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Elongated skull from Italian cave reveals earliest European evidence of cranial modification

A University of Florence–led team reports early Eurasian evidence of artificial cranial modification (ACM) in a Late Upper Paleolithic individual from Arene Candide Cave, Italy. Shape analyses place the specimen within the ACM cluster and radiocarbon dates to 12,620–12,190 years ago.

Body culturalization runs deep in human history, from adornments to permanent modifications recorded in archaeological contexts. More than just stylistic choices, transformations in appearance impart cultural values and symbolic meanings through the physical body, serving as a living artifact of cultural practices and societal beliefs, perpetuating shared values and collective identity.

Searching for these cultural clues with archaeology can be tricky. Tattoos require rare forms of soft-tissue preservation (Ötzi the iceman, for example) and adornments like piercings fall away with deteriorating flesh, whereas skeletal markers such as intentional dental modification and cranial modifications offer more lasting evidence of practices that shaped identity over millennia.

Move over Mercury—Chiron is in retrograde: What even is Chiron?

You might have seen an interesting phrase popping up in your social media feeds lately: “Chiron is in retrograde.” If you’re anything like me, you’ve never heard of Chiron before—and I’m a professional astronomer.

So what is Chiron, and what does it mean to be in retrograde? The short answer is that Chiron is an asteroid-slash-comet orbiting somewhere past Jupiter and Saturn. And until January 2026, it’s going to look like it’s going backwards in the sky. If you can spot it.

But there’s a bit more to the story.

NVIDIA Opens Portals to World of Robotics With New Omniverse Libraries, Cosmos Physical AI Models and AI Computing Infrastructure

NVIDIA today announced new NVIDIA Omniverse™ libraries and NVIDIA Cosmos™ world foundation models (WFMs) that accelerate the development and deployment of robotics solutions.

Meet IDEA: An AI assistant to help geoscientists explore Earth and beyond

A new artificial intelligence tool developed by researchers at the University of Hawai’i (UH) at Mānoa is making it easier for scientists to explore complex geoscience data—from tracking sea levels on Earth to analyzing atmospheric conditions on Mars.

Called the Intelligent Data Exploring Assistant (IDEA), the combines the power of large language models, like those used in ChatGPT, with scientific data, tailored instructions, and computing resources.

By simply providing questions in everyday language, researchers can ask IDEA to retrieve data, run analyses, generate plots, and even review its own results—opening up new possibilities for research, education, and scientific discovery.

Using NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM to run gpt-oss-20b

This notebook provides a step-by-step guide on how to optimizing gpt-oss models using NVIDIA’s TensorRT-LLM for high-performance inference. TensorRT-LLM provides users with an easy-to-use Python API to define Large Language Models (LLMs) and support state-of-the-art optimizations to perform inference efficiently on NVIDIA GPUs. TensorRT-LLM also contains components to create Python and C++ runtimes that orchestrate the inference execution in performant way.

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