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According to a report in the , more than 3,000 artifacts were recovered during environmental work in the Nieuwe Drostendiep stream valley in the northeastern section of the Netherlands. The objects include tools from the Paleolithic period and the Bronze Age; medieval jewelry and jewelry dated to the second century B.C.; and materials from the Eighty Years' War, fought in the sixteenth century, and World War II. In particular, archaeologists found a gold ring dated to the third or fourth century A.D. and a fibula dated to the tenth or eleventh century A.D. "We are proud of the rich history...

Live Science reports that a new study of Viking coins from the Damhus hoard, a cache of 226 pennies unearthed in Denmark near the site of the Viking town of Ribe in 2018, suggests that they contain silver recycled from Islamic coins. The 1,000-year-old coins, known as pennies, bear a face on one side thought to represent the Norse god Wodan or Odin, with a stag on the reverse. Thomas Birch of the National Museum of Denmark said that each coin would have been enough to buy ale, bread, or simple tools. Analysis of the coins also shows that when...

A semiconductor chip produced 64 DNA sequences in parallel using a water-based enzymatic process. Researchers at Harvard University have developed a semiconductor chip that can synthesize 64 different DNA sequences in parallel using electric currents and a water-based enzymatic process, potentially offering an alternative to conventional DNA manufacturing methods. The chip uses localized electrical control to trigger DNA synthesis at selected sites on its surface. The team says the approach avoids the solvent-heavy phosphoramidite chemistry widely used to produce synthetic DNA today. Synthetic DNA is a key tool in modern biotechnology, supporting applications ranging from diagnostics and genome engineering to...

The History Guy remembers the battle of the Meuse Argonne, the largest and deadliest battle in the history of the United States army. The episode discusses events and shows photographs depicting a period of war, which some viewers may find disturbing. The History Guy uses images that are in the Public Domain. As photographs of actual events are often not available, I will sometimes use photographs of similar events or objects for illustration. The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered (formerly "Five Minutes of History") is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen...

Most visitors hit the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Vatican, then leave Rome thinking they have seen it all. This guide goes deeper. You will discover 10 hidden gems in Rome that most tourists miss, including secret viewpoints, underrated museums, underground Rome history, and quiet local corners you can actually enjoy without the crowds.From the haunting Non-Catholic Cemetery and the Pyramid of Cestius to the Aventine Hill Orange Garden and the Knights of Malta keyhole view, this is off the beaten path Rome at its best. We step into Baroque Rome at Chiesa del Gesù, explore the Baths of...

Explanation: How did a hamster wheel get into space? The Hamster Wheel Nebula (Longmore 8) was discovered by Andrew Longmore in 1976 as a part of a larger survey of the southern sky. This survey employed several improvements in photographic technology, including the use of highly sensitive film, to capture deeper and fainter objects on plates that were examined by eye and catalogued. The featured image, taken at Observatorio El Sauce in Chile, depicts an intricate wheel structure of glowing hydrogen that was thrown out into space by a dying star and ionized by the leftover white dwarf. This structure...

While climatologists fear skyrocketing temperatures, scientists are now warning that a “cold blob” in the Atlantic could trigger a global cooling event, among other apocalyptic scenarios, per an alarming study in Geophysical Research Letters. Located South of Greenland and Iceland, this anomalous patch of ocean has seen temps dip by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th Century, Science News reported. Coincidentally, this comes as the United Nations’ influential climate change committee has discarded dire temperature increase models spouted by doomsdayers on the Left.

Data centers have become the chic new enemy among activists. Critics claim the centers are using inordinate amounts of electricity and water to power artificial intelligence, inspiring protesters to take to the streets and Democratic lawmakers to head to Albany to stymie their development. However, some experts say the anti-data center push is more of a moral panic than an empirical one, often based on speculative and sometimes bunk projections. It seems that data centers are the boogeyman onto which larger fears about the impact of AI are being projected. “The estimates of future data-center development may be overestimated by...

There's a reason they call the lands surrounding the North Pacific the "Ring of Fire," and no, it's not because of a Johnny Cash song. No, the reason for that appellation is that the northern coasts of the lands on the Pacific are hotbeds of tectonic and volcanic activity. Nowhere are Americans more aware of this than in California, which has been hit by some pretty serious temblors in the past. Now, it looks like another big one may be on the way. Geologists are looking at the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults, and they are a tad worried...

