There is just something about the Medieval period that irks me. And for some of the people illustrated in some of these Medieval art, they seem to feel the same way about the day and age they lived in. Look through this gallery for more illustrations of people getting stabbed who just don't give a damn. -via Sad and Useless

Unicorns are one of the more popular mythical creatures with their horn sticking out of their forehead. It's a horse with a horn on its head, it looks pretty and some children like it. Well, what if the idea for unicorns were actually based on a dinosaur? An ancient rhino to be precise.

Known as the Siberian unicorn, the animal had a long horn on its nose, and roamed the grasslands of Eurasia. New evidence shows the hefty beast may have eventually died out because it was such a picky eater.

Weighing in at a mighty four tonnes, with an extraordinary single horn on its head, the "Siberian unicorn", shared the earth with early modern humans up until at least 39,000 years ago.

Learn more about this picky beast from Helen Briggs' article on The BBC.

(Image credit: W.S. van der Merwe)

Misinformation has become one of the most talked about subject matters in today's culture of politics and media but what makes us so vulnerable to believing certain types of information that causes so much panic and mass hysteria?

In 1938, people weren't as accustomed to new technologies and were pretty much unaware of what was happening in the world real-time. They would probably find out more about a piece of news that happened in the other side of the world or even in another state only after a week or two, or maybe even a month.

So what exactly happened in that 1938 fiasco? Read more about it on Aeon.

(Image credit: University of Indiana Libraries)

Losing one's agency and control over one's own body can make people lose hope and the will to live. But what if the neural signals in our brain could be decoded such that we can perform the intentions we have in mind? Well, that's the mission of BrainGate.

Three people paralyzed from the neck down have been able to use unmodified computer tablets to text friends, browse the internet and stream music, thanks to an electrode array system called BrainGate2.

The system uses an array of micro-electrodes implanted into the brain which decode, in real time, the neural signals associated with the intention to move a limb.

The participants shared some of their experiences and thoughts about the system with Rachel England and you can read more about it on her article at Engadget.

(Image credit: BrainGate)

Preservatives, additives, and other chemical enhancements in food processing is something a lot of us would steer clear of nowadays because we are more informed about them and there are strict regulations concerning the manufacturing of consumer products we use daily.

But back in the 19th century, there were no such laws or standard practices that protect consumers from harm to their health and safety. Thus a government chemist embarks on a sort of crusade to change all that.

Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist became fascinated with the story behind how all of this came to be and wrote a book about the man who took the first step.

The lack of regulation meant that companies could pretty much put whatever they wanted into food with no fear of being held accountable. "[Food] wasn't safety tested, because there were no rules requiring that," says Blum. "It wasn't labeled because there were no rules requiring that anyone tell you what was in your food. And it wasn't illegal even if you killed someone."

Read more about it on Ars Technica.

(Image credit: FDA)

As we become increasingly surrounded by our Internet of Things devices, more data and information can become available and useful in a variety of situations. One such situation is a murder trial in Farmington, New Hampshire.

Prosecutors believe there may be recordings of the stabbings of two women from January 2017. Amazon has not yet said if it would release the information.

"I think this is the beginning of the 'internet of evidence' where lots of pieces of smart devices are going to show up in criminal prosecutions," Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, author of The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement, told Day 6.

Though it may be too soon to say that smart devices would be a common sight in court cases, it does provide impetus for discussion about it. If it would be helpful then it should be considered.

Of course, there are things like privacy and security concerns, not to mention the possibility of evidence being tampered with or that the data is in the possession of big corporations like Amazon.

Still, we could see more of this happening in the future.

(Image credit: Norm Arnold/CBC)

Surely, it's a tempting prospect to be able to change the genetic makeup of an embryo to give it enhanced traits but such practice is banned by the international scientific community for ethical reasons.

But Chinese genome-editing researcher, He Jiankui, says that he has successfully been able to disable the genetic pathway that would prevent HIV infection for two twins that were recently born.

Until now, the use of these tools in embryos has been limited to research, often to investigate the benefit of using the technology to eliminate disease-causing mutations from the human germ line. But some studies have reported off-target effects, raising significant safety concerns.

The germline was edited to block CCR5 so that HIV would not have an entry point to the cells. This was done to the embryo in vitro before they were implanted into the mother.

Of course, it received backlash from the scientific community the minute they heard about the news. Whether it would become a more acceptable practice with very stringent regulations all depends on the decision in a summit of various international researchers in the field which was held in Hong Kong from November 27 to 29.

