Science
Bird flu confirmed in older Wyoming woman who likely had contact with infected flock at her home
An older woman in southeast Wyoming is hospitalized with bird flu, state health department officials said Friday.
It's the state's first human case of Type A H5N1 influenza, which is spreading through animals and some people. Nearly 70 people in the U.S. have been reported infected with bird flu in the last year, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though researchers and studies suggest that's likely an undercount.
The woman had a backyard flock of chickens that got sick and died, a CDC spokesperson said Saturday. The state health department said the woman, who lives in Platte County, Wyoming, likely had direct contact with the flock. It said she also has other health conditions and is hospitalized in another state.
Dr. Alexia Harrist, the state health officer and state epidemiologist, said Wyoming residents shouldn't have “a high level of concern” about the human case, the test result for which was confirmed by a CDC on Friday.
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Most confirmed human cases of bird flu across the U.S. came with mild symptoms.
“Unfortunately, this patient’s experience has been much more serious,” Harrist said in the news release.
A new study published by the CDC showed bird flu has silently spread from animals to some veterinarians.
Bird flu has been spreading in wild birds in the U.S. since 2022. The virus was detected for the first time in U.S. dairy cows last year. It has infected more than 960 cattle herds in 16 states.
7 hours ago
How to cook the perfect boiled egg, according to science
Scientists say they’ve cracked the code for boiling the perfect egg.
It’s a recipe you can test for yourself — though the timing isn’t ideal with soaring egg prices in the United States from a bird flu outbreak.
The perfect boiled egg has a velvety yolk paired with a soft, solid white.
Achieving this balance can be a challenge because the yolk cooks at a lower temperature than the white. Hard boiling an egg can yield a chalky yolk, while cooking low and slow can produce jelly-like, undercooked whites.
Researchers cooked hundreds of eggs and used math to tackle this runny conundrum. One equation dealt with how heat travels between a hot surface and an egg; another captured how the egg’s contents morph from liquid to solid with a gel-like state in between.
Their final recipe involves transferring eggs in a steamer basket every two minutes between two bowls of water — one boiling and the other lukewarm at 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) — for a total of 32 minutes before cooling under running water and peeling.
“You could definitely do this at home with half a dozen eggs or so,” said Gregory Weiss, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved with the research.
In the method proposed by the researchers, dubbed periodic cooking, the egg whites heated and cooled until fully set. The yolk, on the other hand, held firm at a constant temperature and cooked until creamy.
“You can almost spread it, like on bread,” said study author Emilia Di Lorenzo from the University of Naples Federico II.
To confirm they had cooked up something new, the researchers tested the chemical makeup of the prepared eggs and served them to a panel of eight tasters alongside traditional boiled eggs.
The research was published Thursday in the journal Communications Engineering.
This new technique could mean more time in the kitchen compared to a standard hard-boiled egg, said food scientist Joanne Slavin from the University of Minnesota. But the blend of textures on the tongue could be worth the extra time.
“This is a slower process to get a better outcome,” said Slavin, who had no role in the study.
1 day ago
Scent of Mummy: Research discovers ancient Egyptian remains smell nice
At first whiff, it sounds repulsive: sniff the essence of an ancient corpse.
But researchers who indulged their curiosity in the name of science found that well-preserved Egyptian mummies actually smell pretty good.
“In films and books, terrible things happen to those who smell mummified bodies,” said Cecilia Bembibre, director of research at University College London's Institute for Sustainable Heritage. “We were surprised at the pleasantness of them."
“Woody,” “spicy” and “sweet” were the leading descriptions from what sounded more like a wine tasting than a mummy sniffing exercise. Floral notes were also detected, which could be from pine and juniper resins used in embalming.
The study published Thursday in the Journal of the American Chemical Society used both chemical analysis and a panel of human sniffers to evaluate the odors from nine mummies as old as 5,000 years that had been either in storage or on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
The researchers wanted to systematically study the smell of mummies because it has long been a subject of fascination for the public and researchers alike, said Bembibre, one of the report’s authors. Archeologists, historians, conservators and even fiction writers have devoted pages of their work to the subject — for good reason.
Scent was an important consideration in the mummification process that used oils, waxes and balms to preserve the body and its spirit for the afterlife. The practice was largely reserved for pharaohs and nobility and pleasant smells were associated with purity and deities while bad odors were signs of corruption and decay.
Without sampling the mummies themselves, which would be invasive, researchers from UCL and the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia were able to measure whether aromas were coming from the archaeological item, pesticides or other products used to conserve the remains, or from deterioration due to mold, bacteria or microorganisms.
