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 .

Could a self-monitoring system for criminals replace prisons one day? Future Chronicles is our regular speculative look at inventions yet to come. In this latest installment, we journey to 2050, when technology had been developed so that criminals could be monitored at home. "It's no surprise that the first countries to abolish prisons were Scandinavian " In the 2020s, the US was spending an eye-watering $182 billion a year on locking up its citizens. No other country imprisoned as many people or spent as much in doing so.

We present a data-driven emulator, stochastic weather generator (SWG), suitable for estimating probabilities of prolonged heatwaves in France and Scandinavia. This emulator is based on the method of analogs of circulation to which we add temperature and soil moisture as predictor fields. We train the emulator on an intermediate complexity climate model run and show that it is capable of predicting conditional probabilities (forecasting) of heatwaves out of sample. Special attention is payed that this prediction is evaluated using proper score appropriate for rare events. To accelerate the computation of analogs dimensionality reduction techniques are applied and the performance is evaluated. The probabilistic prediction achieved with SWG is compared with the one achieved with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). With the availability of hundreds of years of training data CNNs perform better at the task of probabilistic prediction. In addition, we show that the SWG emulator trained on 80 years of data is capable of estimating extreme return times of order of thousands of years for heatwaves longer than several days more precisely than the fit based on generalised extreme value distribution. Finally, the quality of its synthetic extreme teleconnection patterns obtained with stochastic weather generator is studied. We showcase two examples of such synthetic teleconnection patterns for heatwaves in France and Scandinavia that compare favorably to the very long climate model control run.

If the King of Sweden wants help drafting his annual Christmas speech this year, he could ask the same AI model that's available to his 10 million subjects. As a test, researchers prompted the model, called GPT-SW3, to draft one of the royal messages, and it did a pretty good job, according to Magnus Sahlgren, who heads research in natural language understanding at AI Sweden, a consortium kickstarting the country's journey into the machine learning era. "Later, our minister of digitalization visited us and asked the model to generate arguments for political positions and it came up with some really clever ones -- and he intuitively understood how to prompt the model to generate good text," Sahlgren said. Early successes inspired work on an even larger and more powerful version of the language model they hope will serve any citizen, company or government agency in Scandinavia. The current version packs 3.6 billion parameters and is smart enough to do a few cool things in Swedish.

Mika Lintilä the Minister of Economic Affairs in Finland appointed a steering group in May 2017 to figure out how they could become one of the world's top countries within the field of Applied AI. In October 2017, Finland was the first European Union country to put a national action plan on AI into writing. This seems quite a lot earlier than most other countries in Scandinavia. At around that time they were scheduled to release their final report April 2019. However they also released a report at the time called Finland's Age of Artificial Intelligence that touched upon their strengths and weaknesses in AI with eight specific recommendations to turn the country into a global leader.

Paval Botica, chief officer on CMA CGM's Benjamin Franklin container ship, checks a monitor off Guangzhou, China, in 2016. The startup Shone is outfitting CMA CGM ships with situational awareness systems, a first step toward autonomous operation. The next time you hop on a ferry, take a look at the captain's bridge. There may not be a human at the helm much longer. Ships around the world are beginning a transformation into autonomous machines, leveraging the same advances in artificial intelligence that are shaking up the automotive world.

What do you get if you combine the broad trends of smartphones, wearables, Internet of Things, an individual desire for control and healthcare costs for society? You get VCs investing in health-tech startups, that's what. And the latest evidence of this is Stockholm-based Lifesum raising a 10m funding round led by Nokia Growth Partners (NGP), with Draper Esprit, Bauer Media Group and SparkLabs Global Ventures. Lifesum, which tracks what you eat and your exercise, says it now has 15 million users. That's less than the 80 million users which MyFitnessPal had when it was acquired by athletic apparel maker Under Armour in February 2015.