At an auction in England in 2011, one of John Lennon’s teeth sold for just over US$31,000.How much are your teeth worth?Teeth are amazing little miracles. They light up our smiles, we use them to speak and we chew with them more than 600 times at every meal.Yet, in a society where 1 out of 5 Americans ages 75 and up live without their teeth, many people may not realize that teeth are designed to stay with us for a lifetime.I’m a dentist and an assistant professor spanning clinical dentistry ...read more
Partitioning history into multiple ages has helped us comprehend human developments and events throughout time, but what decides when one age transitions to the next? It turns out that the answer isn’t so clear-cut. Civilizations across the ancient world progressed at varying rates, complicating the task of drawing a clean divide between ages.Scholars have relied on overarching themes, though, to explain how human history changed trajectory over time. This is embodied by the three ages of preh ...read more
The traditional accounts of Aztec sacrifice are almost too gory to be true. In them, Aztec priests cut beating hearts from the chests of sacrificial victims before throwing them down the steep steps of pyramids. “It is the most terrible and frightful thing,” an account from 1519 stated, shortly after the Spanish arrival in Mesoamerica.But the Aztecs, or Mexica, whose empire controlled most of central Mexico in the 15th century, didn’t see sacrifice as quite so startling, nor as quite so si ...read more
Back in 2019, a group of computer scientists performed a now-famous experiment with far-reaching consequences for artificial intelligence research. At the time, machine vision algorithms were becoming capable of recognizing a wide range of objects with some recording spectacular results in the standard tests used to assess their abilities. But there was a problem with the method behind all these tests. Almost all the algorithms were trained on a database of labelled images, known as ImageNet. Th ...read more
Conspiracy theories are everywhere, and they can involve just about anything.People believe false conspiracy theories for a wide range of reasons– including the fact that there are real conspiracies, like efforts by the Sackler family to profit by concealing the addictiveness of oxycontin at the cost of countless American lives.The extreme consequences of unfounded conspiratorial beliefs could be seen on the staircases of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and in the self-immolation of a protes ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine