Ms Parcak looked at modern-day plant cover to find places where a possible Viking settlement had altered the soil by changing the amount of moisture in the ground. This was a technique she had previously used in Egypt.
After identifying a potential site, archaeologists found a hearth-stone, which was used for iron-working, near what appeared to have been a turf wall.
Two of his biggest ideas were about how space and time work. This thing you’re reading right now explains those ideas using only the ten hundred words people use the most often.1 The doctor figured out the first idea while he was working in an office, and he figured out the second one ten years later, while he was working at a school. That second idea was a hundred years ago this year. (He also had a few other ideas that were just as important. People have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how he was so good at thinking.)
Well, almost nobody. Kangbashi is one of hundreds of sparkling new cities sitting relatively empty throughout China, built by a government eager to urbanize the country but shunned by people unable to afford it or hesitant to leave the rural communities they know. Chicago photographer Kai Caemmerer visited Kangbashi and two other cities for his ongoing series Unborn Cities. The photos capture the eerie sensation of standing on a silent street surrounded by empty skyscrapers and public spaces devoid of life. “These cities felt slightly surreal and almost uncanny,” Caemmerer says, “which I think is a product of both the newness of these places and the relative lack of people within them.”
One of the most tragic events in the history of space exploration is the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and all seven of its crew on February 1, 2003—a tragedy made worse because it didn’t have to happen. But just as it is human nature to look to the future and wonder what might be, so too is it in our nature to look at the past and wonder, “what if?” Today, 13 years after the event, Ars is rerunning our detailed 2014 examination of the biggest Columbia “what if” of all—what if NASA had recognized the danger? Could NASA have done something to save the crew?
With such rapid expansion of capability, it may seem difficult to tell what the next 60 years will bring, much less the next century. But we never do anything in space without first imagining what we could do, so in that spirit, here is an attempt to predict—and nudge us into—the future.
Designing digital experiences comes with an ingrained obsession. The obsession of speed and performance. Amazon calculated that an increased loading time of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google loses about 8 million searches (and ad displays) when page speed decreases by just four tenths of a second — scary shit!
That left some speculation about, um, aliens. While it’s incredibly unlikely, it does kinda fit what we’re seeing. An advanced civilization would have big energy requirements, and it would make sense to build huge structures around their star to capture as much light as possible for solar power. The dips in light we see are then these “megastructures” passing in front of the star (some people call this a Dyson Swarm; a collection of enormous solar panels enclosing the star).
The participants were asked to focus on the correct answer and count the number of times its frame flashed. The brain patterns from the flickering answers together with the detection of another kind of brain signal that occurs when someone counts, enabled a computer to tell which answer, if any, the person was focusing on.
My on-the-fly take was that there was a conceptual problem: if we made machines smart enough to provide all our services, wouldn’t those machines effectively be people, deserving freedom from servitude?
