All posts tagged: history

Gigs turns your concert history into a personal live music archive

Gigs turns your concert history into a personal live music archive

Published by skeptic

People always hold up their phones to record special moments at concerts, but they often never revisit those videos. Gigs, a new concert-tracking app launching this week, wants to change that. The iOS app helps live music fans turn their years of concerts, tickets, and photo and video memories into a personal archive with the help of Apple’s on-device AI. To add a concert to Gigs, users can import a ticket, email, screenshot, or even a website link, and the app will use Apple’s Foundation Models to extract the dates, venues, lineups, and other information to fill out the listing. For those who already track their concert history elsewhere, like Setlist.fm or Concert Archives, there’s the option to automatically import years of concert and festival attendance by linking their accounts. Image Credits:Gigs Once the concerts have been added to the app, users can sync those dates to their personal calendar, get ticket sale reminders, browse expected set lists, and view other info about the show or artist. When the concert ends, the app reminds the …

The Books Briefing: The First Draft of Cultural History

The Books Briefing: The First Draft of Cultural History

Published by Daniella Wilson

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Newspapers publish the rough draft of history, as the saying goes. And what’s the rough draft of the news? I would argue that it’s gossip, as filtered by good reporters. Which means that gossip is the very rough first version of what ends up in the history books. I first thought of this syllogism while reading primary sources for my book of cultural history, and it came to mind recently as I dove into Lena Dunham’s highly entertaining new memoir, Famesick. “God bless a memoir that drops names—the more bold-faced and braggadocious the better,” my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote this week in an essay about the book. Gilbert also laments that Dunham’s second memoir fails at what her groundbreaking HBO series, Girls, managed to do: “make broader meaning out of her experiences.” It’s true that the book cannot compete with the show’s ability to explain members of a generation to themselves. And yet, …

‘Doors to Death’ reveal how Romans upgraded a stadium for bloodsport

‘Doors to Death’ reveal how Romans upgraded a stadium for bloodsport

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The ancient Roman city of Perge—in present-day southern Turkey—was one of the region’s most prominent urban centers. By the 2nd century CE, the hub was so large that it even supported a sizable stadium for communal gatherings and athletic events. However, these events took a much darker turn only a couple hundred years later. Based on recent archaeological evidence examined at the site, Perge’s stadium received renovations during the Late Roman period (the 3rd through 6th centuries CE) to facilitate deadly gladiatorial fights. The sites were also used for Damnatio ad Bestias—public executions by wild animals. These structural additions even included five specially designed gateways researchers nicknamed the “Doors to Death.” The findings are detailed in a recently published study in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology from a team led by Istanbul University archaeologist Sedef Çokay Kepçe. While the stadium was originally designed to seat thousands of attendees, their taste in entertainment shifted as the empire transitioned into the …

The Triumphant New LACMA Has the Potential to Rewrite Art History

The Triumphant New LACMA Has the Potential to Rewrite Art History

Published by José Betancourt

Can an art museum tell a non-linear version of art history and still be legible to its visitors? That’s the question guiding the David Geffen Galleries, the new building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that opens to members on April 19 and to the public on May 4. Typically, museums narrate millennia of artistic expression as a series of progressive movements limited to the US and Europe, with everything else pushed to the margins. LACMA has historically been one of those museums, with one of the buildings it tore down to make way for the Geffen Galleries being devoted primarily to art of the Americas.   Related Articles Now, with other institutions embracing a more global art history that emphasizes plurality, here comes the new LACMA, where artworks made across multiple centuries press up against each other, as do pieces made within in the same decade but in drastically different geographical contexts. It’s a triumph. The plan to rethink LACMA’s entire campus has been in the works for 25 years, starting with …

How robots learn: A brief, contemporary history

How robots learn: A brief, contemporary history

Published by skeptic

That has changed. The machines are yet unbuilt, but the money is flowing: Companies and investors put $6.1 billion into humanoid robots in 2025 alone, four times what was invested in 2024.  What happened? A revolution in how machines have learned to interact with the world.  Imagine you’d like a pair of robot arms installed in your home purely to do one thing: fold clothes. How would it learn to do that? You could start by writing rules. Check the fabric to figure out how much deformation it can tolerate before tearing. Identify a shirt’s collar. Move the gripper to the left sleeve, lift it, and fold it inward by exactly this distance. Repeat for the right sleeve. If the shirt is rotated, turn the plan accordingly. If the sleeve is twisted, correct it. Very quickly the number of rules explodes, but a complete accounting of them could produce reliable results. This was the original craft of robotics: anticipating every possibility and encoding it in advance. Around 2015, the cutting edge started to do things …

Britain’s bitter assisted dying debate is about to come roaring back to life – POLITICO

