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Radiocarbon dating, invented in the late 1940s and improved ever since to provide more precise measurements, is the standard method for determining the dates of artifacts in archaeology and other disciplines.

“If it’s organic and old—up to 50,000 years—you date it by radiocarbon,” said Sturt Manning, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Classical Archaeology in the College of Arts and Sciences.

A new paper led by Cornell University points out the need for an important new refinement to the technique. The outcomes of his study, published March 18 in Science Advances, have relevance for understanding key dates in Mediterranean history and prehistory, including the tomb of Tutankhamen and a controversial but important volcanic eruption on the Greek island of Santorini.

Continue reading “Fine-tuning radiocarbon dating could ‘rewrite’ ancient events” | >

An ancient Elpistostege fish fossil found in Miguasha, Canada has revealed new insights into how the human hand evolved from fish fins.

An international team of palaeontologists from Flinders University in Australia and Universite du Quebec a Rimouski in Canada have revealed the specimen, as described in the journal Nature, has yielded the missing evolutionary link in the fish to tetrapod transition, as fish began to foray in habitats such as and land during the Late Devonian period millions of years ago.

This complete 1.57 metre long fish shows the complete arm (pectoral fin) skeleton for the first time in any elpistostegalian fish. Using high energy CT-scans, the skeleton of the pectoral fin revealed the presence of a humerus (arm), radius and ulna (forearm), rows of carpus (wrist) and phalanges organized in digits (fingers).

Continue reading “Ancient fish fossil reveals evolutionary origin of the human hand” | >

A theory of how #AI & #brain recognize things. https://bit.ly/2Qnq3RC “In this article, we proposed a hypothesis that we call Switch Hypothesis for explaining how an ANN as well as a real neural network carry out its functions…” #MachineLearning #DeepLearning #NeuralNetworks

Neuroscience and psychology today has advanced significantly. With the use of neuroimaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), human beings have gradually revealed the secrets behind how our brains perceive, recognize and memorize things. However, if you’d like to have a detailed, neuronal-level elucidation on how brains realize its functions, you should be very disappointed because no one is currently capable of doing so. In other words, although our cerebrums are no longer a pitch-black box, it’s still at least a “gray” box, with a lot of enigmas yet to be explained.

As the number of global coronavirus cases surpassed 200,000 as of Wednesday, a Japanese flu drug undergoing clinical trials in China as a possible treatment for coronavirus has effectively helped patients recover, Chinese officials told reporters. This is only one of many drugs that have shown promise.

A Chinese government official said patients who took Avigan tested negative for the virus in a shorter amount of time.

You’ve probably seen some of the cool things magnets can do. Place one near a paper clip, and the clip zooms across the table toward the magnet. Hold one magnet near another, and the second one mysteriously darts in the opposite direction. If you didn’t know about science, magnet tricks might seem like magic tricks.

Now, scientists have discovered another magnetic trick. By mixing unbelievably small magnets with oil, bigger magnets can be used to move the oily globs around. The trick isn’t just cool to watch. Some day, the technique could help clean up messy oil spills in the sea mistakenly dumped by ships.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh make teeny tiny magnets out of two metals: iron and cobalt. Unlike the palm-sized magnets you may have played with in school, these magnets are measured in nanometers. One nanometer equals one-billionth of a meter. That may be hard to picture, so think of this: A human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide.(Read this story to learn more.)

Continue reading “Nanomagnets corral oil” | >

I think these can be fought with current technology such as quantum radar even other higher level technology. It can also be hacked with quantum radar or neutrino beams.

Know colloquially as the “Black Holes” by the U.S. Navy, the Improved-Kilo-class of submarines are quite deadly — and could turn the balance of power in the South China Sea in China’s favor.

Clause density is something new to me but seems interesting as I know shores algorithm is the only thing that can hack systems.

Google is racing to develop quantum-enhanced processors that utilize quantum mechanical effects to one day dramatically increase the speed at which data can be processed.

In the near term, Google has devised new quantum-enhanced algorithms that operate in the presence of realistic noise. The so-called quantum approximate optimization algorithm, or QAOA for short, is the cornerstone of a modern drive towards noise-tolerant quantum-enhanced algorithm development.

The celebrated approach taken by Google in QAOA has sparked vast commercial interest and ignited a global research community to explore novel applications. Yet, little actually remains known about the ultimate performance limitations of Google’s QAOA algorithm.

Continue reading “Russian Scientists Break Google’s Quantum Algorithm” | >

I frankly think this of exotic species unknown but it has exotic movement.

With over 4,000 exoplanets found so far, it takes a particularly interesting one to stand out.

LHS 1815b literally does that. While most planet-bearing stars we find orbit the Milky Way in the plane of its disk, this planet’s host star’s orbit takes it well out of that plane, flying way up over the galaxy and way down below it over time, giving it a pretty interesting view of our galaxy.

Continue reading “An Earth-sized exoplanet found with a star that zooms *way* up and down in the Milky Way” | >