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“We were quite worried that we might find notes or hints of decaying bodies, which wasn’t the case,” said Matija Strlič, a chemistry professor at the University of Ljubljana. “We were specifically worried that there might be indications of microbial degradation, but that was not the case, which means that the environment in this museum, is actually quite good in terms of preservation.”
Using technical instruments to measure and quantify air molecules emitted from sarcophagi to determine the state of preservation without touching the mummies was like the Holy Grail, Strlič said.
"It tells us potentially what social class a mummy was from and and therefore reveals a lot of information about the mummified body that is relevant not just to conservators, but to curators and archeologists as well," he said. “We believe that this approach is potentially of huge interest to other types of museum collections.”
Barbara Huber, a postdoctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany who was not involved in the study, said the findings provide crucial data on compounds that could preserve or degrade mummified remains. The information could be used to better protect the ancient bodies for future generations.
“However, the research also underscores a key challenge: the smells detected today are not necessarily those from the time of mummification,” Huber said. “Over thousands of years, evaporation, oxidation, and even storage conditions have significantly altered the original scent profile.”
Huber authored a study two years ago that analyzed residue from a jar that had contained mummified organs of a noblewoman to identify embalming ingredients, their origins and what they revealed about trade routes. She then worked with a perfumer to create an interpretation of the embalming scent, known as “Scent of Eternity,” for an exhibition at the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark.
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Researchers of the current study hope to do something similar, using their findings to develop “smellscapes” to artificially recreate the scents they detected and enhance the experience for future museumgoers.
“Museums have been called white cubes, where you are prompted to read, to see, to approach everything from a distance with your eyes,” Bembibre said. “Observing the mummified bodies through a glass case reduces the experience because we don’t get to smell them. We don’t get to know about the mummification process in an experiential way, which is one of the ways that we understand and engage with the world.”
2 days ago
Could obesity drugs help with alcohol cravings? New study suggests potential
Medications that have transformed the treatment of obesity may also help people drink less alcohol, according to new government-funded research.
The study was small — just 48 adults — and lasted just over two months, so it’s not the final word. Experts say it’s not yet clear how safe these drugs are for people who don’t need to lose weight.
But the results add to evidence from animal studies and reports that people are finding drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy helpful to manage cravings, not just for food, but also for tobacco and alcohol. Scientists are studying these drugs in smokers, people with opioid addiction and cocaine users.
“This is such promising data. And we need more of it,” said study co-author Dr. Klara Klein, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who treats patients with diabetes and obesity. “We frequently will hear that once people start these medications that their desire to drink is very reduced, if not completely abolished."
The drugs, known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, work by mimicking hormones in the gut and the brain to regulate appetite and feelings of fullness. The new study looked at one of these drugs, semaglutide, which is the drug in Ozempic and Wegovy.
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The research, published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, part of the National Institutes of Health.
There are already three medications approved to treat alcohol use disorder, so until larger studies can confirm the findings, people should talk to their doctor about what's already available, said lead author Christian Hendershot, an addiction researcher at University of Southern California.
For the new study, researchers recruited people who reported symptoms of alcohol use disorder, such as difficulty controlling their drinking, but weren’t actively seeking treatment for it.
First, each person came to a lab where they were served their favorite alcoholic beverage and could drink as much as they wanted over two hours.
Then, researchers randomly assigned half the people to get a weekly injection of semaglutide. The other half got sham injections.
For nine weeks, everyone kept track of their drinking habits and their desire for alcohol. A lab visit with their favorite alcohol was repeated at the end of the study.
During the last weeks of the study, nearly 40% in the semaglutide group reported no heavy drinking days compared with 20% in the placebo group. And in the final lab test, the semaglutide group drank roughly half the amount, on average, compared to those who got the placebo.
Everyone in the study was overweight. It's unclear how safe the drugs would be for a person of normal weight, Klein said.
Smokers in the study who got the semaglutide also cut back on cigarettes, noted Luba Yammine of UTHealth Houston, who is leading other research on GLP-1 drugs for people who want to quit smoking. The finding is promising but more data is needed, Yammine said.
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The study “provides additional important information on the potential role of this new class of medications” in treating certain addictions, said Dr. Lorenzo Leggio, an NIH researcher who is leading a 20-week trial of semaglutide for alcohol use disorder now underway in Baltimore.
“It is important to keep in mind that we need larger randomized clinical trials to confirm these findings,” Leggio said.
