Even walls can evolve. A survey of the oldest section of the Great Wall of China not only bumps back its age by 300 years but shows waves of architectural innovations. The oldest section is in the Changqing District, Jinan, Shandong Province and is sometimes called the Great Wall of Qi.Revisiting the Great WallThe survey, conducted last year by the Shandong Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, employed a host of tools to investigate the wall’s origins. They sampled soil fro ...read more
Freelance software engineering is a lucrative and dynamic field where skilled developers tackle diverse challenges, from bug fixes to full-stack feature development. In recent years, these workers have been among the first to incorporate AI systems into their workflow to help write code. That raises an interesting question: could an AI system do the same job by itself? In other words, have software engineers effectively developed themselves out of their own jobs?Now we get an answer of sorts tha ...read more
Explorers have long trusted compasses to navigate Earth’s land and oceans, using our planet’s global magnetic field as their guide. But what happens when you take a compass beyond Earth — into orbit, to the Moon, to other planets, or even beyond our solar system? Would it still point north, or would it aimlessly spin in the absence of a dominant magnetic field? The answer depends on where you are in the cosmos and what other magnetic fields are at play.On Earth, a compass needle aligns wit ...read more
An experimental Microsoft computer chip under development will deliver a one-two tech punch, according to the company.The first blow is a statement that Microsoft scientists have developed the first-ever quantum-computing chip in its class. This form of computing could theoretically make, ahem, quantum leaps in both speed and number of calculations a computer could perform simultaneously.The physics that theoretically would power such a chip is hard to understand — even for some physicists.“ ...read more
Feelings of exclusion aren’t all that fun. And they aren’t all that unusual, either, at least not for narcissists. According to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, narcissists are more likely to feel left out than non-narcissists, partially due to their actual exclusion and partially due to their perceived exclusion.“Feeling ostracized is a subjective experience based on the perception of social cues by the individual,” said Christiane Büttner, a study autho ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine