In the storage rooms of a museum in western Turkey, an archaeologist noticed an unexpected residue inside a small Roman glass vessel. Dark-brown flakes still clung to the interior. Researchers have ...

In the fall of 2023, NIST’s scientists in Charleston, South Carolina, received a special shipment of containers packed with baggies full of frozen human feces. Teams of scientists there and at an ...

In the wee hours of the morning in a lab in Amherst, Massachusetts, geoscience graduate student Rob D’Anjou sat looking over test results, a pot of coffee nearby. He’d been pulling long days to ...

Researchers scraped residue from ancient Roman bottles and discovered what might have been a medical concoction. (Ilker Demirbolat (left); Cenker Atila (right)) Some of the earliest writings — ...

“Poop is central to the story of how dogs came into our lives," write Duke University dog researchers Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods in their wonderful new book, Survival of the Friendliest: ...

Some of the earliest writings — including those inscribed on papyrus in Egypt and later in ancient Greece and Rome — contain recipes for making medicines. Finding physical proof, however, that ...