On what would’ve been the astronomer’s 90th trip around the Sun, here’s a look at his legacy as a scientist, advocate and communicator.
In the northern reaches of Russia, enigmatic craters have begun appearing in broad expanses of windswept tundra. These craters can reach 230 feet across and plunge more than 100 feet deep into dark frozen soils known as permafrost.
The first crater was discovered by a helicopter pilot in 2014 on the Yamal Peninsula, a finger of frozen land extending into the Arctic Ocean. Reindeer herders stumbled upon another 16 craters after that. As the number of craters identified grew, so did the hypotheses about how the craters came to be. Some speculated that missiles, meteorites, or even UFOs were responsible. But when researchers dug into the mystery, they found high levels of methane in the atmosphere around the craters, suggesting that the forces responsible were not objects falling from above but rather explosive belches of gas from deep below the surface.
A re-examination of King Tutankhamun’s burial mask showed it wasn’t originally made for him.
The earring holes on the mask provide an obvious clue the mask was intended for a high-status female or child.
With the mystery surrounding where his famous stepmother, Queen Nefertiti, is buried, experts surmise King Tut’s mask could have been used by her first.
We didn’t call it AI at first. The first thing that happened was these new innovations just crept into our electronic medical record system. They were tools that monitored whether specific steps in patient treatment were being followed. If something was missed or hadn’t been done, the AI would send an alert. It was very primitive, and it was there to stop patients falling through the cracks.
Then in 2018, the hospital bought a new program from Epic, the electronic medical record company. It predicted something called “patient acuity” — basically the workload each patient requires from their nursing care. It’s a really important measurement we have in nursing, to determine how sick a person is and how many resources they will need.
An OECD international review of the impact of computers in education reports:
“Students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes…And perhaps the most disappointing finding of the report is that technology is of little help in bridging the skills divide between advantaged and disadvantaged students.”
After reviewing 126 research studies exploring technology-based education interventions, the global research center J-PAL concluded:
“Initiatives that expand access to computers…do not improve K-12 grades and test scores. [Furthermore], online courses lower student academic achievement compared to in-person courses.”
Killing is a funny old thing. You can cut down 17 people, decapitate their corpses and stuff their mouths with bamboo grass — and people will call you one of the greatest warriors ever simply because the slaughter happened during war. That’s why there are so few “evil samurai” on record. Throughout its history, Japan has strongly believed that all’s fair in love and war, and it’s had plenty of the latter over the years. But once Tokugawa Ieyasu finished unifying the country in the early 17th century, war in Japan all but ended. THAT’S when we start seeing instances of mass-murdering, serial-killing monsters with katana, who end up going down in history as Japan’s most infamous samurai criminals.
In Hawai‘i, people, pigs, and ecosystems only have so much room to coexist, and the pigs exist a little too much.
An enigmatic stone and turf structure on Bodmin Moor that was previously thought to be a medieval animal pen has been found to be 4,000 years older – and unique in Europe.
The rectangular monument was built not in the early medieval period to corral livestock, as recorded by Historic England, but rather in the middle Neolithic, between 5,000 and 5,500 years ago, archaeologists have discovered.
In the early hours of October 30, 1961, a bomber took off from an airstrip in northern Russia and began its flight through cloudy skies over the frigid Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya. Slung below the plane’s belly was a nuclear bomb the size of a small school bus—the largest and most powerful bomb ever created.
At 11:32 a.m., the bombardier released the weapon.
Apple apparently hasn’t learned much from the criticism it took earlier this year for an ad showing creative works unceremoniously crushed in an industrial press. A pair of new ads for Apple Intelligence portray the Writing Tools and Memories movies as tools for those unwilling to put in any effort.
A hypothesis called “The Silurian hypothesis” wins the title of “most interesting hypothesis most likely to be false” for all of science. In brief, the hypothesis postulates that previously a species different from ours had achieved high intelligence and technological civilization on this planet. The Silurian hypothesis (named after “Silurian” aliens in the brainy British TV series “Doctor Who”) was initially proposed by two astronomers, Gavin A. Schmidt and Adam Frank, as a thought experiment, to see if it would even be feasible to detect the traces of such a hypothetical civilization which had existed many millions of years ago. Would there still be detectable changes in the sedimentation patterns if someone (not human) had built cities and military bases a hundred million years ago? Would ancient trash dumps be conserved somewhere, somehow? Would there be changes in the patterns of radioisotopes in the rocks as a result of an ancient nuclear war?
There’s been an exciting new discovery in the fight against plastic pollution: mealworm larvae that are capable of consuming polystyrene. They join the ranks of a small group of insects that have been found to be capable of breaking the polluting plastic down, though this is the first time that an insect species native to Africa has been found to do this.
Here we report Navaornis hestiae gen. et sp. nov., an exquisitely preserved fossil species from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil. The skull of Navaornis is toothless and large-eyed, with a vaulted cranium closely resembling the condition in crown birds; however, phylogenetic analyses recover Navaornis in Enantiornithes, a highly diverse clade of Mesozoic stem birds. Despite an overall geometry quantitatively indistinguishable from crown birds, the skull of Navaornis retains numerous plesiomorphies including a maxilla-dominated rostrum, an akinetic palate, a diapsid temporal configuration, a small cerebellum and a weakly expanded telencephalon.