3 days ago
Space telescope spots rare ‘Einstein ring’ of light around galaxy in our cosmic neighborhood
Europe’s Euclid space telescope has detected a rare halo of bright light around a nearby galaxy, astronomers reported Monday.
The halo, known as an Einstein ring, encircles a galaxy 590 million light-years away, considered close by cosmic standards. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.
Astronomers have known about this galaxy for more than a century and so were surprised when Euclid revealed the bright glowing ring, reported in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
An Einstein ring is light from a much more distant galaxy that bends in such a way as to perfectly encircle a closer object, in this case a well-known galaxy in the constellation Draco. The faraway galaxy creating the ring is more than 4 billion light-years away.
Gravity distorted the light from this more distant galaxy, thus the name honoring Albert Einstein. The process is known as gravitational lensing.
“All strong lenses are special, because they’re so rare, and they’re incredibly useful scientifically. This one is particularly special, because it’s so close to Earth and the alignment makes it very beautiful,” lead author Conor O’Riordan of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics said in a statement.
Euclid rocketed from Florida in 2023. NASA is taking part in its mission to detect dark energy and dark matter in the universe.
4 days ago
America's kids are still behind in reading and math. These schools are defying the trend
Math is the subject sixth grader Harmoni Knight finds hardest, but that's changing.
In-class tutors and “data chats” at her middle school in Compton, California, have made a dramatic difference, the 11-year-old said. She proudly pulled up a performance tracker at a tutoring session last week, displaying a column of perfect 100% scores on all her weekly quizzes from January.
Since the pandemic first shuttered American classrooms, schools have poured federal and local relief money into interventions like the ones in Harmoni's classroom, hoping to help students catch up academically following COVID-19 disruptions.
But a new analysis of state and national test scores shows the average student remains half a grade level behind pre-pandemic achievement in both reading and math. In reading, especially, students are even further behind than they were in 2022, the analysis shows.
Compton is an outlier, making some of the biggest two-year gains in both subjects among high-poverty districts. And there are other bright spots, along with evidence that interventions like tutoring and summer programs are working.
The Education Recovery Scorecard analysis by researchers at Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth allows year-to-year comparisons across states and districts, providing the most comprehensive picture yet of how American students are performing since COVID-19 first disrupted learning.
The most recent data is based on tests taken in spring 2024. By then, the worst of the pandemic was long past, but schools were dealing still with a mental health crisis and high absenteeism — not to mention students who'd had crucial learning interrupted.
“The losses are not just due to what happened during the 2020 to 2021 school year, but the aftershocks that have hit schools in the years since,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard economist who worked on the scorecard.
In some cases, the analysis shows school districts are struggling, even though their students may have posted decent results on state tests. That’s because each state adopts its own assessments, and those aren’t comparable to each other. Those differences can make it impossible to tell whether students are performing better because of their progress, or whether those shifts are because the tests themselves are changing, or the state has lowered its standards for proficiency. For example, Wisconsin, Nebraska and Florida seem to have relaxed their proficiency cutoff in math and reading in the last two years, Kane said, citing the analysis.
The Scorecard accounts for differing state tests and provides one national standard.
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Higher-income districts have made significantly more progress than lower-income districts, with the top 10% of high-income districts four times more likely to have recovered in both math and reading compared with the poorest 10%. And recovery within districts remains divided by race and class, especially in math scores. Test score gaps grew by both race and income.
“The pandemic has not only driven test scores down, but that decline masks a pernicious inequality that has grown during the pandemic,” said Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist who worked on the scorecard. “Not only are districts serving more Black and Hispanic students falling further behind, but even within those districts, Black and Hispanic students are falling further behind their white districtmates.”
Tutors in class, after school and on Saturdays
Still, many of the districts that outperformed the country serve predominantly low-income students or students of color, and their interventions offer best practices for other districts.
In Compton, the district responded to the pandemic by hiring over 250 tutors that specialize in math, reading and students learning English. Certain classes are staffed with multiple tutors to assist teachers. And schools offer tutoring before, during and after school, plus “Saturday School” and summer programs for the district’s 17,000 students, said Superintendent Darin Brawley.
The district also now conducts dyslexia screenings in all elementary schools.
The low-income school district near downtown Los Angeles, with a student body that is 84% Latino and 14% Black, now has a graduation rate of 93%, compared with 58% when Brawley took the job in 2012.
Harmoni, the sixth grader, said tutoring has helped her grasp concepts and given her more confidence in math. She has “data chats” with her math specialist that are part performance review, part pep talk.
