'Extremely rare' Roman tomb discovered in Germany No riches or remains are inside--but it probably wasn't tomb raiders. This stone circle was part of a Roman burial mound called a tumulus. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In 15 BCE, the Romans invaded parts of Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. The region would eventually become the province of Raetia, but it was not valued for its economic resources.

One of the main objectives of the Mars Exploration Program is to search for evidence of past or current life on the planet. To achieve this, Mars exploration has been focusing on regions that may have liquid or frozen water. A set of critical areas may have seen cycles of ice thawing in the relatively recent past in response to periodic changes in the obliquity of Mars. In this work, we use convolutional neural networks to detect surface regions containing "Brain Coral" terrain, a landform on Mars whose similarity in morphology and scale to sorted stone circles on Earth suggests that it may have formed as a consequence of freeze/thaw cycles. We use large images (~100-1000 megapixels) from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to search for these landforms at resolutions close to a few tens of centimeters per pixel (~25--50 cm). Over 52,000 images (~28 TB) were searched (~5% of the Martian surface) where we found detections in over 200 images. To expedite the processing we leverage a classifier network (prior to segmentation) in the Fourier domain that can take advantage of JPEG compression by leveraging blocks of coefficients from a discrete cosine transform in lieu of decoding the entire image at the full spatial resolution. The hybrid pipeline approach maintains ~93% accuracy while cutting down on ~95% of the total processing time compared to running the segmentation network at the full resolution on every image. The timely processing of big data sets helps inform mission operations, geologic surveys to prioritize candidate landing sites, avoid hazardous areas, or map the spatial extent of certain terrain. The segmentation masks and source code are available on Github for the community to explore and build upon.

The mystique of the ancient stone circle of Stonehenge has long stoked people's imaginations. Theories as to what the Neolithic monument was used for include everything from a burial site to a place of healing. But a team of Australian researchers believes that the bluestone circle and similar formations of standing stones in the UK may actually have been built to track the movements of the sun, moon and stars thousands of years ago. They found strong alignments between the placement and orientation of the stones with the paths of the sun and moon and other features in their surroundings. Experts believe the analysis provides the first evidence to support theories that stone circles were used to measure or track the movement of heavenly bodies.