Trails are narrow ribbons of civilization cutting through wilderness. They are as much about what is worth exploring as they are about what's off limits. A hiker loses a trail, and suddenly they're in a deep wilderness, unmoored from the world until they stumble back to that thin filament again. To find missing hikers, it makes sense to look near trails, and to do that, a team at the University of Zurich is training drones to identify and follow trails into the woods.
How do you reconstruct a civilization's history when it has been literally trampled underfoot? Some of Rome's roads through the Balkans are largely forgotten, others still in use, and others we only know about because of documents from travelers explaining a route that matches ruined Roman distance markers. Hoping to get a better grasp of how these road networks worked in the Balkans between the 1st century BC and 4th century AD, researchers turned to an unlikely research assistant: slime mold. Published in The Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, a new study details how “slime mould imitates development” of these roads, by figuring out the most efficient way to travel between cities. That is, if the cities were made of yummy treats.
The act of deception is probably as old as civilization - not long after humans began communicating, they began communicating lies. Shortly after that, they probably started trying to force others to tell the truth. Modern technology has given us a few options in this arena, from dubious polygraphs to powerful drugs - and now a new study suggests brain interference can work, too.