“Looking at my data, it kind of disappoints me” when the numbers are low, said Harmoni. “But it makes me realize I can do better in the future, and also now.”
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Brawley said he’s proud of the district's latest test scores, but not content.
“Truth be told, I wasn’t happy,” he said. “Even though we gained, and we celebrate the gains, at the end of the day we all know that we can do better.”
That could be more difficult in coming years. Federal pandemic relief money has ended; many schools used it for programs like tutoring. Going forward, schools must prioritize interventions that worked. Districts that spent federal money on increased instructional time, either through tutoring or summer school, saw a return on that investment, Kane and Reardon said.
Brawley said Compton hopes to maintain its tutoring programs using other funding sources. “The question is, at what scale?”
Elsewhere in the country, reading levels have continued to decline, despite a movement in many states to emphasize phonics and the “ science of reading.” So Reardon and Kane called for an evaluation of the mixed results for insights into the best ways to teach kids to read. Schools also must engage parents and tell them when their kids are behind, the researchers said.
And schools must continue to work with community groups to improve students' attendance, they said. The scorecard identified a relationship between high absenteeism and learning struggles.
Tutors also help with attendance
In the District of Columbia, an intensive tutoring program helped with both academics and attendance, D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Lewis Ferebee said. In the scorecard analysis, the District of Columbia ranked first among states for gains in both math and reading between 2022 and 2024, after its math recovery had fallen toward the bottom of the list.
Pandemic-relief money funded the tutoring, along with a system of identifying and targeting support at students in greatest need. The district also hired program managers who helped maximize time for tutoring within the school day, Ferebee said.
Students who received tutoring were more likely to be engaged with school, Ferebee said, both from increased confidence and because they had a relationship with another trusted adult.
Students expressed that “I'm more confident in math because I'm being validated by another adult,” Ferebee said. "That validation goes a long way, not only with attendance, but a student feeling like they are ready to learn and are capable.”
Even now that federal pandemic relief money has ended, Ferebee said many of the investments the district made will have lasting impact, including the money spent on teacher training and curriculum development in literacy.
Christina Grant, the District of Columbia's superintendent of education until 2024, said she's hopeful to see the evidence emerging on what's made a difference in student achievement.
“We cannot afford to not have hope. These are our students. They did not cause the pandemic,” Grant said. “The growing concern is ensuring that we can ... see ourselves to the other side.”
5 days ago
Super Bowl commercials rely on comedy and nostalgia to avoid potential missteps
This year's Super Bowl commercials went for easy laughs and nostalgia, largely steering clear of controversy and leaving the surprises on the football field, where the Philadelphia Eagles dominated the Kansas City Chiefs.
Eugene Levy’s eyebrows flew off and buzzed around after he ate some Little Caesars. Four old ladies went on a joy ride in a commercial for WeatherTech, while sloths had a case of the Mondays in an ad for Coors Light. And British singer Seal became an actual seal, sad that he couldn't hold Mountain Dew with his flippers.
Actor Glenn Powell did a take on Goldilocks for Ram Trucks, while comedian Nate Bargatze cloned himself and hired an opera singer because he saved so much money using DoorDash. Shaboozey took a lighthearted stroll through New Orleans for Nerds, while the stars of the “Fast and Furious” franchise took a slow cruise in a convertible so they could enjoy Häagen-Dazs ice cream bars.
Tim Calkins, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said this was a complicated Super Bowl for advertisers.
Most ads were in development during last fall's U.S. presidential election race, so avoiding controversy was even more of a priority than usual, Calkins said. The finalized crop of commercials feature a lot of simple humor, nostalgia and few creative risks, he said. But even that approach can backfire.
“That’s the challenge this year. Everybody wants to be safe, but you also want to be interesting,” Calkins said. “Safe advertising isn’t the advertising you notice or remember.”
And advertisers can't afford not to be noticed. Some of the roughly 80 Super Bowl ads spots cost a record $8 million for 30 seconds this year.
Here are some of the themes of this year's Super Bowl ads:
Heartwarming nostalgia
Budweiser brought back its Clydesdales for its Super Bowl ad, including a foal that wants to join the delivery team. Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reenacted their famous deli scene from 1989's “When Harry Met Sally,” except this time Sally was expressing her enthusiasm for Hellmann's mayonnaise.
Harrison Ford was reflective in an ad for Jeep, talking about freedom and personal choices. “This Jeep makes me happy, even though my last name is Ford,” he said.
