In some Icelandic sagas—embellished stories of Viking life—sailors relied on so-called sunstones to locate the sun’s position and steer their ships on cloudy days. The stone would’ve worked by detecting a property of sunlight called polarization. Polarization is when light—which normally radiates randomly from its source—encounters something, such as a shiny surface or fog, that [...]

On the battlefields of the Somme, history and geology meld. Beneath the chalky earth, men carved messages, memorials and poems into the walls of tunnels that were dug almost a century ago during the First World War. Explosions in the tunnels buried countless men and reshaped the surface, where grass and trees now soften the [...]

This story appeared in Science Magazine [pdf] and online [html]. NASA is unlikely to be the operator of the next spacecraft to land on the moon, but the U.S. space agency is considering sending along some red tape. As dozens of private teams race to return to the moon as soon as next year, spurred [...]

Buddhist artists in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, may have painted with oils centuries before European Renaissance painters developed the technique. A team led by Marine Cotte at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, has analyzed tiny samples of paintings sent by a UNESCO conservation team from a site where the Taliban destroyed two giant Buddha [...]

Archaeologists broke ground at Stonehenge last week for the first time since 1964, with the aim of using modern technology to pinpoint just when builders dragged the first bluestone pillars to the site some 4500 years ago. The team, which is re-excavating a trench originally dug in the 1920s, plans to analyze short-lived organic material [...]

Since ancient times, people have been salting meat for storage. Now Iranian archaeologists are using the same trick to preserve the body of a man who mined some of that salt millennia ago.