What will be the future of genome editing? We don't know yet but hopefully it can be of use in the future. Read more about it on Nature.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The more we launch rockets, satellites, and other space objects into the atmosphere, the more we entangle ourselves in a trap, a dilemma that would curtail our efforts for space exploration rather than further its advancement.

With all the space debris and junk in the earth's low orbit, it could create problems in the future. Much like our oceans that are being polluted with plastics and other wastes, space is being filled with the debris from all the things we put out there. - Kurzgesagt, in partnership with Brilliant.

George Washington is no honest Abe. Based on an aggregate ranking of presidents' perceived success from the point of view of academic historians and political scientists or popular opinion, the Founding Father placed third, just below Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But the fight for American independence, as with all nations' fight for liberty, was neither an easy path nor one without compromise.

George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and other Founding Fathers are remembered today as virtuous creators of a bold new democracy. But they were also cunning manipulators of their information environment—a side of the founding story that has often been neglected by history.

Amy Zegart at The Atlantic has more on this story.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Much like nature, art can bloom and flourish anywhere. The world is a canvas and local artists found an old US army base as a haven for their art.

Sitting along the "demilitarised zone" between North and South Korea is Camp Greaves, a former US Army base which is now a large interactive gallery for local artists.

One of the most arresting images comes early. Behind a heavy metal door is the interior of a powder magazine ammunition storage area. Staring straight at you is a model of deer with huge antlers that extend and interlace to become a tree.

You may look at the rest of the gallery on The BBC.

(Image credit: Stephen McDonell/BBC)

It is quite frustrating whenever you have loads of work to do and suddenly, your computer would just crash or stop loading because of all the applications you have opened on the computer. It takes time to process but even the most powerful computers would have to deal with a few hiccups here and there.

You see, each bit of data is stored by the charge (or lack of it) on a tiny capacitor within the RAM chip. But these capacitors gradually lose their charge over time. To avoid losing the stored data, they must regularly get refreshed to restore the charge (if present) to its original level.

This refresh process involves reading the value of every bit and then writing it back. During this "refresh" time, the memory is busy and it can't perform normal operations like loading or storing bits.

Read more of Marek Majkowski's article to learn about how dynamic RAM works on Cloudflare.

(Image credit: Radoslavkk/Wikimedia Commons)

Last Monday, NASA's InSight has landed on Mars. What prospects will we have from this endeavor? Will we be able to see Martians? Are there chances that humans could possibly inhabit and build a civilization on other planets?

Check out the details of the mission, its status, and the journey that it took on NASA's Mars InSight Mission page.

(Image credit: NASA JPL)

Talk about a false sense of security. Researchers have been able to successfully create working master fingerprints that could unlock a majority of modern smartphones today.

Known as DeepMasterPrints, these artificially generated fingerprints are similar to the master key for a building. Although the researchers were not the first to consider creating master fingerprints, they were the first to use a machine learning algorithm to create working master prints.

Faking one's fingerprints and other biometric features seems like something taken from an action thriller spy film or series like Mission Impossible, but being able to create an AI that "learns" how to generate fake biometrics is now becoming a scary reality.

(Image credit: Vice)

It is quite a complicated concept to understand how data hacks happen and how they are evolving to become more and more sophisticated to make data theft seamless. We aren't even completely safe on the platforms we use online.

Rowhammer attacks are fiendishly technical. They involve strategically executing a program over and over on a "row" of transistors in a computer's memory chip. The idea is to "hammer" that row, until it leaks some electricity into the adjacent row. That leakage can cause a bit in the target row to "flip" from one position to another, slightly altering the data stored in memory.

Previously, Rowhammer was understood to impact typical random access memory used in many off-the-shelf computers. Rowhammer has also been shown to threaten the memory in Android phones. But on Wednesday, researchers in the VUSec research group at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam published details of a next-generation Rowhammer ambush that can target what's known as "error-correcting code" memory.

Now, ECC memory is increasingly found in a diverse array of devices which means that if Rowhammer is able to bypass ECC, we are in for some even more dangerous data breaches in the future.

(Image credit: La Tigre)

Anxiety can come in different forms and at the most inopportune moments. Stripping yourself of all the hustle and bustle from your daily grind can leave you looking at your life and facing the realities that you wouldn't usually have time to focus on.

That's why when you find yourself alone in the hotel room, with some time to spare before a business meeting or maybe right after an event that you just attended, the atmosphere around you might get oddly discomforting.

Jennifer Shannon, a cognitive and behavioral therapist, suggests a few ways to sink into the feeling of anxiety. Erin Van Der Meer shares these tips in this article at The Daily Beast.

(Image credit: The Daily Beast)