The Muppets searched for accommodations with Booking.com, while an Instacart ad featured a parade of familiar mascots like Mr. Clean, the Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Doughboy. Disney asked what the world would be like without the iconic characters it owns, like Elsa from “Frozen,” Bart Simpson and the Marvel superheroes.
Advertisers are leaning on nostalgia more than they used to in Super Bowl ads, according to Kimberly Whitler, a marketing professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Nods to the past can broaden the appeal of an ad to different generations and connect products to positive cultural moments, she said.
Celebrity mash-ups
Putting celebrities together in unexpected combinations can broaden the appeal of a commercial. In their Super Bowl ad for Michelob Ultra, actors Catherine O'Hara and Willem Dafoe are pickleball champs. Soccer star David Beckham and actor Matt Damon are long-lost twins who bond over Stella Artois. Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay and comedian Pete Davidson teamed up for a HexClad commercial, while Post Malone, Shane Gillis and Peyton Manning had a block party with Bud Light. A slew of celebrities, including Matthew McConaughey, Martha Stewart, Greta Gerwig and Charlie XCX, appeared in an ad for Uber Eats.
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Linli Xu, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, said celebrity endorsements can get people talking. But with dozens of brands using them, there's a risk of diminishing returns.
Celebrities can also get so much attention that viewers don’t remember which brand they're advertising, Xu said.
“There is a balancing act in terms of having celebrities in the ads,” she said.
Women in focus
Multiple ads put a spotlight on women and girls. Pharmaceutical company Novartis promoted early detection for breast cancer, while Lay's had a heart-warming spot featuring a little girl who grows her own potato.
Women's sports were also a big focus. Nike featured Caitlin Clark, Sha’Carri Richardson, Sabrina Ionescu, Jordan Chiles, A’ja Wilson and Sophia Wilson in a commercial talking about how often female athletes face the word, “can't." The ad's conclusion: “You can’t win. So win."
The NFL ran a commercial calling for girls' flag football to become a varsity sport in all 50 states. But Dove also offered a sobering statistic: half of girls who quit sports have been criticized for their body type.
“Clearly the advertisers are trying to target the female audience, given the rising number of female viewers for the big game and the NFL in general in recent years,” Xu said.
Gross-out humor
Charles Taylor, a marketing professor at Villanova University's School of Business, noticed more gross-out humor than usual.
In a commercial for Dunkin’, actor Jeremy Strong emerged from a can of coffee covered in grounds and brown liquid. A man’s tongue started dancing to celebrate cold foam from Nestlé Coffee Mate. And in a star-studded ad for Pringles, Chiefs head coach Andy Reid, L.A. Clippers’ James Harden and actor Nick Offerman all watch their iconic mustaches jump off their faces and soar through the sky to help deliver cans of the chips.
Taylor said the ads do get attention, but the yuck-factor could backfire.
Serious moments
It wasn't all fun and games at the Super Bowl this year. Pharmaceutical company Pfizer promoted its efforts to cure cancer. Hims & Hers, a telehealth company, talked about America's obesity epidemic. The Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, founded by New England Patriots Chairman and CEO Robert Kraft, ran an ad featuring Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady saying what they hate about each other, in an effort to show how pointless hate is.
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An ad from Rocket showed people dreaming of home and aimed to get the Super Bowl crowd to sing along to “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Xu said she expected more ads promoting that unifying message, but thought most advertisers went with humor instead.
“We just had an election year and there’s a lot of discussion around divisiveness,” she said. “People might be wanting to see some unity, everybody coming together as a country.”
For the third consecutive year, the religious-themed He Gets Us commercial returned to the Super Bowl. This year's ad featured Johnny Cash's cover of “Personal Jesus” and showed everyday people being helpful and heroic. Come Near, a nonprofit that says it aims to share “the love and message of Jesus in disruptive and personally engaging ways," funded the ad this year and last year after taking over the effort from a previous group.
Artificial intelligence arrives
Several Super Bowl ads made the case for AI as a helpmate. Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth and Kris Jenner teamed up for an ad wearing Meta 's smart glasses, which use artificial intelligence to answer questions about what wearers are seeing. Actor Walton Goggins pitched GoDaddy Airo, which uses AI to help build websites and social content. And Google's “50 States, 50 Stories” campaign is showing viewers a small business from their state that's using Google's Gemini AI assistant. But Cirkul, a water bottle brand, poked fun at AI, showing comedian Adam Devine accidentally ordering 100,000 bottles using the AI assistant on his phone.
