Vast swathes of "pristine" Amazon rain forest may actually have been sophisticated urban landscapes prior to the arrival of European colonists, anthropologists say.

Mexican devotees honor the folk saint Santa Muerte—a scythe-carrying skeleton—each month, though the Catholic Church links the saint to black magic and Satanism.

On the eve of Hurricane Katrina's three-year anniversary, Gustav is poised to blossom into a similarly catastrophic storm, prompting communities all along its path to prepare for the worst.

The fatal cancer that has ravaged Australia's Tasmanian devils is evolving more quickly than the feisty marsupials can fight it.

Dental pulp from a wisdom tooth could be a new source of therapeutic stem cells, sidestepping the ethical concerns of embryonic cells, Japanese researchers claim.

An "exquisitely carved" statue of Roman leader Marcus Aurelius, with lion-skin boots and a feathery beard, has been discovered in an artifact-rich site in Turkey.

Dwarf galaxies of varying brightness orbiting the Milky Way have a common central mass, says a new study that suggests dark matter can provide the minimum mass required for galaxies to form.

The U.S. is likely to grant national-monument status to Pacific island regions that together are larger than Alaska and Texas combined—a "great choice," conservationists say, if the areas are actually protected.

A distant cousin of the famous "bullet cluster" shows the same separation of dark and ordinary matter occurring as its two parent galaxy clusters collide at high speed.