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.

Archaeologists excavating an abandoned burial ground under Euston Station in London have uncovered the remains of the Royal Navy explorer Captain Matthew Flinders, who led the first expedition to circumnavigate Australia in 1802 and gave the country its name.

The oldest known periodic table has been restored after a major conservation effort. Discovered in 2014 by Dr Alan Aitken during a clean out of old stores, the classroom table of chemical elements dates from 1885 and accurately reflects the level of knowledge for the time of its printing.

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.

It's hard to imagine the world before Tim Berners-Lee brought the World Wide Web into our lives. His invention indelibly changed the course of human history, and he's now been awarded with a million-dollar prize for his significant and lasting contributions to computing.

​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.