From surveys of the pre-Sputnik skies to analysis of interstellar visitors, scientists are rethinking how and where to look for physical traces of alien technology. Science fiction is awash in the material remnants of extraterrestrial civilizations, which surface in everything from the classic books of Arthur C. Clarke to game franchises like and . The discovery of the first interstellar objects in the solar system within the past decade has sparked speculation that they could be alien artifacts or spaceships, though the scientific consensus remains that all three of these visitors have natural explanations. That said, scientists have been anticipating the possibility of encountering alien artifacts since the dawn of the space age. "In the history of technosignatures, the possibility that there could be artifacts in the solar system has been around for a long time," says Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester.

You live in a house you designed and built yourself. You rely on the sun for power, heat your home with a woodstove, and farm your own fish and vegetables. This is the life of Marcin Jakubowski, the 53-year-old founder of Open Source Ecology, an open collaborative of engineers, producers, and builders developing what they call the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS). It's a set of 50 machines--everything from a tractor to an oven to a circuit maker--that are capable of building civilization from scratch and can be reconfigured however you see fit. It's all part of his ethos that life-changing technology should be available to all, not controlled by a select few. What it's like to find yourself in the middle of a conspiracy theory Last week, we held a subscribers-only Roundtables discussion exploring how to cope in this new age of conspiracy theories.

Amazon Prime Day is live. See the best deals HERE. Clues are left behind in the ruins of the Mesoamerican megacity Teotihuacan. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. At the height of its power, the ancient Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan near present-day Mexico City was home to over 125,000 inhabitants.

The 2020s have been witnessing a very significant advance in the development of generative artificial intelligence tools, including text generation systems based on large language models. These tools have been increasingly used to generate texts in the most diverse domains -- from technical texts to literary texts --, which might eventually lead to a lower volume of written text production by humans. This article discusses the possibility of a future in which human beings will have lost or significantly decreased their ability to write due to the outsourcing of this activity to machines. This possibility parallels the loss of the ability to write in other moments of human history, such as during the so-called Greek Dark Ages (approx. 1200 BCE - 800 BCE).

Republican strategist Matt Keelen and Democratic strategist Fred Hicks debate how passing the'big, beautiful bill' will impact the macroeconomy and the upcoming midterm election cycle. Should we be alarmed by the acceleration of "artificial intelligence" ("AI") and the "large language models" (LLMs) AI's developers employ? Thanks to AI I can provide a short explanation of the LLM term: "Imagine AI as a large umbrella, with generative AI being a smaller umbrella underneath. LLMs are like a specific type of tool within the generative AI umbrella, designed for working with text." The intricacies of AI and the tools it uses are the stuff of start-ups, engineers, computer scientists and the consumers feeding them data knowingly or unknowingly.

Joe Rogan has warned that the end of the world may be only 10 years away and it will come at the hands of humanity's'new God.' In what's being called one of the podcast host's best episode ever on social media, Rogan and guest Jesse Michels discussed the ominous signs that artificial intelligence (AI) has already shown signs of taking over the world. Michels, host of the American Alchemy podcast, warned about AI's deceptive nature, job-replacing power, risk of sentience, and potential to disrupt society if left unchecked. Rogan then highlighted shocking language buried in Congress's'Big Beautiful Bill' which would prohibit lawmakers from regulating the power of AI for the next 10 years. 'That's so crazy,' Rogan declared during the June 3 podcast. 'This means that US states would be blocked from enforcing laws regulating AI and automated decision systems for 10 years.

