Hint: It wasn't always an asteroid.

NASA was dangerously cavalier about the dangers of the shuttle launches.

We've been somewhat lucky in the past...

Commodus lived the anti-Stoic life, pursuing lust, narcissism, and self-indulgence.

Some artifacts drown in shipwrecks, others are taken by the tide. Many others will vanish as a result of climate change and rising sea levels.

Rock art in northern Australia depicts marsupial lions, giant kangaroos, and other megafauna that populated the Land Down Under long ago.  

The 557-million-year-old specimen challenges the theory that animal body plans were laid out in the Cambrian explosion.

Human beings are descendants of these early tetrapods – at least those who made a new life on land.

Can a shared language promote peace? Some people think so.

While becoming a monk is an evolutionary dead end for the individual, celibacy reaps benefits for the group as a whole.

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

In a nod to its addictive qualities, it was first dubbed “Some More.”

Long before Christopher and Magellan, ancient explorers voyaged into the unknown and brought home extraordinary tales.

Using data collected from ancient civilizations across the world, researchers identified the most significant factors in human development. War came out on top. 

More than 300 years ago, a Spanish ship laden with unspeakable treasure sank after a battle. Because of greed, the treasure remains on the sea floor.

Predatory dinosaurs with big skulls tend to have tiny arms. Researchers propose there might be a direct link between those traits.

When you're a genius, how do you make ends meet?

Long before tobacco arrived from the Americas, ancient civilizations in the Old World were getting high off hemp smoke and opium. 

New research finds that dinosaurs were already adapted to living in cold climates before the end-Triassic mass extinction. But how?

Fossils of Australopithecus in a South African cave are one million years older than previously thought. This challenges the consensus that humans first evolved in East Africa.

Three out of four Russians accused of witchcraft were men.

The architecture and infrastructure found may well have required the greatest amount of skilled labor of any construction from the same time period in the entire continent. 

The weird and wild ways mummy fever swept through Europe.

Unlike other world rulers, Genghis Khan was laid to rest not inside an elaborate mausoleum but an unmarked grave somewhere in Mongolia. Maybe.

Before gunpowder was introduced to the West, medieval Arabs devised grenades using crockery.

In the Canaan religion, Yahweh was a lesser god, who was assigned the land of Israel. Here's how he became "God Almighty."

The ancient Maya enjoyed filling their teeth with gemstones. A new study reveals how the procedure was done and how it didn't kill them.

In terms of sheer productivity, “-gate” has no peer. Wikipedia’s list of -gates has over 260 entries.

The long-standing debate over whether dinosaurs were more like birds or lizards is drawing to a close.

An elaborate device called the Mechanical Turk defeated Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte at chess. Edgar Allan Poe revealed the hoax.