Explanation: While cruising around Saturn, be on the lookout for picturesque arrangements of moons, rings, and shadows. One such striking sight occurred in 2005 and was captured by the then Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft. In the featured image, moons Mimas (left) and Tethys (right) are visible on either side of Saturn's thin rings, which are seen nearly edge-on. Across the top of Saturn are dark shadows of the wide rings, exhibiting their impressive complexity. The violet-light image brings up the texture of the backdrop: Saturn's clouds. Cassini orbited Saturn from 2004 until mid-2017, when the robotic spacecraft was directed to dive...

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool still needs some algae emancipation. Just days after the iconic Reflecting Pool reopened following President Trump’s $14 million renovation to seal the concrete bottom with an “American flag blue,” its familiar gnarly-looking green algae once again took over. “Versus previous administrations, the National Park Service is actually maintaining the beautifully completed Reflecting Pool,” a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told The Post. “The nanobubbler technology has successfully destroyed the algae bloom that has plagued every pool reopening since 1922, most infamously, the Obama pool reopening that resulted in massive algae clumps taking over...

My brain has been percolating on this for a bit, so apologies for not having all the background here. Tuesday morning, 0645, bad night's sleep, and my brain decided it wanted to tackle AI governance. Some thoughts I couldn't shake: Every time someone tries to incorporate Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into AI governance, it fails. Asimov himself proved why — he didn't write them as a blueprint. He wrote them as a story engine for exploring how they break. Every single Robot story was about the edge cases, paradoxes, and unintended consequences of three seemingly simple rules. The Laws...

On June 27, the asteroid will approach at a distance of around 0.01715 astronomical units. It hasn't been this close since at least 1600 CE. Potentially hazardous asteroid 152637 (1997 NC1) seen by the Virtual Telescope Project, when it was around 10.5 million kilometers (6.5 million miles) from Earth. Image credit: Gianluca Masi/The Virtual Telescope Project Potentially hazardous asteroid 152637 (1997 NC1) is about to make its closest approach in over 400 years, in an event only seen once every decade. At these distances, and given the size of the asteroid, it should be possible to view using a small...

Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel and the rest of the tech lords are way sharper than Elizabeth Warren and Graham Platner and Scott Pelley and the woke NGO crowd. I know that experts agree that our liberal and Democratic friends are the sharpest knives in the drawer, because education and credentials. After all, how would they have got to be the ruling class without intelligence and cunning? But in the last week, we have all started to wonder. When the Democrats all sing in chorus about the evils of Elon Musk’s first trillion, as though he were...

Donald Trump has shocked the world by banning the use of the most advanced AI by foreigners, including Britons, over national security fears. The Trump administration has ordered that Anthropic's latest systems, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, be cut off from non-Americans, including those based in the US. The AI systems are theoretically capable of conducting large-scale hacking attacks and developing bioweapons. Anthropic said the only way to comply with the ban was to universally block access to its most advanced models, including for US citizens. Its popular Claude AI remains available. Tom Tugendhat, the former Conservative security minister, warned...

In the Middle East, intelligence services furiously hunt for fissile material in Iran. In Japan, residents still worry about radiation exposure from Fukushima Daiichi. In other places, stolen or missing radioactive sources have made the news. One solution: the cell phone.

Explanation: Venus and Jupiter may have caught your attention lately. The recent close conjunction of the two brightest planets in recent evening skies has been hard to miss. With Jupiter at the top, starting on May 30 and ending on June 8, their close approach was chronicled daily, left to right, in the featured panels from Maharashtra, India. Near the western horizon, the evening sky colors and exposures used for each panel depend on the local conditions near sunset. At their closest on June 9, the celestial pair appeared to be only about three times the width of a full...

While most news reports have focused trivially on Elon Musk’s status as the first trillionaire resulting from SpaceX’s successful initial public offering (IPO) last week, the real story of that IPO has to do with SpaceX itself and how that company’s extremely bright future is going to change human history. Let me run some numbers.

Explanation: In an interplanetary first, on July 19, 2013 Earth was photographed on the same day from two other worlds of the Solar System, innermost planet Mercury and ringed gas giant Saturn. Pictured on the left, Earth is the pale blue dot just below the rings of Saturn, as captured by the robotic Cassini spacecraft then orbiting the outermost gas giant. On that same day people across planet Earth snapped many of their own pictures of Saturn. On the right, the Earth-Moon system is seen against the dark background of space as captured by the sunward MESSENGER spacecraft, then in...

The uncertainty of science: In two somewhat self-righteous press releases today from two different academic organizations, scientists who have been for three decades touting the somewhat uncertain evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, thus requiring the ad hoc creation of something they label “dark energy” to explain it, insisted that their theory is still right despite publication of a paper last year that said their evidence was weak and unconvincing. The headlines of the first press release is especially insulting to the very concept of the scientific method: - Royal Astronomical Society: ‘Crisis averted’ as experts confirm...