Articles for author: Suhail Ahmed

Archaeologists Just Unearthed a 35,000-Year-Old Advanced Society in the Philippines And It’s Changing Everything

June 14, 2025

For decades, the grand narratives of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley dominated the story of early human civilization, pushing Southeast Asia to the margins. But a revolutionary finding on the Philippine islands is rewriting history. One that mastered deep-sea fishing, long-distance trade, and ceremonial burials millennia before the advent of agriculture, archaeologists have found ...

Discover How Underground Fungi Shape Forests and Climate But Remain Undiscovered

June 14, 2025

Suhail Ahmed

Under every forest, grassland, and even some deserts sits a vast, linked web of life one that is still mostly unknown. Particularly mycorrhizal species, underground fungus create symbiotic interactions with plants that move nutrients, store carbon, and help ecosystems resist climate change. Scientists estimate, however, that up to 83% of these fungus remain unidentified and ...

Stunning aerial view of Earth from space showing continents and oceans.

Can You Imagine a World Without Air? Earth’s Oxygen Is Disappearing Faster Than You Think

June 14, 2025

Suhail Ahmed

Imagine leaving and struggling to breathe not from pollution but from the air itself disappearing. Though headlines mostly feature climate change, a far more existential crisis looms: the oxygen of Earth is vanishing. Not in decades, not in centuries, but over billions of years our planet will choke. Scientists warn that Earth will become uninhabitable ...

Ancient Intelligence? 43,000 Years Ago Neanderthal Fingerprint on Painted Stone Reveals Prehistoric Symbolism

June 13, 2025

Suhail Ahmed

Archaeologists have found an object in a quiet rock shelter in Segovia, Spain, that questions accepted wisdom regarding Neanderthal cognition: a granite pebble with a red ochre dot and a clearly identifiable Neanderthal man fingerprint. More than just an old fingerprint, this discovery dated to 43,000 years is a tantalizing clue that Neanderthals might have ...

The Octopus Inside Your Brain? How Astrocytes May Hold the Key to Human Memory

June 13, 2025

Suhail Ahmed

For years neuroscientists have focused on the brain’s neurons as its principal creators of memory and thought. But what if the reason for our cognitive abilities isn’t in the electrical activity of neurons, but in the quiet, star-shaped cells that connect them? A new research published in PNAS on May 20, 2025, suggests the astrocytes ...

June’s Spectacular Milky Way Show is Here—Discover How to Witness the Galactic Wonder

June 13, 2025

Suhail Ahmed

June is the prime time to see the Milky Way’s brilliant core as it is presenting its best performance of the year. For stargazers, this is “core season” the window through which the brilliant heart of our galaxy flows across the night sky like a celestial river of stars. But catching this cosmic show calls ...

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 microarcseconds across — equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon. Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data – roughly 350 terabytes per day – which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

Did You Know? M87’s Monster Black Hole Spins at 80% of the Cosmic Limit—And Feeds Even Faster!

June 13, 2025

Suhail Ahmed

At the core of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), a cosmic behemoth is challenging preconceptions. Renowned for being the first black hole ever directly photographed, the supermassive black hole M87 has just exposed another amazing secret: it devours matter even faster and spins at a blistering 80% of the maximum speed in the universe. Using ...

Unearthing Royal Secrets: 2,800-Year-Old Tomb of a King Midas Relative Discovered in Turkey

June 12, 2025

Suhail Ahmed

Archaeologists have found a wealth of old secrets in the sun-baked plains of central Turkey, including a royal tomb containing the remains of a close relative of the fabled King Midas. Announced by Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism Mehmet Nudi Ersoy, the finding has rocked the archaeological community with new understanding of the mysterious ...

Sleeping Giant or Restless Beast? The Tuff Layer Behind Italy’s Campi Flegrei Caldera’s Shivers

June 12, 2025

Suhail Ahmed

Under Naples, Italy’s busy streets, a sleeping titan stirs. For decades, the large, smoldering volcanic crater known as Campi Flegrei has been shaking, baffling researchers with its regular but non-eruptive movement. New studies now point to a secret offender: a brittle layer of tuff rock compromised by millennia of magma intrusions that absorbs volcanic gases ...

Image title: Moon-Mercury-Pleiades ConjunctionAuthor: Giulio ColomboCountry: Italy This photograph shows the young lunar crescent, some of the nine brightest stars of the Pleiades (with one behind a cloud) on the right, and the planet Mercury, looking slightly red, in the middle of the image. This picture is rather suggestive of the idea that the Pleiades might possibly consist of seven stars. However, the viewer is misled by the clouds; five of the stars form a tiny chariot, one is next to the handle, and three are at the other end of the quadrilateral. Eight stars would be clearly visible if there were no clouds. This configuration of the young Moon next to the Pleiades is visible only in the northern hemisphere spring. Thus it was used by the ancient Babylonians to determine the second month of their year and to judge whether or not an intercalary month was necessary. At least as early as the second millennium before the common era, the Babylonians used several asterisms for each month, with another one of them reappearing every five days after invisibility during daylight. To determine the necessity of intercalation in order to synchronise the solar and the lunar year, the Babylonians used several asterisms, not only the Pleiades. For instance, they also made use of the bright stars Arcturus and Sirius, and they observed a configuration with the Moon as well as heliacal phenomena. The modern Jewish and modern Islamic traditions still make use of some of the Babylonian astronomical rules. However, given that the constellations have shifted as a result of precession, and the fact that nowadays we also have computational means to calculate our calendars, this configuration of the small crescent Moon and the Pleiades is less useful, though it remains exceptionally beautiful. Thus the ancient Babylonian and middle Babylonian tradition survives only rudimentarily. Furthermore, it is unlikely that it is depicted in the Nebra Disc from Bronze Age Europe, as has long been claimed. This image was taken on Elba Island, Italy, in May 2022. Also see image in Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7425575

Have You Seen This? The Moon ‘Kisses’ Mercury and Mars in June’s Cosmic Show

June 12, 2025

Suhail Ahmed

The night sky of June is expected to show a pair of amazing conjunctions one with the elusive Mercury and the other with a remarkably near encounter between the Moon and Mars. These events serve as a reminder of the clockwork accuracy of our solar system and an opportunity to see planetary motions that even ...

Archaeologists Just Unearthed a 35,000-Year-Old Advanced Society in the Philippines And It’s Changing Everything

Discover How Underground Fungi Shape Forests and Climate But Remain Undiscovered

Can You Imagine a World Without Air? Earth’s Oxygen Is Disappearing Faster Than You Think

Ancient Intelligence? 43,000 Years Ago Neanderthal Fingerprint on Painted Stone Reveals Prehistoric Symbolism

The Octopus Inside Your Brain? How Astrocytes May Hold the Key to Human Memory

June’s Spectacular Milky Way Show is Here—Discover How to Witness the Galactic Wonder

Did You Know? M87’s Monster Black Hole Spins at 80% of the Cosmic Limit—And Feeds Even Faster!

Unearthing Royal Secrets: 2,800-Year-Old Tomb of a King Midas Relative Discovered in Turkey

Sleeping Giant or Restless Beast? The Tuff Layer Behind Italy’s Campi Flegrei Caldera’s Shivers

Have You Seen This? The Moon ‘Kisses’ Mercury and Mars in June’s Cosmic Show

5 Things Discovered Inside Stonehenge in the Last 20 Years That Changed Every Previous Explanation

7 Facts About the Great Pyramid That Every Official Theory Has Failed to Account For

6 Artefacts Found at Sumerian and Egyptian Sites That Share Identical Construction Methods Despite the Civilisations Having No Known Contact