History

The ingenuity of ancient Egyptian engineers may have been more advanced than we thought. A currently unexplained ancient structure may have been part of a water purification system feeding a hydraulic lift to raise huge stone blocks to build a pyramid.

Tycho Brahe is best known as a Danish Renaissance astronomer. But he was also a bit of an alchemist, and a first-ever analysis on shards found at his former home from the 1500s has shed some light on just what he was up to in his basement lab.

The wreck of the ship used for Sir Ernest Shackleton's final Antarctic expedition has been located by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS) off the coast of Labrador. The Quest, aboard which Sir Ernest died in 1922, sank in May 1962.

It’s hard to construct a building without a plan, but when did humans first start doing that? Archeologists have discovered the oldest known blueprints, with a 9,000-year-old rock carving in Jordan depicting a to-scale plan for a nearby megastructure.

The wreck of one of the most famous exploration ships in history has been located. Using a robotic submersible, the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust has found Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance, which was crushed in the Antarctic pack ice in 1915.

A team of scientists at the University College London has used 3D tomography to shed new light on the Antikythera Mechanism – the world's first computer, which was an accurate model of the Cosmos as it was known to the ancient Greeks.

After the death of Larry Tesler this week, New Atlas takes a brief look back at the invention of those now-ubiquitous computer commands: cut, copy and paste.

Whenever computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee makes the headlines, a significant minority of outlets inevitably, and wholly incorrectly, refer to him as “the inventor of the internet.” Here’s why they’re wrong.

New Atlas looks at some of Stephen Hawking's most memorable quotations, and to set them in the context of his life and work. Brace yourself for a whirlwind tour of free will, the state of humanity, God and fake news, all thanks to one of science's finest minds…

A file of 148 documents belonging to Alan Turing​ including correspondence, official letters, and a handwritten draft of a BBC radio program on artificial intelligence has been discovered in a filing cabinet at the University of Manchester.

Carl Sagan is best known as a science popularizer, but he was also a pioneer in the early US space program, a planetary scientist, astrobiologist, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and social activist. Now a major archive of his work preserved by his assistant Shirley Arden is up for auction.

​In a comment piece in Nature, astrophysicist and author Mario Livio discusses a recently rediscovered 1939 essay by Sir Winston Churchill in which he discusses the possibility of life on other planets and the exploration of the Solar System.

Trains held the land speed record until 1907 when Glen Curtis ran 136 mph on a V8 motorcycle. Within a decade he would become the Henry Ford of the aerospace industry, but his motorcycle record of 1907 was not bested until 1930.

​The Curta was the smallest mechanical calculator ever made and was much sought after until it was replaced by electronic calculators. The remarkable story behind its creation has its roots in a Nazi death camp.

​The world's oldest known recording of computer-generated music has been restored to its former glory by a team from the British Library. Taken from an acetate cut recording made by the BBC in 1951, the songs were generated by the Ferranti Mark I computer.