Science Archaeology Who built Scandinavia's oldest wooden plank boat? An ancient fingerprint offers clues. Archeologists are closer to solving the Hjortspring Boat's mysteries. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Archaeologists examining an ancient boat discovered in Denmark over a century ago are getting some help from a clue usually associated with crime scenes .

A member of the Ukrainian State Emergency Service attends a transfer ceremony of special vehicles from Japan to Ukraine in Kyiv in November 2023. With Russia making incremental territorial gains in Ukraine, Kyiv is urging Tokyo to boost its support in areas such as cybersecurity, demining and counterdrone systems, transforming what started as ad hoc, nonlethal assistance into a long-term security partnership. "Ukraine has identified several priority areas," Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Serhiy Boev told The Japan Times in an exclusive interview. These include counterdrone systems that can be integrated with the country's air-defense network, logistics and maintenance support for nonlethal equipment, as well as surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to enhance maritime domain awareness, particularly in the Black Sea. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Understanding the robustness of a weather forecasting model with respect to input noise or different uncertainties is important in assessing its output reliability, particularly for extreme weather events like hurricanes. In this paper, we test sensitivity and robustness of an artificial intelligence (AI) weather forecasting model: NVIDIAs FourCastNetv2 (FCNv2). We conduct two experiments designed to assess model output under different levels of injected noise in the models initial condition. First, we perturb the initial condition of Hurricane Florence from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Reanalysis v5 (ERA5) dataset (September 13-16, 2018) with varying amounts of Gaussian noise and examine the impact on predicted trajectories and forecasted storm intensity. Second, we start FCNv2 with fully random initial conditions and observe how the model responds to nonsensical inputs. Our results indicate that FCNv2 accurately preserves hurricane features under low to moderate noise injection. Even under high levels of noise, the model maintains the general storm trajectory and structure, although positional accuracy begins to degrade. FCNv2 consistently underestimates storm intensity and persistence across all levels of injected noise. With full random initial conditions, the model generates smooth and cohesive forecasts after a few timesteps, implying the models tendency towards stable, smoothed outputs. Our approach is simple and portable to other data-driven AI weather forecasting models.

Underwater images often suffer from severe color distortion, low contrast, and a hazy appearance due to wavelength-dependent light absorption and scattering. Simultaneously, existing deep learning models exhibit high computational complexity, which limits their practical deployment for real-time underwater applications. To address these challenges, this paper presents a novel underwater image enhancement model, called Adaptive Frequency Fusion and Illumination Aware Network (AQUA-Net). It integrates a residual encoder decoder with dual auxiliary branches, which operate in the frequency and illumination domains. The frequency fusion encoder enriches spatial representations with frequency cues from the Fourier domain and preserves fine textures and structural details. Inspired by Retinex, the illumination-aware decoder performs adaptive exposure correction through a learned illumination map that separates reflectance from lighting effects. This joint spatial, frequency, and illumination design enables the model to restore color balance, visual contrast, and perceptual realism under diverse underwater conditions. Additionally, we present a high-resolution, real-world underwater video-derived dataset from the Mediterranean Sea, which captures challenging deep-sea conditions with realistic visual degradations to enable robust evaluation and development of deep learning models. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that AQUA-Net performs on par with SOTA in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations while using less number of parameters. Ablation studies further confirm that the frequency and illumination branches provide complementary contributions that improve visibility and color representation. Overall, the proposed model shows strong generalization capability and robustness, and it provides an effective solution for real-world underwater imaging applications.

Science Archaeology Ancient'dirty dishes' may have led archaeologists astray for decades A new study questions if Bronze Age dishes really do have traces of olive oil. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. As far as kitchen staples, you don't really get much better than olive oil . It can do it all--jazz up a salad, sauté vegetables, add a nice crisp to some noodles, and more. Humans have been using olive oil for about 8,000 years, so archeologists often report olive oil residue on excavated pottery.

Environment Animals Wildlife Endangered Species German hairy snails are disappearing from London's River Thames Londoners are scouring riverbanks to save the endangered mollusk. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Researchers believe that its signature hairs help the strange creature live in its damp, riverside environments by enabling it to sweat off moisture. By wicking off that excess moisture, the slime gets more sticky, so the snail can hold onto the slick riverside debris and the plants it eats. However, the snail needs some extra support.

What is in the 28-point US plan for Ukraine? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Can the US get all sides to end the war? Why is Europe opposing Trump's peace plan? Here's where things stand on Saturday, December 6: A Russian drone attack killed two men, aged 52 and 67, in the Ukrainian city of Izyum as they were unloading firewood from a truck, according to local officials. Russian forces also killed a 12-year-old boy in an attack on the Vasylkivska community in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region, and wounded more than a dozen Ukrainians in attacks on the Kherson, Donetsk and Sumy regions, local officials said.

An Garda Síochána (Irish police force) has launched an investigation after drones were detected in Irish skies on the night the Ukrainian president arrived in Ireland. Volodymyr Zelensky flew into Dublin late on Monday night for a one-day official visit with his wife, First Lady Olena Zelenska. Senior Irish government figures, including Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Micheál Martin, have been briefed on the issue. Martin confirmed it would be discussed at a National Security Council meeting later this month. In a statement, gardaí said its Special Detective Unit (SDU) is investigating the matter and will be liaising with the Defence Forces and international security partners.

More than just rats and fleas added to the'perfect storm' plague. Photograph of the fresco Trionfo della Morte, taken at its original location in the Camposanto Monumentale in Pisa. The fresco, known as the "Triumph of Death" and attributed to the painter Buonamico Buffalmacco, is not precisely dated; scholarly estimates range from 1335 to 1350. While it does not depict the Black Death explicitly, the selected detail shows victims of an epidemic from diverse social backgrounds, their souls carried off by demons. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday.

What is in the 28-point US plan for Ukraine? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Can the US get all sides to end the war? Why is Europe opposing Trump's peace plan? Here's where things stand on Wednesday, December 3: Russian forces attacked Ukraine's Kherson region, using "rocket launchers, mortars and drones", killing a 76-year-old woman and injuring at least two other people, the Kherson Regional Prosecutor's Office said in a post on Telegram. A Russian drone attack killed one person and injured five people in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, the head of the city's military administration, Oleksandr Honcharenko, wrote on Facebook.