Forgive this reporter his naivete, but believe it or not, the ancient Egyptians actually wrote far more than the formal inscriptions on great pyramids and obelisks. For that very public writing on ...

Greek inscription inside Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Credit: Flickr / George Terezakis CC BY 2.0 The Latin alphabet is undoubtedly the world’s most recognizable form of written language, whose ...

Before the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, ancient Egypt was shadowy and mysterious with towering monuments, magical names, and an unknown antiquity, though most Western scholars believed that ...

At the turn of the 19th century, Napoleon’s armies uncovered a remarkable object near the Egyptian town of el-Rashid: a large, gray slab containing three blocks of the same text in three different ...

Paralysis, one of the most common and debilitating outcomes of severe damage to the central nervous system, continues to cast a long shadow of hopelessness on millions of lives worldwide. Despite the ...

Stone Age people 40,000 years ago used a simple form of writing comparable in complexity to the earliest stages of the world’s first writing system, cuneiform, according to a study of mysterious signs ...

How old is the Tarot? This is a question that seems easy to answer today. As playing cards, we can confidently map the Tarot to the early 15th century. Mystery solved? Well, it’s not quite that simple ...

The room we are in is locked. It is windowless and lit from above by a fluorescent bulb. In the hallway outside—two stories beneath the city of London—attendants in dark suits patrol silently, giving ...

Science fiction has long speculated about the possibility of first contact with an alien species from a distant world and how we might be able to communicate with them. But what if we simply don’t ...