(Photo: Mirosław Blicharski/Aleksander Poznań)Archeologists in Poland recently made an unexpected discovery: the remains of a 17th-century female who was suspected of being a vampire. The skeleton was found during an excavation near the city of Bydgoszcz. Early medieval graves had been uncovered in the area more than a decade before, when archeologists found jewelry, semi-precious stones, and remnants of silk clothing that had been buried with the deceased. A team from Poland’s Nicholas Copernicus University returned to the region this year to seek out artifacts from a 17th-century cemetery that had been damaged over the years by agriculture.
The RMS Titanic’s bow. (Photo: OceanGate Expeditions)The sinking of the RMS Titanic has managed to remain in the public conscience for more than a century. Between James Cameron’s Titanic and various traveling artifact exhibitions (not to mention countless “Jack could have fit on the door” analyses), this North Atlantic tragedy has been romanticized, meme-ified, and studied across multiple generations. As for the latter, we now have extra fodder to do just that. New 8K footage reveals previously uncaptured details of the sunken ship in all its haunting glory. OceanGate Expeditions, a company that specializes in using submersible vessels to “explore and document” the seafloor, conducted an undersea earlier this year.
The best way to prevent malware from creeping onto your Android phone is to only download apps from the official Play Store. However, no method is foolproof. Malware creators occasionally find a way to hide malware in Google’s repository, at least for a little bit. Earlier his year, security researchers spotted a malicious software package called SharkBot spreading through the Play Store. It was stamped out, of course, but now it’s back with a vengeance. In the early days of the Play Store, Google would allow every app to go live with minimal oversight. Slowly, it has ratcheted up its automated and human-powered checks, which makes it very difficult to upload a known piece of malware.
“Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” on display at the Colorado State Fair. (Image: Jason Allen via Discord)A man’s AI-generated “painting” took home the blue ribbon in an art competition this week, and artists are furious. Jason Allen submitted “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” to the Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition, which began on August 26. On Monday he was the first-place winner of the competition’s “Digital Arts/Digitally-Manipulated Photography” category—despite the fact that he himself didn’t create the piece. Instead, an AI program called Midjourney generated the artwork based on a text prompt. Allen then took the generated image and touched it up in Photoshop before upscaling with Gigapixel.
A lot of press attention has been rightly focused on Intel’s long-awaited launch of its Arc discrete GPUs. As you are well aware, there have been many delays, and now that it’s September we still don’t have a firm launch date, pricing, or any specific information on its high-end GPUs. The company had previously stated these GPUs would launch “,” which is precisely now. The constant delays along with the underwhelming first GPU to launch — the Arc A380 — even caused to advise Intel to abandon its fledgling effort to stop the bleeding. In response, Intel has now gone on the record saying its discrete GPU program is not going anywhere.
(Photo: National Cancer Institute)A new analysis has revealed a disappointing drop in Americans’ life expectancy. The average person born in the US in 2021 can now be expected to live for 76.1 years—the shortest lifespan recorded since 1996. The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which collects, analyzes, and disseminates the country’s official vital statistics, released its provisional life expectancy on Wednesday. The report finalizes lifespan data for 2019 and 2020 while providing provisional life expectancy data for those born in 2021. While the former years have sufficient death certificate data to confidently predict the lifespan of people born in the former years, death certificates from 2021 can still be changed.
Meteors have been raining down on Earth since time immemorial, but we are only beginning to understand that some of them have very exotic origins. In 2014, a small space rock hit the atmosphere and broke apart like so many others, but upon investigating this event, astronomers realized it came from beyond our solar system. Now, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is putting together a privately funded expedition to hunt for pieces of the mysterious object on the ocean floor. He’s even holding out hope that the object could show evidence of alien intelligence. Loeb’s interest in this object traces back to a different interstellar interloper.
The ATX chassis market has undergone a kind of renaissance in the past few years. All of a sudden, tempered glass windows have become the standard, along with vertically-mounted GPUs to show off your hardware. Despite all these changes, most cases are still pretty much the same, at least on the outside. Now a new ATX chassis is looking to change that by allowing you to customize the exterior to your heart’s content. That is, assuming you’re handy with a marker. The case is made by AeroCool and it’s appropriately named the . It’s an ATX mid-tower chassis that includes tempered glass “drawing panels” on the side and front.
(Photo: Michael Fousert/Unsplash)In an effort to make electric vehicles more accessible to everyday drivers, France is working on a plan to lease EVs for €100 per month (roughly $100 USD). The strategy, which Budget Minister Gabriel Attal announced Sunday on a French news channel, involves subsidizing EV leases to make them more financially appealing. For low-income households, French president Emmanuel Macron has an even more affordable state-sponsored program. It’s unknown at this time how much of the bill (if any) these households will need to foot. As of now, France offers subsidies as high as €6,000 for EVs that cost €47,000 or less.
