Sometimes one clue at a crime scene can provide the key to unlocking an entire mystery. Such is the case with a single gold earring found inside a building that burned to the ground about 2,200 years ago in Catalonia, according to a report in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.The fact that the earring was hidden — both in a pot and in a nook inside a wall — suggests that its owners knew Hannibal’s Carthaginian army was heading their way. Because the earring was in one of the several b ...read more
Many people understand the concept of bias at some intuitive level. In society, and in artificial intelligence systems, racial and gender biases are well documented.If society could somehow remove bias, would all problems go away? The late Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who was a key figure in the field of behavioral economics, argued in his last book that bias is just one side of the coin. Errors in judgments can be attributed to two sources: bias and noise.Bias and noise both play important r ...read more
With the new Amy Winehouse biopic “Back to Black” in U.S. theaters as of May 17, 2024, the late singer’s relationship with alcohol and drugs is under scrutiny again. In July 2011, Winehouse was found dead in her flat in north London from “death by misadventure” at the age of 27. That’s the official British term used for accidental death caused by a voluntary risk.Her blood alcohol concentration was 0.416%, more than five times the legal intoxication limit in the U.S. – leading her ...read more
There’s an old saying that you can’t step in the same river twice. But a group of researchers have now retraced an ancient, buried Nile tributary — allowing historians to walk in the dried-up waterway path that probably proved instrumental in the construction of the 31 pyramids it once flowed past.A report in Communications Earth & Environment employed satellite imaging, ground-penetrating radar, and soil samples to show that these famous structures — including the Giza complex — m ...read more
Exoplanets, or planets far from our solar system, are always exciting to discover. With each one, researchers learn more about how these exoplanets form and whether they can support life and star systems across the universe. A team of researchers from various universities just identified another exoplanet about the same size as Earth, 55 light-years away, which is very close when compared to cosmic scales. The exoplanet, dubbed SPECULOOS-3 b, is only the second of its kind currently known and ta ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine