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Breakthroughs that shape tomorrow.
Phys.org
AI learns to read ancient Japanese pottery with 93% accuracy
Classifying ancient pottery has always depended on the trained judgment of an archaeologist. Identifying the subtle differences between piece types takes years of experience, and two experts will not always agree. Now, a team including researchers at Nagoya University in Japan has developed a deep learning model that can classify pottery by shape with high accuracy, using three-dimensional scan data rather than photographs or drawings.
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Phys.org
'Coral houses' are dotted throughout the Pacific. Now, scientists know exactly when they were built
The Mangareva Islands are about 1,600 kilometers southeast of Tahiti in French Polynesia. They get their name (which means "floating mountains") from the way the sea spray breaking on the surrounding coral atolls, or motu, causes the ancient volcanic peaks to appear as if they are floating above the waves.
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Big Think
The surprising origin of modern compassion
Most people I know are moved by news of tragedy. A terrible earthquake, a drought, a famine, a flood, wildfires, displaced people, innocent victims of military aggression — we feel pity for those pointlessly suffering and a desire, even an obligation, to help. So we donate to disaster relief; we organize a collection for food, water, or first aid; possibly we volunteer. Almost never do we know the people in need: they are complete strangers, often in far-off lands, people we will never meet and possibly wouldn’t like if we did. Yet we — at least most of us — want to help. This sense of moral obligation to strangers in need is not written into the human DNA. Nor was it found in the ancient roots of our cultural heritage in the West. Philosophers in the Greek and Roman worlds enthusiastically agreed that helping others was appropriate and often obligatory, but altruistic acts were focused almost exclusively on close genetic and social relations — family, friends, and, less frequently, others “like us” in the same community. The sense that anyone should help anonymous strangers in far-away places was simply not part of the moral equation. Why then is it part of the equation today? Why does this urge to provide assistance — for some of us quite intense, for others admittedly faint — seem like moral “common sense,” not just among religious folks but agnostics and atheists as well, a common sense that affects not only our individual psyches but also our views of social agenda and governmental priorities? My argument in [my new] book is that the impulse to help strangers in need is embedded in our Western moral conscience because of the teachings of Jesus. As Christianity spread throughout the ancient world, it revolutionized the understanding of ethical obligation, leading to a fundamental transformation in the moral conscience of the West. I realize this is a bold claim. It is not that Jesus invented this kind altruism out of whole cloth. On the contrary, he based his teachings on his understanding of the Hebrew Bible, and similar views can be found among other Jewish teachers of his day. Unlike other religious traditions at the foundation of Western culture, Judaism had long emphasized the obligation to care for the poor, the needy, the outcast, and the oppressed. But, and this is an important “but,” these obligations for the most part extended only to those who belonged to the Israelite community, either by birth, conversion, or immigration. Jesus universalized this obligation. Since it was the followers of Jesus — rather than adherents of other Jewish teachers — that converted millions of gentiles and eventually became the religion of the West, the shift in ethical concerns and practices is ultimately based on Jesus’s own distinctive teachings. The Christian church that emerged in Jesus’s wake was never a monolith, advancing a single code of ethics, any more than it endorsed a single set of doctrinal teachings or ritual practices. On the contrary, “the” early church was startlingly diverse in nearly every way. Very few Christians, even at the beginning, adopted the strict ethical injunctions of Jesus himself. Moreover, as soon as Christianity began to spread outside his native land, Christian converts faced new situations in unexpected contexts, completely different from those of their founder, an itinerant Jewish preacher in the sparsely populated hinterlands of rural Galilee. Christian leaders adjusted Jesus’s teachings accordingly, often altering and almost always softening them for public consumption. Still, by the end of the 4th century, when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, the basic core of his teachings had begun to make a significant difference in the lives of thousands on the margins of society. Prior to the spread of Christianity, there were no public hospitals in the Roman world; no orphanages, poorhouses, or old persons’ homes; no government assistance to help those in need or private charities to minister to the poor, homeless, and hungry. These are Christian innovations that evolved from Christian understandings of what it meant to be a good person. As Christianity spread throughout the ancient world, it revolutionized the understanding of ethical obligation, leading to a fundamental transformation in the moral conscience of the West. Would these values and institutions have arisen without Christianity? There is no way to know. It is possible, of course, that the religions and cultures of, say, Southeast Asia or China would eventually have influenced Western mores. But [this development in moral thinking] arose internally in the West, not under Eastern influences. Ultimately they derived from Jesus’s distinctive teachings about what it means to love others. This kind of love is not strictly (or even necessarily) a feeling or emotion; it is directed toward the good of others, even at a cost to oneself. One very concrete expression of active love involves sharing material resources, for example through charitable giving; another, less often considered, involves nonmaterial kindness in personal relationships, graphically exemplified in acts of pure forgiveness extended to those who have harmed us (a different kind of “charity”). The Christian revolution in ethics [is] based on love, charitable giving, and forgiveness. There can hardly be a more important time to reflect on these Christian moral principles. We live in a world of heightened hatred and hostility toward the “other.” Much of the animosity is directed toward those who are not like us, and often our personal grievances lead to violent social action and governmental policy. In these times of power and dominance, it may be useful for all of us, whatever our religious commitments (or noncommitments), to consider the ethical principles that lay at the root of our civilization, and to consider what it would mean to love a neighbor, even if the neighbor is a stranger. This article The surprising origin of modern compassion is featured on Big Think.
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Big Think
The real lesson from the first time globalization died
Around 1200 BC, the most sophisticated network of civilizations the ancient world had ever produced collapsed within a single generation. Archaeologist Eric Cline has spent his career forensically reconstructing why, and the answer is far stranger and more unsettling than a single catastrophic event. This video The real lesson from the first time globalization died is featured on Big Think.
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