Enlarge / This fragmented inscription records a decree concerning the Acropolis of Athens and dates back to 485-484 BCE. (credit: Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 3.0) Google DeepMind has collaborated with classical scholars to create a new AI tool that uses deep neural networks to help historians decipher the text of damaged inscriptions from ancient Greece. The new system, […]
Enlarge / Section of the so-called “Tavistock letter,” written by Charles Dickens in his idiosyncratic shorthand. The crowd-sourced transcription, now 70 percent complete, reveals a dispute between Dickens and The Times of London. (credit: Public domain) Last October, a collaboration called The Dickens Code project made a public appeal to amateur puzzle fans and codebreakers […]
In 1697, a man named Jacques Sennacque wrote a letter to his cousin, a French merchant named Pierre Le Pers, requesting a certified death certificate for another man named Daniel Le Pers (presumably also a relation). Sennacque sealed the letter with an intricate folding method known as “letterlocking,” a type of physical cryptography—the better to […]
Enlarge / Archaeology is catching up with the digital humanities movement with the creation of large online databases, combining data collected from satellite-, airborne-, and UAV-mounted sensors with historical information. (credit: Brown University) There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a […]