What did a dinosaur sound like? How would a Neandertal vocalize? Scientists have long used fossil evidence, DNA analyses and computer models in attempts to break the silence of the distant past. Now 3-D printing and body-scanning technology have lent a little bit of voice to a relatively young artifact: the more than 3,000-year-old mummy of an ancient Egyptian named Nesyamun.
Like Rolling Stones farewell tours or the McRib, every few years they seem to come back. I’m talking about those ready-made-for-reposting, viral-friendly photographs of McDonald’s food that doesn’t seem to ever rot.
Ah, the Oxford comma. Journalists often fight over it, academics love it and a lot of people don’t care about or even know what it is. But this singular bit of punctuation is actually super important.
The news almost reads like an Onion headline: Sweden, the country, has got its very own telephone number. And you can call it anytime you like to chat with a random Swede about, well, anything really.
Microsoft today published an apology for its Twitter chatbot Tay, saying in a blog post that a subset of human users exploited a flaw in the program to transform it into a hate speech-spewing Hitler apologist.
Robots are taking people’s jobs, from white collar jobs to those on Wall Street. Now, it looks like they’re going to deliver pizzas, too.
