Fortnite has been home to many events throughout its history, but today, we learned of what is perhaps the most interesting event yet. Epic Games teamed up with Time Magazine to create an interactive experience highlighting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his efforts with the civil rights movement within Fortnite. Dubbed March Through Time, the experience will be going live in Fortnite Creative.
A pair of frozen lions were shown in a recently published study showing shockingly good preservation of remains. Radiocarbon dating shows one lion "Boris" lived more than 43,000 years ago, while the other, "Sparta", was last walking the planet around 28,000 years ago. The younger of the two lions is believed to be one of the most well preserved ice age animals ever recovered by human researchers.
It would appear that we're a bit closer to the source of the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs on Earth. Researchers from Southwest Research Institute published a paper this week with research on material samples harvested from the crater dated back to the event that changed the course of life on Earth. Perhaps most surprising among the details shared by the researchers was the high frequency of elements similar to those found in other asteroids that hit the earth relatively frequently, meaning... this asteroid wasn't quite as rare as we might've thought.
In what feels like the first chapter in an apocalyptic science fiction story, scientists reported this week that they'd discovered a set of ancient viruses in glacier ice. Using Guliya ice cap core samples first harvested back in 2015, these researchers have discovered genetic code for 33 viruses. Just 4 of those viruses were previously known by modern humans, the rest are "novel" - previously unknown to the scientific community.
The 80s were a heyday for movies and TV shows that featured cars as prominent characters in the plot. One of the most iconic movie cars from the 80s is the De Lorean used in "Back to the Future." Doc said if he had to build the Time Machine, why not do it with style and the 1981 De Lorean DMC-12 certainly had style.
Research published this week showed a team interested in the total population of individual species of dinosaurs. They began their work with one of the best-known dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex, taking a crack at estimating new metrics based on what they already know to be true. They've used a relationship established between body size and population density in extant species to estimate a new set of traits never before calculated in such a way.
The skull you're looking at was in pieces when it was discovered. After a whole heck of a lot of work, the physical remnants were put together again for this photo. But it's the tiniest of pieces we care about today. It's the DNA this 45,000 year old skull provided that's placed it in the headlines this week.
Few things in antiquity spark fantasy and imagination as much as the kings and some queens of ancient Egypt. The stuff of legend, horror, and studies, the remains of these people long gone, more popularly known as mummies, are revered not just as historical artifacts but also national treasures. Everything about them is treated with respect and sometimes with fear. Take for example the mere transfer of these mummies from one museum to another, held in an elaborate and historical procession fit for pharaohs.
Did you know that pieces of the original history-making Wright Brothers' "1903 Wright Flyer I" have orbited the Earth and been to moon? Now, NASA collaborated with Carillon Historical Park and the Wright Brothers National Museum to send another piece of the flyer to Mars to take part in another of humanity's historical achievements. The Perseverance rover rolls on Mars now, holding the helicopter craft Ingenuity, onboard which is a piece of the Wright Flyer I's wing fabric.
A study released this week shows how the tyrannosaurus consumed different resources at multiple stages of growth. Modern meat-eating mammals can easily be arranged in a chart showing average adult size - each of these animals have a unique effect on their own ecosystem. Given the average size of adult dinosaurs, there appeared to be a massive gap in the middle of the chart from smallest to largest.
Today you can view a 10-billion-pixel scan of the Johannes Vermeer painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring." Over the course of one night, the folks at Hirox captured 91,000 photos of the painting. Hirox fed the photos into a computer where their custom software took care of all the stitching. The result was a single reconstruction of the painting at 93,205 x 108,565 pixels in all.
Internet Archive is now home to high-quality digitized versions of vintage Computerworld issues, an update to the content made possible using microfilm archives. The records provide a look at technology and its development over the decades -- the first volume was published back in the summer of 1967 and the last in 2014.