Britain’s bitter assisted dying debate is about to come roaring back to life – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Da Costa called the plan “extraordinary.” She said: “Last time round, MPs voted to allow the Lords to do their work. This is a very different vote. There will be no ‘off switch’ once it goes to the Lords. MPs will be asked if they’re happy with the bill — with all its deficiencies and all the evidence that has been heard — to become law.” Opponents of the bill argue that the debates in the Lords have exposed holes in the law that the Commons scrutiny did not. One, Labour peer Luciana Berger, pointed out that the bill has sweeping powers and 59 clauses — far longer than any known private members’ bill, including those that allowed abortion and outlawed capital punishment. Supporters of assisted dying react outside Parliament on June 20, 2025 as MPs in the House of Commons voted in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. | Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images “This process has shown that we can’t get a bill that is safe,” said Berger. …

RFK Jr. vs. the Animal Kingdom: A Brief History of the Secretary’s Fascination With Creatures Great and Small

RFK Jr. vs. the Animal Kingdom: A Brief History of the Secretary’s Fascination With Creatures Great and Small

Published by Sam Flores

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., currently the nation’s secretary of health and human services, often positions himself as an enemy of settled science. But when it comes to dead animals, he’s somehow always ready for hands-on exploration. In a new biography, RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise—released Tuesday—journalist Isabel Vincent reports that Kennedy once pulled over to the side of the road to cut off the genitals of a dead racoon for quasi-scientific study. According to the New York Post, Vincent learned about this incident from Kennedy’s own private journals, which he wrote between the years of 1999 and 2001. “I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be,” the journal entry read—a surprising show of self-awareness for someone sticking his fingers into a dead woodland creature. Apparently, Kennedy doesn’t have a love for animals so much as an irrepressible desire to have them around. It apparently started early: In his …

The Online Fiction Boom Reimagining China’s History

The Online Fiction Boom Reimagining China’s History

Published by skeptic

If you could travel back in time, what year would you choose? What would you change about history? For a surprising number of Chinese people, their answer turns out to be the same: Use what they know today to save China from its unglorious past. In a new book titled Make China Great Again: Online Alt-History Fiction and Popular Authoritarianism, Rongbin Han, a Chinese politics professor at the University of Georgia, examines a popular science fiction genre where people travel back in time to rewrite Chinese history. Han looked at the 2,100 most popular titles on a top web novel review platform and found 238 such stories where the main characters bring technological knowledge, advanced political theories, and economic reform ideas back to ancient China or more recent historical eras. Who says 10th-century China is unequipped for a parliamentary political system? Someone’s gotta try to see how it would have worked. Han says he has personally read over 70 of these alt-history fiction books, plus dozens of other web novels with other themes for comparison. …

How Iran cryptocurrency demands explain a key role of money throughout history

How Iran cryptocurrency demands explain a key role of money throughout history

Published by skeptic

When Iran began demanding payment in exchange for safe transit through the Strait of Hormuz, it offered the option to pay in cryptocurrency. Likewise, the shadowy network of tankers that have smuggled Russian oil to world markets since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have often been paid this way. Illicit actors the world over have increasingly turned to cryptocurrency as a way to conduct business while avoiding the risk of US sanctions. In so doing, countries like Russia and Iran are drawing on a characteristic of money that has been around since at least the bronze age: its ability to facilitate trade between strangers and across political boundaries. In my book Shell Money (2024), which investigates some of the world’s earliest forms of money, I show how similar dynamics have been at play throughout history. Cryptocurrency has been Iran’s preferred payment method for safe transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Somkanae Sawatdinak/Shutterstock Modern currencies like the US dollar and euro are backed by confidence in the financial institutions of nation states – in …

It’s a bird! It’s a head! No, it’s a mummified foot.

It’s a bird! It’s a head! No, it’s a mummified foot.

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Not every mummy is treated equally. While the traditional image conjures a well-preserved, carefully wrapped ancient Egyptian body inside an elaborately decorated tomb, there are many more examples of partial and poorly prepared remains. These especially delicate specimens are difficult for scientists to even document, much less analyze in sufficient detail. Take a collection of mummy fragments housed at the MNMKK Semmelweis Museum of Medical History in Budapest, Hungary. Curators have housed the archaeological discoveries since the institution opened in 1965, and at least some of the mummies are over 2,300 years old. But apart from the radiocarbon dating, they lacked the technological capabilities to safely study them. However, researchers can finally see the remains with impressive clarity thanks to the recent installation of a high-resolution CT scanner. The oldest mummy specimen is over 2,300 years old. Credit: Medical Imaging Center / Semmelweis University “Based on the results so far, it is evident that modern imaging technology opens up …