The dramatic collapse of the Mayan civilisation 1000 years ago is one of the world's enduring archaeological mysteries. But how the Maya got started in the first place is no less mysterious. Now newly discovered excavations have revealed that some Mayan ceremonial plazas and pyramids are centuries older than we thought – but leave obscure why they were built.

A pair of neutrinos detected in Antarctica may be the first of these ghostly particles seen coming from outside the solar system since 1987. If the finding is confirmed, it could lead to a new way of looking at the universe that may solve a number of cosmic puzzles.

Neutrinos have no charge and negligible mass, which means they can travel through space largely unimpeded by matter and electromagnetic fields. Detecting astrophysical neutrinos would offer an unprecedented way of studying comic objects across vast distances, similar to the way infrared light allows us to peer into opaque cosmic dust clouds to see stars forming.

On May 9, 1926, famed American explorer Richard Byrd took off from the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen along with his pilot, Floyd Bennett, in an attempt to be the first to fly to the North Pole. About 16 hours later, the pair returned to the island in their Fokker tri-motor airplane, the Josephine Ford, saying they had indeed accomplished the feat.

The quest to understand why our Universe is made of matter rather than antimatter has received a boost at the Large Hadron Collider.

The LHCb experiment has for the first time observed decays of particles known as Bs mesons that preferentially end up as matter, rather than antimatter.

However, the difference is still not enough to explain the preponderance of matter over antimatter in the cosmos.

Life may well lurk beneath the Martian surface today, but it'll be tough to detect without sending humans to the Red Planet, some experts say.

It could be a long time before robots are able to drill deep into the Martian underground, explore caves and investigate other potentially life-supporting habitats on the Red Planet. So if humanity wants to satisfy its curiosity about potential life on Mars anytime soon, it should work to get boots in the red dirt, advocates say.

There is now so much debris in orbit that the space environment is close to a cascade of collisions that would make space extremely hazardous, a major international meeting has concluded.

Its summary position stated there was an "urgent need" to start pulling redundant objects out of the sky.

Scientists estimate there are nearly 30,000 items circling the Earth larger than 10cm in size.

The current Chairman and former CEO of Nestlé, the largest producer of food products in the world, believes that the answer to global water issues is privatization. This statement is on record from the wonderful company that has peddled junk food in the Amazon, has invested money to thwart the labeling of GMO-filled products, has a disturbing health and ethics record for its infant formula, and has deployed a cyber army to monitor Internet criticism and shape discussions in social media.

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Should trade wars and protecting local jobs get in the way of clean energy?

That's the dilemma before India – and the world – at the moment. Desperately short of power, but with an average of 300 sunny days a year, India is aggressively pursuing solar energy. Its national solar programme, the grandly named Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (named after India's first prime minister) plans to generate 20,000 megawatts of solar power by 2022. But an ugly trade spat with the US may frustrate India's efforts to go solar.

Individuals who work in creative fields are diagnosed and treated with a mental illness more frequently than the general public, showing an important link between writing and schizophrenia.

The finding came from a team of experts at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. Their extensive research on the Swedish registry is currently the most inclusive in its area.

It’s no accident that money obtained through dishonest or illegal means is called “dirty money.” A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that when people perceive money as morally tainted, they also view it as having less value and purchasing power.

Challenging the belief that “all money is green,” and that people will cross ethical boundaries to amass it, social scientists from UC Berkeley and Stanford University have found compelling evidence that the source of wealth really does matter. In fact, some people avoid ill-gotten gains – such as profits from unfair labor practices or insider trading – for fear of “moral contagion,” according to a paper published this week in the online issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Religion and gender politics is often a toxic mix. First, the Church of England tied itself in knots over the ordination of women bishops. And then, Pope Francis got in trouble with the traditionalists by washing two young women's feet over Easter. Apparently, the liturgies dictate he should only have washed the men's feet.