A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Argentina has found chromosomal evidence of people living in South America as far back as 18,000 years ago. The group has published a paper describing their work and findings on the open access site PLOS ONE.

Over the past several years, scientists have found evidence of people first traveling to North America from Siberia approximately 14,000 to 17,000 years ago, using what was then a land bridge to Alaska. In this new effort, the researchers have found evidence suggesting that the timeline may have to be pushed back a bit.

Rather than looking for tools or bones left behind by the first people to travel to South America—which presumably was populated by people moving south down through North America and then through Central America—the researchers used a chromosomal approach.

Supercooled water undergoes a liquid–liquid phase transition. The authors show that the two phases have distinct hydrogen-bond networks, differing in their degree of entanglement, and thus the transition can be described by the topological changes of the network.

Numbers are an integral part of programming. Hence, programming languages support various datatypes to represent different kinds of numbers and provide various methods to work with them. Each of these datatypes comes with certain limitations on the range of numbers they can represent; while some can represent a small range of numbers, others support a very large range of numbers. Depending on our use case, we can choose from one of them. But none of them have a way to represent infinity.

We often encounter and have to deal with infinity in many real-world scenarios, and so we need a way to represent them in programming languages. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to represent and work with infinity in Python.

SuperMii

SuperMii provides a variety of tools you may use to create your cartoon avatar. You can further download them to use as your profile images, for example, on your preferred social networking networks. It is one of the best Metaverse Avatar building tools to make better versions than Mark Zuckerberg.

In Part 1 of this who-knows-how-many-parts-there-will-be mini-series, we focused on one of my favorite display technologies in the form of Nixie tubes. We also featured a photograph showing the main control room of an abandoned power plant in Hungary that—much like your humble narrator—was simply oozing with style.

In that photograph, you may have spotted another of my favorite display technologies—vintage analog meters—which I typically acquire at Hamfests and electronic flea markets. I really like the look and feel of these little beauties so long as they are of a certain age, thereby bestowing an air of gravitas upon the occasion of their use.

One of my ongoing hobby projects is what I call my Vetinari Clock, which is named after one of the characters from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Lord Havelock Vetinari, who is the Lord Patrician in charge of the city-state of Ankh-Morpork, has a strange clock in his waiting-room. While it does keep completely accurate time overall, it sometimes ticks and tocks out of sync (for example, “tick, tock … ticktocktick, tock …”) and it occasionally misses a ‘tick’ or a ‘tock’ altogether. As a result, by the time Lord Vetinari’s visitors are finally granted an audience, their nerves are already frayed and frazzled.