Experts have located a legendary lost city in Egypt that never appears on maps with the help of a mummy. Ancient Egyptians had an affinity for baboons thanks to their association with the God, Babi. Experts know that they were kept as pets in captivity and had their sharpest teeth removed to make them less harmful. And it is the Egyptians’ keeping of baboons that has led experts to the location of the mysterious Egyptian city of Punt thanks to their DNA. Gisela Kopp, a geneticist at the University of Konstanz, Germany who is studying baboon DNA explained to Live Science: “There were these stories that they got them from Punt, this fabled, mysterious land.” Punt has been mentioned in documentation from ancient Egypt, but experts have never been able to determine where it would actually lie on a map. But, in recent years, experts have been able to narrow down its exact location by looking at DNA from mummified baboons which have been discovered from the time period. Kopp and a group of colleagues were able to extract usable DNA from the remains of a mummified baboon believed to be from between 800 B.C. and 540 B.C. In their study, published in the journal eLife, they then compared that DNA to the genetic information of 14 baboons from known origins to compare specific information of geographic location. It revealed the baboon’s DNA was most closely related to populations from what are coastal areas of Eritrea today. Kopp explained, “It's close to this ancient port of Adulis”. Adulis is also mentioned in records dating from 300 B.C. onwards and is known as being a place that traders travelled to for wild animals. Kopp explained that there is now a working theory that Adulis and Punt may have been essentially the same place. “Maybe the earlier Punt was in a similar location to where Adulis was [later] established,” Kopp said. The study is based on the DNA of one mummified baboon, as the attempted extraction of fragile ancient DNA from nine other baboon mummies failed to yield usable samples. Experts hope to replicate their study with more DNA samples to gain more information from different time periods. How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel Sign up to our free indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Scientists have been left baffled by the discovery of the wreck of a 2,000-year-old “computer” that is amazingly complex. The Antikythera mechanism – an astronomical calendar – has been dubbed “‘the first computer” and has baffled scientists for generations after it was first discovered inside a Greek shipwreck in 1901. The device is a hand-powered time-keeping instrument that used a wing-up system to track the sun, moon and planets’ celestial time. It also worked as a calendar, tracking the phases of the Moon and the timing of eclipses. Despite sounding relatively simple, the mechanism was actually ahead of its time, being more technically sophisticated than any other tool that was invented over the next 1,000 years. In its current condition, the mechanism is in 82 separate fragments with only a third of its original structure remaining, including 30 corroded bronze gearwheels. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Research into the device from experts at University College London involved 3D computer modelling and helped them solve the mystery of how the device worked, revealing a “creation of genius”. Adam Wojcik, a materials scientist at UCL said at the time: “We believe that our reconstruction fits all the evidence that scientists have gleaned from the extant remains to date.” They theorised that the device tracked the movement of the sun, moon and planets on concentric rings, as the ancient Greeks believed that the sun and planets revolved around Earth, rather than the sun. The researchers explained in Scientific Reports: “Solving this complex 3D puzzle reveals a creation of genius—combining cycles from Babylonian astronomy, mathematics from Plato’s Academy and ancient Greek astronomical theories.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Sam Nussey TOKYO Nintendo made a pitch for the ongoing match fitness of its aging Switch console

The Valorant Champions Tour 2024 is hosting Masters events in Madrid and Shanghai, introducing VCT China, and implementing major changes to Valorant Challengers.

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OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, has given its first official public preview of DALL-E

Humane has launched its AI Pin, one of the world’s most hyped tech products, and it has immediately made a public mistake. The AI Pin has been the subject of speculation promoted by Humane, a company that has remained somewhat mysterious and includes designers and executives who have worked at Apple and Microsoft. The system is intended to be attached to clothing and then makes use of a range of microphones, speakers and a display that can shine onto its owners hand to give information. That information is provided by artificial intelligence systems built on technology from ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Microsoft. The pin costs $699 and will be available later this year. It has been promoted by its president Imran Chaudhri as a response to both the prevalence of phones and the future of mixed-reality headsets, instead aiming to allow people to engage with the world around them. One of the features intended to do that is access to artificial intelligence systems that can be used to get answers to questions. Users can just press the AI Pin and speak into the air, which will then allow the computer to access the internet and show an answer. During its reveal event, executives showed the pin being used to answer one such question. “I can also use it to ask questions, like: when is the next eclipse, and where is the best place to see it?”, representatives said, explaining that it would be answered by “an AI browsing the web, or grabbing knowledge from all over the internet”. The AI Pin is then showed answering by saying that the best place to view the next total solar eclipse, in April 2024, would be Exmouth in Australia or East Timor. But next year’s solar eclipse will in fact be visible in North America, and in fact has been given the name “the Great North American Eclipse”. It will not be at all visible in Australia, and can only be seen in Mexico, the US and Canada. The system may have made the mistake because a total solar eclipse earlier this year was in fact best viewed from Exmouth and East Timor. That eclipse, in April, brought widespread coverage to the small Australian town – and that coverage was presumably used to train the artificial intelligence system that answered the question. Humane did not say which assistant was being used for that answer. The AI Pin is built specifically to call on a number of different assistants depending on what question is asked. The error recalls a similar error made by Google’s Bard chatbot when it was introduced at the beginning of the year. An ad showed Bard being asked about interesting discoveries by Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, and replying that it had taken “the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system” – which is not true. At the time, many noted that the error highlighted a central error with large language models. The systems tend to “hallucinate” – or confidently state falsehoods – and have no real way of being able to check whether the information they are given is true. Read More You can finally use one feature of the Apple Vision Pro headset – sort of ChatGPT creator mocks Elon Musk in brutal tweet Call of Duty launch sparks record traffic on broadband networks

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It’s the brightest explosion ever seen in the universe, but until now it’s been a mystery that couldn't be explained. Telescopes observed an enormous blast in October which was regarded as the biggest of all time. It was identified as a gamma-ray burst, named GRB 221009A, which came as a result of a massive star collapsing into a black hole. At the time it was a mystery as to why the explosion shone so brightly. Now, further research published in the journal Science Advances has uncovered the reason it was so bright is due to the fact it was facing directly at us and also pulled stellar material along with it. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hendrik Van Earthen from the University of Bath said: “The slow fade of the afterglow is not characteristic of a narrow jet of gas, and knowing this made us suspect there was an additional reason for the intensity of the explosion, and our mathematical models have borne this out. “Our work clearly shows that the GRB had a unique structure, with observations gradually revealing a narrow jet embedded within a wider gas outflow where an isolated jet would normally be expected.” The research into GRB 221009A has the potential to further the study of huge gamma-ray bursts, which can produce as much energy as the Sun will in its entire lifetime in the space of just a few seconds. “GRB 221009A represents a massive step forward in our understanding of gamma-ray bursts, and demonstrates that the most extreme explosions do not obey the standard physics assumed for garden variety gamma-ray bursts,” Brendan O’Connor, GW graduate student and lead study author, said. “GRB 221009A might be the equivalent Rosetta stone of long GRBs, forcing us to revise our standard theories of how relativistic outflows are formed in collapsing massive stars.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Amruta Khandekar and Saeed Azhar (Reuters) -The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq rose on Monday as a surge in

Whether you enjoy the velvety skin on peaches or peel it off, you may wonder why they developed fuzz in the first place.