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About 900 years ago, the Native American tribes of Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian city in northern Mexico until colonial times, cut down giant trees and transported them more than 110 miles (180 km) to use as monument markers, a new study finds.The tree, known as the Mitchell Log, is the largest sign of its kind in what is now known as Cahokia, an earth mound in southwestern Illinois.The marker posts were important monuments in Cahokia, but researchers still don’t know when Cahokia people erected and eventually stopped placing these large logs. you may like By determining the exact dates when…
Many years ago, scientists noticed something odd: Earth’s northern and southern hemispheres reflect roughly the same amount of sunlight into space. This symmetry is strange because the northern hemisphere has more land, cities, pollution, and industrial aerosols. All of this should lead to a higher albedo, meaning more sunlight is reflected than absorbed. Most of the southern hemisphere is ocean, and the ocean is darker and absorbs more sunlight.But new satellite data suggests that the symmetry is breaking down.From balance to imbalanceIn a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, climate scientist Norman Loeb of…
simple factsWhat is it: Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS extending its tailLocation: Inside the solar system, heading towards MarsShare date: September 4, 2025Even as comets bright to the naked eye tear through Earth’s skies (cheers, Comet Lemon!), the solar system’s most famous object today is hidden behind the sun. It is the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.This alien visitor, which most astronomers believe to be a comet from an unknown star system far beyond our own, is only the third interstellar object ever detected in our solar system. It is the largest, fastest moving, and possibly oldest interstellar object ever observed.Although it was only…
Our extinct cousins, Neanderthals, are often depicted as eating only meat, without any fruits, grains, or vegetables. But did Neanderthals really survive on meat alone?There’s plenty of evidence that Neanderthals regularly ate meat, but a series of studies has shown that our evolutionary relatives, who went extinct more than 30,000 years ago, also ate non-meat animal parts, such as fatty extracts from bone marrow and other foods such as pistachios, lentils and wild peas.By analyzing the number of atoms that contain different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei, known as isotopes such as carbon-13 and nitrogen-15, scientists can estimate the…
OpenAI this week released an AI-powered web browser called ChatGPT Atlas. This made me wonder, “Is it finally time to ditch Safari?” This news was on our minds when Max Zeff, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed the browser landscape (including lesser-known alternatives) on the latest episode of the Equity podcast. But I don’t think any of us will make a big transition anytime soon. First, Sean pointed out that many companies have tried to usurp the dominant browser position, but ultimately failed, because browsers alone cannot make money. Of course, that’s unlikely to be a problem for OpenAI, whose funding…
A few Thursdays ago, I woke up at nearly 4:30 a.m. to an Instagram DM that kept me awake. Rizzbot, a child-sized humanoid robot developed by Unitree Robotics with a large following on social media (more than 1 million followers on TikTok and more than 500,000 followers on Instagram), sent me a photo. He was flipping me off. There are no words. No explanation. It’s just a robot holding up its middle finger. I was shocked, but my sinking feeling meant I could guess why. A few weeks ago, Rizzbot — or whoever runs the Instagram account — and I…
Every few weekends, Lavanya Jain, a 21-year-old student, opens the BlaBlaCar app to find a lift from Noida, a suburb of New Delhi, to her home in Kandla, a small town in northern India’s Uttar Pradesh state. The 120-kilometre journey costs about 500 rupees, or the equivalent of about $6. This is a fraction of the ₹1,500 to ₹2,000, or $17 to $23, he pays for a private taxi. “Basically, anyone who is looking for a fast, efficient, affordable and comfortable way to travel and likes to chat should check out BlaBlaCar,” Jain told TechCrunch, adding that he has used…
A 2,700-year-old pottery shard discovered near Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is the first known correspondence between the kingdoms of Assyria and Judah ever found in Jerusalem.The 1-inch (2.5 centimeter) long shard (a term used by archaeologists to describe pottery shards) is covered in cuneiform writing and dates to the First Temple period (1000-586 B.C.). It contains a royal letter from the kingdom of Assyria to the kingdom of Judah, apparently requesting to know the circumstances surrounding the delay in paying tribute.The inscription is written in Akkadian. Akkadian is a language spoken in the Near East, including Assyria, and written in cuneiform.…
An mRNA-based vaccine for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that has saved 2.5 million lives worldwide during the pandemic could help revitalize the immune system to fight cancer. This is a surprising finding from new research that we and our colleagues published in Nature.While developing an mRNA vaccine for brain tumor patients in 2016, our team led by pediatric oncologist Elias Seyul discovered that mRNA can train the immune system to kill tumors, even if the mRNA is not associated with cancer.Based on this finding, we hypothesized that mRNA vaccines designed to target the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 might have antitumor…
New AI-powered web browsers, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet, are poised to supplant Google Chrome as the gateway to the internet for billions of users. The main selling point of these products is a web-browsing AI agent that promises to complete tasks on your behalf by clicking on websites and filling out forms. But consumers may be unaware of the significant risks to user privacy associated with agent browsing, an issue the entire technology industry is grappling with. Cybersecurity experts who spoke to TechCrunch said AI browser agents pose a greater risk to user privacy compared to…