Archaeologists have used drones and an old cold war spy boat to identify three shipwrecks on the Mediterranean seabed. One contains artefacts dating back over 2000 years, hinting at a vast network of trade during the rise of ancient Greek city states like Athens.
“If our dates are correct, this is just as Alexander the Great is beginning his conquest,” says team leader Ben Ballardat the Ocean Exploration Trust (OET), whose father Robert discovered the wreck of the Titanic.
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Forget lightning speed calculations, technological superiority and machine-like precision. Thanks to the efforts of some researchers, artificial intelligence can now create magic.
“We’ve done a number of different tricks involving artificial intelligence,” says Peter McOwan, a computer science professor at Queen Mary University of London.
Read more at Smithsonian Magazine.
Joe Karetak heard broken propeller shrapnel whiz through the air as the blade of the sinking helicopter—sent to rescue him and his son, Joe Jr.—hit the ice. The chopper crashed into the floe somewhere outside the hamlet of Arviat on the western shore of Hudson Bay in Nunavut, Canada, a long way from everywhere. The pilot was frantically trying to get out of the cockpit. Twenty feet across the open water created by the crash, Karetak was powerless to help. He had already spent nearly 24 hours lost in a boat in the Arctic Ocean, and adrift on an ice floe, in frozen clothes at minus 70°F.
“This can’t be happening,” thought the Inuit hunter, then 53 years old. “This is just unbelievable.”
The pilot managed to kick open the door and started swimming through the water toward him. Karetak reached out his harpoon and pulled the man onto the ice. He immediately wrapped him up in a parachute and sleeping bags, trying to save the man who had come to rescue him and his son. “I tried to heat him up with my body, talking with him to keep him from shock,” Karetak says.
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Near the beginning of the 3rd century in ancient China, Han Dynasty leader Cao Cao is said to have called upon a famous doctor named Hua Tuo to treat a headache. Cao Cao had received said headache from a hallucinatory dream that occurred after attacking a sacred tree with his sword, according to the classic 14th century historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Hua Tuo, known today as the father of Chinese surgery, was already famous for treating a number of other patients successfully. Historical accounts credit him for his fame with acupuncture, surgery and for the use of an herbal drug mixture (possibly including marijuana or opium), which made him one of the first known doctors in the world to use anesthetics. The surgeon took the warlord’s pulse and determined a tumor was to blame. Then Hua Tuo made his best medical recommendation: Cao Cao needed to get a hole drilled in his head.
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Archaeologists have long assumed that Maya tools like obsidian blades, bone needles and even stingray tails found in ritual contexts were used for bloodletting rituals. The problem is, it’s hard to be sure. Researchers find obsidian blades all over the place, and many of them appear to have been used simply as kitchen knives.
Now, archaeologists are using new techniques to identify these tools—sharpening our understanding of how common bloodletting was and giving insight into the social contexts that drove the practice.
Researchers have long been in the dark about what some caribou populations eat during the summer. It’s difficult to find droppings before they rot away in the warmer weather, and the animals often behave differently when humans are watching what they do.
Read more at The Wildlife Society
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
One technology giant on the forefront of renewable energy implementation has come out on why it rolled back its research and development while another, which has been largely inactive on the sustainability front, has just announced a new goal of achieving 100 percent renewable energy use.
While Google Inc. engineers have finally spoken up this week in an article in IEEE Spectrum about the reasons the company has cut funding for the research and development of renewable energy, Amazon.com Inc.’s Web services division just announced “a long-term commitment” to achieving full reliability on renewable energy for its “global infrastructure footprint.”
Read more at Scientific American
Second of a two-part series. Click here for the first part.
The second phase of what is believed to be the world’s largest ocean-based geoengineering experiment started out with an early morning knock on the door of the Vancouver offices of the aboriginal corporation in British Columbia that had conducted it.
A team from Canada’s equivalent of U.S. EPA, Environment Canada, came with a search warrant on the Haida Salmon Restoration Council (HSRC) that allowed it to probe the results of the controversial project that the tribe had conducted with Russ George, a California businessman, in the summer of 2012.
Tons of iron sulphate had been dumped into the ocean off the coast of British Columbia in an effort to stimulate salmon fishing and to earn money in a projected carbon offset market.
For the past 100 years, the Haida First Nations tribe in Canada has watched the salmon runs that provided its main food source decline. Both the quantity and quality of its members’ catch in the group of islands they call home, off the coast of British Columbia, continued to drop.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, they became determined to do something about it. They built a hatchery, fixed watersheds damaged by past logging practices and sent more fish into the ocean for their multiyear migrations.
But the larger influx of fish that went out didn’t return, and the search for better solutions for the small village of Old Massett on the north end of Graham Island in British Columbia eventually led the Haida down a path that culminated in the largest ocean fertilization project of its kind ever attempted.
Joshua Rapp Learn 