Category: 7. SciTech

A network of ancient Roman roads converges neatly with satellite images of the Earth at night. A heat map of 15th-century bubonic plague outbreaks bears an eerie resemblance to Europe’s early COVID-19 hot spots. Mapping Past Societies, a free digital atlas hosted by the Initiative for the…

Should artificial intelligence be used to improve decision-making in the court of law? According to a new working paper, not only does one example of an AI algorithm fail to improve the accuracy of judicial calls, on its own the technology fares worse than humans.

“A lot of researchers…

Today, Malaria represents a major public health problem across much of the globe, killing more than 600,000 people annually and infecting another 250 million. It is a disease that has been around for millions of years and is undeniably entwined with human history. 

“Malaria has actually…

The effortless agility with which humans and animals move is an evolutionary marvel that no robot has yet been able to closely emulate. To help probe the mystery of how brains control and coordinate it all, Harvard neuroscientists have created a virtual rat with an artificial brain that can…

Call it the Milky Way mystery.

Evidence of a long-ago collision involving the Earth was there in the form of specific radioactive isotopes deposited across the Earth and Moon. There were, however, skeptics.

But now researchers have tracked the sun’s path through the Milky Way back to a…

Using ancient DNA extracted from the toe bone of a museum specimen, Harvard biologists have sequenced the genome of an extinct, flightless bird called the little bush moa, shedding light on an unknown corner of avian genetic history.

Published in Science Advances, the work is the first…