The origin of the decimal point, a powerful calculation tool, has been traced back to a mathematician who lived during the Italian Renaissance.

By Jo Marchant & Nature magazine.

Google announces VideoPrism.

A foundational visual encoder for video understanding.

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Join the discussion on this paper page.

A new button on your keyboard is just the beginning of major changes coming to Windows in 2024.

Joanna Stern, WSJ, joins ‘Squawk on the Street’ to discuss Apple’s latest large product launch, the Apple Vision Pro.

A temporary lake at Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park has persisted for more than six months, which is far longer than it has lasted before. And experts say that it could stick around for quite a while yet.

Archaeologists have dug up mysteriously black and fertile patches of ancient soils in hundreds of sites across the Amazon. 🌎⁠ https://www.freethink.com/science/carbon-dark-earth-ancient-technique

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The team’s study appears in Science Advances. Other authors include former MIT postdoc and lead author Morgan Schmidt, anthropologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida, and collaborators from multiple institutions across Brazil.

In their current study, the team synthesized observations and data that Schmidt, Heckenberger, and others had previously gathered, while working with Indigenous communities in the Amazon since the early 2000s, with new data collected in 2018–19. The scientists focused their fieldwork in the Kuikuro Indigenous Territory in the Upper Xingu River basin in the southeastern Amazon. This region is home to modern Kuikuro villages as well as archaeological sites where the ancestors of the Kuikuro are thought to have lived. Over multiple visits to the region, Schmidt, then a graduate student at the University of Florida, was struck by the darker soil around some archaeological sites.

“When I saw this dark earth and how fertile it was, and started digging into what was known about it, I found it was a mysterious thing — no one really knew where it came from,” he says.

Topological antiferromagnetic states are generated and spatially reconfigured in free-standing crystalline membranes of haematite through strain design.

Yan, M., Liu, X., Jie, J. et al. Construction and implementation of wide range parameter switchable chaotic system. Sci Rep 14, 4,059 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-54458-2

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