Science Archaeology This'funny-looking rock' holds 3,000 years of Iron Age secrets Experimenting with copper may have led to our eventual breakthroughs with making iron. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Around 1200 BCE, mankind began its shift away from bronze when a new metal showed its . Iron would eventually become king, but the metal's road to dominance is a bit muddled. Now, a new analysis of a 3,000-year-old smelting workshop in the Eastern European country of Georgia indicates that it was actually copper smelters experimenting with iron-rich rocks that may have sparked iron's rise.

Citizen scientists searching aerial images while on coronavirus lockdown have uncovered dozens of previously-hidden Roman, prehistoric and medieval sites. Archaeological digs are currently on hold due to the pandemic but researchers have found roads, burial mounds and settlements - all while working from home. Researchers from the University of Exeter asked teams of volunteers to search through LiDAR images and aerial surveys to hunt for signs of ancient sites. Volunteer amateur archaeologists cross-referenced these topographical images of the Tamar Valley that highlight hidden features with historic maps of the area. Lead researchers Dr Chris Smart said they were'redrawing the archeological map of the South West' and getting a better idea of how areas developed over millennia.

It is likely self-evident to many that the security industry's most overused buzzword of the year is "machine learning." Yet, despite the ubiquity of the term and its presence in company marketing literature, most people – including those working for many of the vendors using the term – don't actually know what it means. Scanning through industry sites and product descriptions, machine learning is often positioned as either a "new" tool or a "new" method – something that can provide additional capabilities or features. For many classes of threat detection, machine learning is positioned as "signatureless" detection by those that don't yet know the basic principles of the math or science behind it. The best way to understand what machine learning is and what it truly brings to the security industry is to compare it to a technology advance that kick-started two centuries ago – the steel age.