe was sacred to the Druids of the ancient Celtic world, and yule logs may have Baltic or Germanic origins.

Even the day we celebrate Christmas, Dec. 25, has nothing to do with the birth of Christ. The Bible never says when Jesus was born — and it likely wasn’t even during the winter. Instead, Dec. 25 may have been selected as the official date for Christmas to coincide with the pagan Saturnalia celebrations of ancient Rome, making it easier for Romans to accept Christianity as it spread through the empire nearly 2,000 years ago.

The latest numbers from the 42nd annual loon count indicate the population is stable and healthy. And since this kind of waterfowl is an indicator species, that's good news all around, says Tracy Hart, a wildlife ecologist with Maine Audubon.

Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive.

If you read a book in 2025—just one book—you belong to an endangered species. Like honeybees and red wolves, the population of American readers, Lector americanus, has been declining for decades. The most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, from 2022, found that fewer than half of Americans had read a single book in the previous 12 months; only 38 percent had read a novel or short story. A recent study from the University of Florida and University College London found that the number of Americans who engage in daily reading for pleasure fell 3 percent each year from 2003 to 2023.

This decline is only getting steeper. Over the past decade, American students’ reading abilities have plummeted, and their reading habits have followed suit. In 2023, just 14 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day, down from 27 percent a decade earlier. A growing share of high-school and even college students struggle to read a book cover to cover.

In the murky first chapters of the human story is an unknown ancestor that made the profound transition from walking on all fours to standing up tall, an act that came to define us.

The odds of stumbling on the fossilised evidence of such an evolutionary prize are slim, but in new research, scientists argue that an ape-like animal that lived in Africa 7m years ago is the best contender yet.

After a fresh analysis of bones belonging to a species called Sahelanthropus tchadensis, the researchers concluded that while it resembled an ape, its bones were adapted to walking upright, rather than moving around on all fours. It is considered the oldest known hominin, or member of the human lineage, since the evolutionary split with chimpanzees.

When her teenagers received their first computers in high school, Cindy Moeller joined them evenings and helped navigate homework assignments on the new devices. Later, working as a critical care nurse, she routinely carried a computer and entered codes and notes while working as a liaison between surgeons, hospital medical staff and patients before surgeries.   

Then the kids grew up and left home, she retired, and she and husband Allan often struggled with newer technology. “We were left floundering,” she says. “Things are changing all the time.”  

Exploring ancient people’s shifting beliefs about rearing and eating pigs.

Pork accounts for more than a third of the world’s meat, making pigs among the planet’s most widely consumed animals. They are also widely reviled: For about two billion people, eating pork is explicitly prohibited. The Hebrew Bible and the Islamic Koran both forbid adherents from eating pig flesh, and this ban is one of humanity’s most deeply entrenched dietary restrictions. For centuries, scholars have struggled to find a satisfying explanation for this widespread taboo. “There are an amazing number of misconceptions people continue to have about pigs,” says archaeologist Max Price of Durham University, who is among a small group of scholars scouring both modern excavation reports and ancient tablets for clues about the rise and fall of pork consumption in the ancient Near East. “That makes this research both frustrating and fascinating.”

Among the most surprising finds is that the inhabitants of the earliest cities of the Bronze Age (3500–1200 BCE) were enthusiastic pig eaters, and that even later Iron Age (1200–586 BCE) residents of Jerusalem enjoyed the occasional pork feast. Yet despite a wealth of data and new techniques including ancient DNA analysis, archaeologists still wrestle with many porcine mysteries, including why the once plentiful animal gradually became scarce long before religious taboos were enacted.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 20, 2025 – A California regulator has formally challenged the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to eliminate E-Rate funding for off-campus Wi-Fi programs.

FCC’s September rollback of hotspot and school bus Wi-Fi support is ‘abrupt and unfounded" and "is based on a faulty interpretation of Section 254 of the Communications Act", the CA Public Utility Commission says. 

At 17 I was the Santa Claus for the Walkertown section of Hazard. Rick Rosanova, the news guy at Channel 4, was Santa at the new Sears in the old bowling alley in another part of town, Lothair. And Bill Douglas was the city’s main Santa from Backwoods to Big Bottom.

He had a $1,000 velvet Santa outfit (in 1968 dollars) with black calfskin boots and jingle bells on a leather strap. His fake beard was combed human hair and in addition to that he could play the harmonica and jig dance. Value add-ons at anyone’s Christmas party.

I worked at Palmer’s House of Toys, a more humble operation. I had a belly pillow and a stringy white beard-wig combination that I had to enhance by putting white shoe polish on my sideburns so my hair would not show through the gaps. The outfit was thin red corduroy, and instead of boots I had plastic covers to slip over my shoes to affect an illusion of boots.

Most fossil fans are familiar with the spectacular Jurassic marine reptiles found by Mary Anning along England’s Dorset Coast in the early 1800s, but few are aware that their predecessors – gigantic Triassic ichthyosaurs (250-201 mya)– have been emerging from the central mountains of Nevada’s Great Basin for the last 125 years.

A beautiful exhibition – Deep Time: Sea Dragons in Nevada – shines a spotlight on these magnificent extinct creatures, brings them to life through life-size animations, and tells stories of scientific discoveries at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno through January 11, 2026

The art museum reunites the state’s stunning Triassic marine reptiles from museum collections across North America, and couples this with an engaging walk through 200 years of paleo-art history starring these enigmatic Mesozoic “sea dragons.”

Philosophy majors rank higher than all other majors on verbal and logical reasoning, according to our new study published in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. They also tend to display more intellectual virtues such as curiosity and open-mindedness.

Philosophers have long claimed that studying philosophy sharpens one’s mind. What sets philosophy apart from other fields is that it is not so much a body of knowledge as an activity – a form of inquiry. Doing philosophy involves trying to answer fundamental questions about humanity and the world we live in and subjecting proposed answers to critical scrutiny: constructing logical arguments, drawing subtle distinctions and following ideas to their ultimate – often surprising – conclusions.

It makes sense, then, that studying philosophy might make people better thinkers. But as philosophers ourselves, we wondered whether there is strong evidence for that claim.

The story of the Angles and their invasion of Britain is a fascinating chapter in the history of England, marking the transition from post-Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England. This tale of migration, conquest, and cultural transformation would shape the destiny of the British Isles for centuries to come.

Origins of the Angles

The Angles were a Germanic tribe originating from the Angeln peninsula in modern-day Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Along with their close relatives, the Saxons and Jutes, the Angles were part of the broader group of North Sea Germanic peoples.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the Angles had a well-developed society in their homeland, with a mixed economy based on agriculture, animal husbandry, and trade. They were skilled metalworkers and boat builders, traits that would serve them well in their future adventures across the North Sea.

The Brehon laws of ancient Ireland stand as a testament to the rich cultural and legal heritage of the Emerald Isle. This sophisticated system of jurisprudence governed Irish society for over a thousand years, from the Celtic era until the 17th century when it was finally supplanted by English common law.

Far from being a primitive set of rules, the Brehon laws were a complex and nuanced legal code that addressed various aspects of Irish life, from property rights to social status, and even beekeeping.

This Christmas, many children welcomed a familiar visitor – a jolly man in a red suit and a sleigh full of gifts. But the bearded figure Americans recognize today as Santa Claus is a relatively modern creation, shaped over centuries by folklore, art and evolving tradition. Stephanie Sy reports. And a warning for parents and younger viewers: this story contains some spoilers about Santa Claus.