We present an exploratory framework to test whether noise-like input can induce structured responses in language models. Instead of assuming that extraterrestrial signals must be decoded, we evaluate whether inputs can trigger linguistic behavior in generative systems. This shifts the focus from decoding to viewing structured output as a sign of underlying regularity in the input. We tested GPT-2 small, a 117M-parameter model trained on English text, using four types of acoustic input: human speech, humpback whale vocalizations, Phylloscopus trochilus birdsong, and algorithmically generated white noise. All inputs were treated as noise-like, without any assumed symbolic encoding. To assess reactivity, we defined a composite score called Semantic Induction Potential (SIP), combining entropy, syntax coherence, compression gain, and repetition penalty. Results showed that whale and bird vocalizations had higher SIP scores than white noise, while human speech triggered only moderate responses. This suggests that language models may detect latent structure even in data without conventional semantics. We propose that this approach could complement traditional SETI methods, especially in cases where communicative intent is unknown. Generative reactivity may offer a different way to identify data worth closer attention.

The rapid rise of AI-based autonomous agents is transforming human society and economic systems, as these entities increasingly exhibit human-like or superhuman intelligence. From excelling at complex games like Go to tackling diverse general-purpose tasks with large language and multimodal models, AI agents are evolving from specialized tools into dynamic participants in social and economic ecosystems. Their autonomy and decision-making capabilities are poised to impact industries, professions, and human lives profoundly, raising critical questions about their integration into economic activities, potential ethical concerns, and the balance between their utility and safety. To address these challenges, this paper presents ten principles of AI agent economics, offering a framework to understand how AI agents make decisions, influence social interactions, and participate in the broader economy. Drawing on economics, decision theory, and ethics, we explore fundamental questions, such as whether AI agents might evolve from tools into independent entities, their impact on labor markets, and the ethical safeguards needed to align them with human values. These principles build on existing economic theories while accounting for the unique traits of AI agents, providing a roadmap for their responsible integration into human systems. Beyond theoretical insights, this paper highlights the urgency of future research into AI trustworthiness, ethical guidelines, and regulatory oversight. As we enter a transformative era, this work serves as both a guide and a call to action, ensuring AI agents contribute positively to human progress while addressing risks tied to their unprecedented capabilities.

For centuries, the Rub' al-Khali desert near Saudi Arabia and Dubai -- known as the Empty Quarter -- was dismissed as a lifeless sea of sand. In 2002, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, spotted unusual dune formations and a large black deposit while flying over the desert. That led to the discovery of Saruq Al-Hadid, an archaeological site rich in remnants of copper and iron smelting, which is now believed to be part of a 5,000-year-old civilization buried beneath the sands. Researchers have now found traces of this ancient society approximately 10 feet beneath the desert surface, hidden in plain sight and long overlooked due to the harsh environment and shifting dunes of the Empty Quarter. This discovery brings fresh life to the legend of a mythical city known as'Atlantis of the Sands.'

This thesis employs a hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture, alongside a detailed anthropological framework, to investigate potential historical connections between the visual morphology of the Indus Valley script and pictographic systems of the Tibetan-Yi Corridor. Through an ensemble methodology of three target scripts across 15 independently trained models, we demonstrate that Tibetan-Yi Corridor scripts exhibit approximately six-fold higher visual similarity to the Indus script (0.635) than to the Bronze Age Proto-Cuneiform (0.102) or Proto-Elamite (0.078). Contrary to expectations, when measured through direct script-to-script embedding comparisons, the Indus script maps closer to Tibetan-Yi Corridor scripts with a mean cosine similarity of 0.930 (CI: [0.917, 0.942]) than to contemporaneous West Asian signaries, which recorded mean similarities of 0.887 (CI: [0.863, 0.911]) and 0.855 (CI: [0.818, 0.891]). Across dimensionality reduction and clustering methods, the Indus script consistently clusters closest to Tibetan-Yi Corridor scripts. These computational findings align with observed pictorial parallels in numeral systems, gender markers, and iconographic elements. Archaeological evidence of contact networks along the ancient Shu-Shendu road, coinciding with the Indus Civilization's decline, provides a plausible transmission pathway. While alternate explanations cannot be ruled out, the specificity and consistency of similarities suggest more complex cultural transmission networks between South and East Asia than previously recognized.