Archaeologists have long known that complex societies can rise, flourish and then disappear so completely that only scattered ruins hint at what was lost. Now a new wave of research is sharpening the ...

I see a pattern emerging in these debates, not of secret lost empires, but of how incomplete our record really is and how quickly complex societies can disappear without a trace. The latest clues, ...

For decades, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has largely been predicated on a specific assumption: that advanced civilizations will inevitably grow, expanding their energy consumption and ...