News Desk

“Man perishes; his corpse turns to dust; all his relatives pass away. But writings make him remembered in the mouth of the reader. A book is more effective than a well-built house or a tomb-chapel in the west, better than an established villa or a stela in the temple!”

Those prescient lines were written over 3,000 years ago, in ancient Egypt. They are part of a new book offering fresh translations of Egyptian hieroglyphics by Toby Wilkinson, an Egyptologist at the University of Cambridge. For the book, called “Writings From Ancient Egypt“, he gathered texts from poets, scribes, priests, storytellers and everyday citizens spanning some 2,000 years of Egyptian civilization to present a tantalizingly personal glimpse into a society defined today mostly by pyramids and mummies.

A small onyx stone believed to have been worn in the sacred breastplate of the High Priest of Jerusalem may have been found after being missing for more than 1,000 years.

A sardonyx gem, thought to have been one of two that were set in gold on each shoulder of the breastplate and deemed to be ‘forms of divine communication’, was discovered in South Africa.

The finding gives a glimpse of the majestic detail of this long-lost edifice central to Jewish and Christian history

If you’ve ever visited Roman ruins, you’ll know that the ancient Romans were really into bathing. Every town had at least one bathhouse, which had a combination of steam rooms, hot tubs, and cold baths. But did these rituals actually do anything for the Romans’ health?

Scientists have identified a gene that helps us feel and keep tabs on our body’s position in space.

Two people, aged nine and 19 years old, with mutations on a gene called PIEZO2 showed researchers how their senses of touch and body awareness, or proprioception, differed from those of other people.

Financial traders are better at reading their ‘gut feelings’ than the general population – and the better they are at this ability, the more successful they are as traders, according to new research led by the University of Cambridge.

People born without sight appear to solve math problems using visual areas of the brain.

A functional MRI study of 17 people blind since birth found that areas of visual cortex became active when the participants were asked to solve algebra problems, a team from Johns Hopkins reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

How are you feeling today?

In a paper that will be presented next month at MobiCom, the Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, researchers from MIT’s CSAIL announce that they have developed a device that can determine people’s emotions by analyzing reflections in wireless signals.

A robot has been arrested while taking part in a political rally in Russia, after police intervened to prevent it from interacting with the public.

Adding to the bizarre situation is the fact that this is the same model of robot that previously tried to escape twice from its manufacturer.

Isaac Asimov gave us the basic rules of good robot behaviour: don’t harm humans, obey orders and protect yourself. Now the British Standards Institute has issued a more official version aimed at helping designers create ethically sound robots.

Can Google bring peace to the web with machine learning? Jigsaw, a subsidiary of parent company Alphabet is certainly trying, building open-source AI tools designed to filter out abusive language. A new feature from Wired describes how the software has been trained on some 17 million comments left underneath New York Times stories, along with 13,000 discussions on Wikipedia pages.

Is. Isn’t. Is. Isn’t. Is. Isn’t. It’s annoying enough when kids get stuck in this kind of loop. But certain bots on Wikipedia have been at it for years, endlessly making and unmaking each other’s edits in spats that never end.

Wikipedia editors sometimes use bots to help them keep on top of changes that users have made to the online encyclopedia. But when two editors task different bots with making incompatible edits, each bot will keep finding that its work has been undone.

The world’s first self-driving taxi has finally found its ride-hail network. On Thursday, NuTonomy, an MIT-spinoff testing self-driving cars in Singapore, announced a partnership with Grab, the Uber of Southeast Asia. The partnership will allow NuTonomy to expand its public trial, which started several weeks before Uber launched its own public test in Pittsburgh

Using a simple membrane extract from spinach leaves, researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed a bio-photo-electro-chemical (BPEC) cell that produces electricity and hydrogen from water using sunlight. The raw material of the device is water, and its products are electric current, hydrogen and oxygen.

Tesla may be at the forefront of solar technologies right now, with their merger with SolarCity bringing the technology full circle. In fact, one of their newer developments is a rumored “solar roof,” an actual roof that functions as solar panels.

Could an outpost on the moon be the next logical step towards the know-how and infrastructure we need to head into the farther reaches of the solar system?

The puzzling appearance of an ice cloud seemingly out of thin air has prompted NASA scientists to suggest that a different process than previously thought—possibly similar to one seen over Earth’s poles—could be forming clouds on Saturn’s moon Titan.