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Artificial Intelligence

The Apollo fountain, which depicts the mythological god riding his chariot

You Can Now Have a Conversation With the Statues at Versailles Using Artificial Intelligence

Through the palace’s smartphone app, visitors can speak with nearly two dozen stunning sculptures and fountains at the historic site in France

Woody Guthrie wrote the song after reading an article in the New York Times.

The Only Recording of Woody Guthrie Singing the Protest Song ‘Deportee’ Has Been Released for the First Time

The singer-songwriter recorded the audio on a reel-to-reel tape machine in his apartment in the 1950s. Now, the previously unheard song has been restored using A.I. audio technology

Danielle Boyer wears a Skobot on her shoulder.

Can A.I. Help Revitalize Indigenous Languages?

Indigenous researchers and roboticists are crafting innovative tools to help save endangered dialects

Until recently, jokes were thought to be beyond the reach of A.I.

Can Artificial Intelligence Learn the Nuances of Human Humor?

As people turn to A.I. for therapy and companionship, some say the models still leave something to be desired

An ancient fragment of a bronze military diploma from Sardinia dating to the second century C.E.

New Research

Google Just Released an A.I. Tool That Helps Historians Fill in Missing Words in Ancient Roman Inscriptions

Known as Aeneas, the tool was trained on an extensive dataset of Latin epigraphy. Experts hope it will help decipher segments of text that have been lost to history

Researchers are hiding instructions for A.I. reviewers in preprint studies using white text, which is invisible on a white background.

Some Researchers Are Hiding Secret Messages in Their Papers, but They’re Not Meant for Humans

Journalists have uncovered a handful of preprint academic studies with hidden prompts instructing A.I. reviewers to give positive responses

The vision is to use the gate to create extended elephant migration routes that cut across South Africa, connecting green areas with navigation corridors that bypass cities and the rehabilitated gold mine dumps that ring Johannesburg.

In South Africa, a Smart Gate Could Help Connect Elephants’ Fragmented Habitat

An unlikely quartet’s clever contraption may allow the pachyderms to make better use of their range

Scans of the painting retouched with a new technique during various stages in the process. On the right is the restored painting with the applied laminate mask.

Graduate Student Develops an A.I.-Based Approach to Restore Time-Damaged Artwork to Its Former Glory

The method could help bring countless old paintings, currently stored in the back rooms of galleries with limited conservation budgets, to light

Radiocarbon dating requires destroying small samples of the fragile scrolls.

New Research

The Dead Sea Scrolls Changed Our Understanding of the Bible. Could Some of Them Be Even Older Than We Thought?

A new study combines A.I., radiocarbon dating and handwriting analysis to estimate new dates for some of the ancient scrolls, thought to be some of the earliest surviving fragments of the Old Testament

Heart disease is the leading cause of death globally, according to the World Health Organization.

This 14-Year-Old Built an App That Detects Heart Diseases in Seconds

Siddarth Nandyala wants to put his tool in the hands of medical professionals so that they can catch cardiovascular abnormalities in their early stages

An ancient star map (not the document analyzed in the new research) unearthed in Dunhuang, China, in the seventh century C.E.

New Research

These Scientists Say They’ve Identified the Oldest Known Star Chart in the World

A new preprint suggests that an ancient Chinese star catalog dates to 355 B.C.E. But other researchers aren’t convinced, arguing that the original coordinates are misaligned by one degree

A still from the Giraffes on Horseback Salad trailer

Salvador Dalí’s Surrealist Screenplay ‘Giraffes on Horseback Salad’ Was Never Made. Can A.I. Bring It to Life?

The Dalí Museum is collaborating with an advertising agency to “reawaken” the Spanish artist’s failed script, which studio executives rejected nearly 90 years ago

The scroll previously known only as PHerc. 172 was written by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus.

Cool Finds

These Ancient Scrolls Have Been a Tantalizing Mystery for 2,000 Years. Researchers Just Deciphered a Title for the First Time

Mount Vesuvius’ eruption preserved the Herculaneum scrolls beneath a blanket of ash. Two millennia later, X-ray scans show that one of them is a philosophical text called “On Vice”

Argentine black and white tegus (Salvator merianae) were brought to the United States in the 1990s by exotic pet traders. They've since proliferated in the wild and been deemed an invasive species.

Mysterious Fossil Found in Museum Storage Turned Out to Be a New, Extinct Lizard Species

Today, tegus are considered invasive creatures in Florida, but a new paper suggests they’ve lived in the southeastern United States at least once before—millions of years ago

A newly developed A.I. model is based on 40 years of vocalizations from a community of Atlantic spotted dolphins.

Google Is Training a New A.I. Model to Decode Dolphin Chatter—and Potentially Talk Back

The company says its new model, called DolphinGemma, will be made open source this summer. Researchers are also trying to train dolphins to mimic made-up names for certain objects

Celebration of the Ommegang in Brussels: The Procession of Our Lady of the Sablon, Denis van Alsloot, 1616

Art Meets Science

How Many People Are in This Painting? The Prado Museum Is Using A.I. to Find Out

With the help of a tech start-up, the Madrid museum is enlisting technology to quantify large crowds in its artworks and boost visitor engagement

An ancient vase depicting the death of Talos, the bronze automaton created by the god Hephaestus to guard the island of Crete

History of Now

Was Talos, the Bronze Automaton Who Guarded the Island of Crete in Greek Myth, an Early Example of Artificial Intelligence?

The mythical sentry was depicted as thinking like a human and showing some human-like tendencies

Matteo Paz with Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum after winning the Regeneron Science Talent Search award.

High School Student Discovers 1.5 Million Potential New Astronomical Objects by Developing an A.I. Algorithm

The 18-year-old won $250,000 for training a machine learning model to analyze understudied data from NASA’s retired NEOWISE telescope

A subset of more than 1,000 neurons, representing just a snapshot of the complexity mapped within a cubic millimeter of mouse brain tissue

In a World First, Researchers Mapped Part of a Mouse’s Brain in Incredible Detail. It’s a Leap Forward for Neuroscience

The 3D brain map includes more than 200,000 cells, 523 million synapses and over two miles of axons, representing the most detailed wiring diagram of a piece of mammal brain ever constructed

Delacroix mural at the Palais Bourbon, home to the French National Assembly

Art Meets Science

Can A.I. Resurrect a Delacroix Mural That Was Destroyed in a Fire More Than 150 Years Ago?

A new project called Digital Delacroix is training cutting-edge technology on the French painter’s style to unravel the lost artwork’s secrets

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