Adding to the list of animals that make use of tools, it turns out that Australian raptors deliberately set fires to flush out prey, picking up burning sticks from an existing fire and dropping them onto dry grass to start a new conflagration. Although this is news to modern science, stories of this behavior are interwoven into Aboriginal culture, from knowledge that spans back through the millennia.
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Last November, the Scan Pyramids project unveiled evidence that there is a 30-meter (100-foot) chamber running above the Grand Gallery in the Great Pyramid at Giza. The image of the chamber, produced by muon tomography (basically an x-ray of the pyramid, made using cosmic rays), is unfortunately imprecise, leading to a wide variety of ideas and speculation as to the chamber’s function and what may lie within. One such idea has been put forward by a Italian astrophysicist/archaeoastronomer Giulio Magli, in that it may contain an iron throne for the pharaoh to sit upon, as part of his journey into the afterlife.
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What is consciousness and why does it matter whether or not we know? The truth is that our most basic understanding of who we are and what our fate may be depends on the answers to those two questions, and in this week’s show Ervin Laszlo, one of the great thinkers and philosophers of our time, returns to Dreamland to tell us about the newest research into such things as whether or not consciousness lives only in the brain, and, if it is nonlocal, then what is the meaning of human life and the fate of a human being?
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Researchers at Japan’s Kyoto University have developed a new artificial intelligence program that can be used to decode human thought patterns, translating brain scans into pictures of not only what the subject is looking at, but also simply remembering, into digital images that can be reviewed.
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