Only 30 of these silver Agnus Dei coins have been discovered. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. The front of the coin represents Christ's crucifixion (right). The reverse side has the Greek letters alpha and omega, symbolizing God as the beginning and the end (left). Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week.

Science Dinosaurs A'spectacular' dinosaur dome heads for the Smithsonian The famously thick-headed Pachycephalosaurus lived during the Late Cretaceous. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A remarkably well-preserved dinosaur fossil has arrived at the Smithsonian's National Museum of National History. According to the institution's announcement, the nearly complete skull of a is set to make its public debut on December 22 in the FossiLab -the museum's working specimen preparation laboratory. "This skull is by far the most spectacular specimen of this type of dinosaur that we have at the museum," said Matthew Carrano, a paleontologist and the museum's Dinosauria curator.

Food Does the Grocery Cart Actually Need a Makeover? The rolling basket we dump our food in hasn't changed much in almost a century, and for good reason--it works. But meddling tech gurus think they know better. In the past few decades there have been numerous incremental changes to grocery stores, like the crazed proliferation of snacks and frozen food, security cameras tracking anything that moves, and self-checkout robots flashing in panic because they can't detect your Twix bar in the bag. Carts remain the open-ceiling prison cells on wheels they were 50 years ago, and baskets don't look much different either.

SOLVA Archaeology Service in Belgium announced the recent discovery of ancient Roman artifacts and remains, including a well-preserved dog, in Velzeke. A remarkable medieval sword with rare symbols was recently put on display in a Dutch museum, over a year after it was found by construction workers unexpectedly. The discovery of the sword was announced by the Netherlands' National Museum of Antiquities (RMO) in Leiden on June 24. The artifact, named the Linschoten Sword, was found in March 2024 during "maintenance dredging activities," the museum said in a press release. Construction workers were struck by a "long piece of iron" while cleaning a small river known as the Korte Linschoten, the statement noted.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are poised to play an increasingly important role in our lives, providing assistance across a wide array of tasks. In the geospatial domain, LLMs have demonstrated the ability to answer generic questions, such as identifying a country's capital; nonetheless, their utility is hindered when it comes to answering fine-grained questions about specific places, such as grocery stores or restaurants, which constitute essential aspects of people's everyday lives. This is mainly because the places in our cities haven't been systematically fed into LLMs, so as to understand and memorize them. This study introduces a novel framework for fine-tuning a pre-trained model on city-specific data, to enable it to provide accurate recommendations, while minimizing hallucinations. We share our model, LAMP, and the data used to train it. We conduct experiments to analyze its ability to correctly retrieving spatial objects, and compare it to well-known open- and closed- source language models, such as GPT-4. Finally, we explore its emerging capabilities through a case study on day planning.

"Father of the Video Game" Ralph Baer escaped Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany as a teen and served in the U.S. Army in WWII. After coming of age in tough times, he felt driven to bring "more fun and whimsy" into the world. Ralph Baer's childhood was stolen by the Nazis. The German-born Jew gained a semblance of revenge overseas, imagining a new way for children of all ages to play. Ralph Baer invented video games.

Margaret W. Moodey was one of the first women to work at the Smithsonian in science. Beginning around 1900, Moodey worked as a scientific aide in the Smithsonian's Department of Geology. Her work included identifying, classifying, and cataloging samples, including gems and fossils. By 1924, an annual report notes that she "had the entire responsibility and care of the collection of cut gems." Moodey was an important resource for anyone seeking answers about the collection.

And then there were four. After narrowing down a list of 12 finalists, The Strong National Museum of Play has inducted four new titles to its World Video Game Hall of Fame. In order of release, they are 1982's Microsoft Flight Simulator,1985's Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, 1998's StarCraft and 2001's Animal Crossing. They beat out the likes of the original Call of Duty, Portal, Guitar Hero and -- checks notes -- FarmVille to make it into this year's class. Incidentally, StarCraft is the second Blizzard game to join the hall after World of WarCraft was in the first selection of games inducted by the museum in 2015.

This year, three Washington-based museums of the Smithsonian Institution deployed a half-dozen four-feet-tall, humanoid robots, nicknamed Pepper, to answer visitors' questions and tell stories, using voice, gestures and an interactive touch screen. They also dance, play games and pose for selfies. Rachel Goslins, director of the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building and overseer of the robots' deployment, said she has been "blown away" by visitors' reactions to them. Pepper, she added, "feels totally aligned with the museums' mission. We are asking people to be present, engaged, to have a communal experience. We're not making you look at your phone even more; we're creating a playful, joyful human experience."

Why bother with a human docent when a robot could give you a guided tour? Last week, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, revealed its new employee -- an interactive robot named Pepper. The 4-foot-tall humanoid robot was created by Softbank, which donated 30 robots to the museum last year. This friendly Pepper robot wants to show you around the Smithsonian museum. "By interacting with museum visitors and providing insight on different exhibits, Pepper will help guide their educational experience through the Smithsonian that they otherwise might have missed out on," Steve Carlin, chief strategy officer of Softbank Robotics, said in a statement.