Humans

Excavation area in Cueva de Ardales with evidence from the Middle Palaeolithic period. Credit: Ramos-Muñoz et al., CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) A cave in southern Spain was used by ancient humans as a canvas for artwork and as a burial place for over 50,000 years, according to a study published June 1, 2022, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by José Ramos-Muñoz of the University of Cadiz, Spain, and…

The release date Destroy All Humans 2 – Reprobed has been announced for later this year. The remastered version of the 2006 title will be released on August 30 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Destroy All Humans 2 – Reprobed is a “full remake” of the cult classic which sees players terrorise the human race with a variety of weird and powerful weapons. Destroy All Humans 2 – Reprobed will be set in the 1960s, taking players into five levels across the world – Bay City (San Francisco), Albion (London), Takoshima…

We haven't even made it to first base yet.Are We There Yet?Humans might be smart enough to accomplish interplanetary life within the next 200 years, scientists said this week.A team of eight researchers published a new study in the preprint journal Arxiv and said humanity could become a Kardashev Type I Civilization by the year 2371.The Kardashev model was made in 1964, according to the study, to assess how close a civilization is to conquering space and interplanetary travel. It's largely based on the kinds of energy…

For the very first time a machine has managed to beat human opponents in a prestigious crossword competition. The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament has is an annual tournament that - until now - has always been won by a human. But the latest winner of this coveted prize is a computer programme called the Berkeley Crossword Solver.This automatic crossword solving programme was developed by Eric Wallace, members of the natural language programming team at University California Berkeley and Matt Ginsberg.Ginsberg was the…

Fifty thousand years ago, Australia was populated by big birds—really big birds. One of them, known as mihirunga, or the “thunder bird,” was six times the size of a modern emu; it may have weighed in at 250 kilograms and stood more than 2 meters tall. But the giant Genyornis newtoni disappeared 45,000 years ago, and researchers have long puzzled over whether human hunters or climate change was the culprit. Now, a new analysis of ancient eggshells—the leftovers of a prehistoric…

The Xbox store has accidentally confirmed the existence of a Destroy All Humans! expansion The sales page, which has now been taken down, revealed the “standalone DLC” for the Destroy All Humans! remake was called Clone Carnage and would allow multiplayer modes. As reported by Eurogamer, the page also revealed that Clone Carnage would feature six new maps for players to explore alongside four new modes – Rampage, Armageddon, Race and Abduction It was also stated that Clone Carnage will support up to four-player…

A close-up of the tooth from a ‘birds-eye’ viewpoint. Credit: Fabrice Demeter (University of Copenhagen/CNRS Paris)Denisovans, a sister species of modern humans, inhabited Laos from 164,000 to 131,000 years ago with important implications for populations out of Africa and Australia.What connects a finger bone and some fossil teeth discovered in a cave in the remote Altai Mountains of Siberia to a single tooth found in a cave in the limestone landscapes of tropical Laos?The answer to this question has been established by…

Like Earth, planetary bodies such as the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and comets contain substantial deposits of valuable resources. This has caught the attention of both researchers and industry, with hopes of one day mining them to support a space economy. But setting up any kind of off-Earth mining industry will be no small feat. Let’s look at what we’re up against. In-situ resource utilization When you think of off-Earth mining, you might imagine extracting materials from various bodies in space…

DeepMind today unveiled a new multi-modal AI system capable of performing more than 600 different tasks. Dubbed Gato, it’s arguably the most impressive all-in-one machine learning kit the world’s seen yet. According to a DeepMind blog post: The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on…

Octopuses are doomed to be orphans from a very young age. After a female octopus lays her eggs, she stops eating and begins self-mutilating, tearing off her skin and biting off the tips of her tentacles.  By the time a young octopus wriggles out of its egg, its mother is already dead. A few months later, its father will die, too.The short and grim life of the octopus has long fascinated scientists. In 1944, researchers hypothesized that mating was somehow hitting a molecular "self-destruct" button within the sea…