6 days ago
Avian flu suspected in up to 15 bird deaths at New York City zoos
At least three and possibly up to 15 birds have died of avian flu at two New York City zoos, according to the organization that operates the facilities.
The Wildlife Conservation Society said three ducks at the Queens Zoo died after contracting the virus, and lab tests are pending on three ducks and nine wild birds that died at the Bronx Zoo after possible exposure.
“As a precaution, over the last two weeks, we have moved vulnerable bird species to protected areas in our parks,” officials said in a statement.
On Friday, state officials ordered bird markets in the metropolitan area to close for a week after seven cases of avian flu were detected during routine inspections in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Gov. Kathy Hochul said there was no immediate threat to public health and the temporary closures were done out of an abundance of caution.
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Avian flu has hit farms nationwide, leading to the slaughter of millions of birds and driving up egg prices.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said the virus poses low risk to the general public. The agency said there have been 67 confirmed cases of bird flu in humans in the U.S., none of them in New York.
1 week ago
'Stunning' 100-million-year-old fossil found in rock
The fossil of a "stunning" well-preserved ammonite has been dug out from a rock on the Isle of Wight.
Jack Wonfor, 24, spotted the stunning mollusc sticking out at St Catherine's point on the southerly tip of the island, BBC reports.
After digging it out, it took eight hours using an electric engraver to uncover the complete full fossil from the excess rock.
Mr Wonfor said the fossil - a Mortoniceras inflatum - "was roughly 100-105 million years old".
The retained firefighter and guide for Wight Coast Fossils on the island said he was extremely happy to get it out complete as ammonites were "hard to find with a complete rostrum".
AI and scientists unite to decipher old scrolls charred by the Vesuvius volcano
He added, "In the rare cases they are preserved they are extremely difficult to extract from the rock without these rostrum breaking and being destroyed."
Wight Coast Fossils said the find was "absolutely stunning".
"This is a well-preserved example of this relatively uncommon ammonite, it is certainly one of the most impressive we've come across," they added.
Mr Wonfor, who has been collecting fossils of marine invertebrates on the island since the age of four, said "it is one of my favourite fossils I have found over the years".
He said he planned to keep it in his collection before donating it to the Dinosaur Isle Museum in Sandown.
1 week ago
AI and scientists unite to decipher old scrolls charred by the Vesuvius volcano
Scientists hope a mix of artificial intelligence and human expertise will help decipher ancient scrolls carbonized by a volcanic eruption 2,000 years ago.
Hundreds of papyrus scrolls were found in the 1750s in the remains of a lavish villa at the Roman town of Herculaneum, which along with neighboring Pompeii was destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.
The library of what’s called the Villa of the Papyri has the potential to add immeasurably to knowledge of ancient thought if the scrolls, which have been rolled up into the size of a candy bar, could be read.
The heat and volcanic ash from Vesuvius destroyed the town and preserved the scrolls, but in an unreadable state, turning them into charred fragile blocks that disintegrate if unrolled physically.
Scholars and scientists have worked for more than 250 years on ways to decipher the scrolls, the vast majority of which are held in the National Library of Naples.
In 2023, several tech executives sponsored the “Vesuvius Challenge” competition, offering cash rewards for efforts to decipher the scrolls with machine learning, computer vision and geometry.
On Wednesday, the challenge announced a “historic breakthrough,” saying researchers had managed to generate the first image of the inside of one of the three scrolls held at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.
University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales, co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, said the organizers were “thrilled with the successful imaging of this scroll.” He said it “contains more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll.”
The scroll was scanned by Diamond Light Source, a lab at Harwell, near Oxford, that uses a particle accelerator known as a synchrotron to create an intensely powerful X-ray.
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Scientists then used AI to piece together the images, search for ink that reveals where there is writing, and enhance the clarity of the text. The process led to a 3D image of the scroll that allowed experts to unroll it virtually, using a process called segmentation.
AI, as it stands, has its limits. Little of the text has been deciphered so far. One of the few words that has been made out is the ancient Greek for “disgust.”
Scholars are being encouraged to join in the effort to complete the text.
“We are still at the beginning of a long process,” Peter Toth, the Cornelia Starks Curator of Greek Collections at the Bodleian, told The Associated Press. “We need better images, and they are very positive and very, very confident that they can still improve the image quality and the legibility of the text.”
Toth also laid out his hope that the technology can be made available locally so that the other two fragile scrolls won't have to be transported to Diamond’s headquarters.
“Maybe there will be something which can be moved,” he said. “And then don’t forget that there is like 1000 more scrolls in Naples.”
1 week ago