Science and Tech
Did drought bring the end of the Hittites?
Published
2 years agoon
By
Berry Fox
A new study examining the reason for the collapse of the Hittites, one of the most powerful empires of antiquity in the Middle East, sheds light on the impact of an unusual drought on the end of the 500-year reign.
The Hittite Empire, which reigned between 1650-1200 BC, had established a powerful civilization in Anatolia during its golden age.
At that time, it controlled central, southern and southeastern Anatolia, as well as the Levant and northern Syria.
Hattusa, the capital city of today’s Çorum province, was central to Hittite political and religious policies for centuries.
But the five-century-old empire collapsed quite suddenly and dramatically around 1200 BC.
Hittite king II. Suppiluliuma came to power around 1207 BC and won numerous victories.
However, there was no other Hittite king recorded after him in history.
An inscription from the reign of Egyptian ruler Ramses III (1188-1177 BC) states that the Hittites were driven out by ‘seamen’ before attacking Egypt.
It was thought that Hattusha, the capital of the Hittites, was also destroyed by the attacks of the sea peoples or raiders in Anatolia.
However, new research has revealed that the city had been evacuated by the royal administration prior to these invasions.
It has remained an important question for historians why they left Hattusha, the center of their faith and bureaucracy, which was based on difficulties such as raids, internal and external conflicts or epidemics, one of the best-known enemies of the Hittites.
Answering BBC’s questions, Sturt Manning, Professor of Classical Archeology and Science at Cornell University and lead author of the study, states that climate has previously been thought to be a factor, but that long-term, infrequent changes in climate are unlikely to lead empires to collapse:
“Instead, it is the successive or ever-expanding years of unexpected crisis that adversely affect many communities of people who depend on agriculture and animal husbandry from the past to the present.
“A semi-arid environment can exacerbate such challenges. So we tried to study the climate in the region in high resolution: This meant addressing the climate on an annual scale.”
THEY EXAMINED THE AGE RINGS OF ANCIENT JUNIPER TREE
prof. Sturt Manning and his research team studied the age rings of trees to get a broader perspective on the impact of climate during the Hittite collapse.
Researchers investigated how the age rings obtained from preserved juniper trees at Midas Mound in Gordion, about 100 km from Ankara, changed over the years.
Juniper trees were known to grow around 1200 BC.
prof. The narrowing of the ring spacing of these trees means their access to water is reduced and drought conditions are exacerbating, Manning says.
“We checked this prediction by also performing stable carbon isotope analysis of tree rings: In drier conditions, the pores (stomas) in trees’ leaves tend to conserve water, and at such times the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 in tree age rings changes.”
As a result of these studies, the researchers found that the Hittites were accustomed to one-year dry periods and they adapted to it.
However, successive severe dry seasons and associated droughts were only a once-in-a-lifetime event.
And according to the researchers, the only example of this happened around 1198-1996 BC.
prof. “The extraordinary and unexpected drought that lasted 3 years in a row is likely to have plunged Hattusha and her empire into an existential crisis during this already very difficult period,” says Manning.
HOW DID THE HITTITES RESPONSE TO THE DROUGHT?
According to researchers, the Hittites were accustomed to dry seasons. And they were taking different measures to deal with these periods.
They stored their grain in the warehouses they built and consumed them in a longer time.
Similarly, he built dams to conserve water for later use.
They consciously used both grains and livestock to feed.
Answering the questions of BBC, the lead author of the research, Prof. “They had a sophisticated infrastructure. These combinations provided reasonable resilience to anticipated challenges. It can be said that they had reasonable expectations of low crop/drought times,” says Manning.
But, according to the study, consecutive years of drought may have broken their resilience, bringing them to the point of no return.
prof. Manning states that the storage technology of the Hittites and the practices that protect the crops in the warehouses against insects and other pests can be effective for a maximum of 1-2 years.
According to him, the inability of land transportation to be carried out on a large scale like today’s caused the Hittites to face an “acute catastrophe threat in the third year”.
‘DROUGHT COULD BE ONLY A FACTOR IN THE COLLAPSE OF THE HITIES’
The research, published in the journal Nature, offers a different perspective on the collapse of the Hittites’ glorious empire, but there are historians who are skeptical of its results.
Speaking to BBC, German Archeology Institute Boğazköy Archaeological Excavation Head Prof. Dr. Andreas Schachner says that the drought problem alone cannot be a sufficient reason to bring the end of an empire:
“The fact that the research comes to this conclusion with limited data from only one political and cultural center of the Hittites oversimplifies the complexity of the event. Many different reasons may have come together in the same period and drought could be just one of these reasons. For example, migrations or earthquakes are some of them. According to one hypothesis. Around 1200 BC there was a chain of earthquakes that destroyed the current Syrian coastlines.”
prof. Dr. Schachner states that research should use more comprehensive data to reach a more reliable conclusion:
“There is too much regionalism in Central Anatolia; you cannot adapt the data in Gordion to Ankara and the data from Boğazköy to Gordion.”
However, there are those who think that it is important that the research reveals for the first time the role of environmental factors in the complex chain of events that affected the collapse of the Hittites.
Answering BBC questions, an academic at the Department of Ancient Near East Languages and Studies at Bilkent University Department of Archeology, Mr. Yavaş Gerçek, said that Manning and his team’s research “rather than suggesting that the Hittite state collapsed due to drought, drought is a spark that triggers other economic, political, social or environmental factors.” He argues that he is” and continues his words as follows:
“It shows that environmental factors and the accompanying political, economic and social transformations need to be studied at smaller scales, not just at the state or empire scale.
“Further studies should investigate whether small or medium-sized human communities are more resilient to such environmental challenges than the state, and how they cope with such processes.”
prof. Manning notes that the risk of unexpected droughts that occur every few centuries is a “historical challenge” with the power to “shake any status quo.”
The research suggests that this crisis brings with it other problems and threats.
prof. “While this actually happens rarely, he emphasizes that we also need to take into account the things that harm our world,” says Manning.
“Three years in a row of severe drought affecting a wide area across many continents can present a real challenge today as it was then.”
“We have to ask ourselves the question: ‘How resilient is our society, country and world really to such risks?’”
Science and Tech
Cyber attack warning from Microsoft
Published
2 years agoon
25/05/2023By
Berry Fox
Microsoft has warned that Chinese state-backed hackers are targeting critical US cyber infrastructures for intelligence gathering across many industries.
US software giant Microsoft warned that the Chinese cyber actor codenamed “Volt Typhoon” revealed “post-compromat credential access” and “network system discovery-oriented, covert and targeted malicious activities” against critical infrastructure organizations in the USA. .
“Microsoft assesses with moderate confidence that the Volt Typhoon action is aimed at developing capabilities that could disrupt the critical communications infrastructure between the United States and the Asian region during future crises,” the company said in its warning.
While Microsoft informed that the actor in question has been active since mid-2021, it advised customers affected by a possible unauthorized access to close their accessed accounts and change their passwords.
On the other hand, in the news of the American New York Times, citing anonymous sources, it was claimed that the US intelligence was aware of the fact that the aforementioned cyber actor had access to US networks when the Chinese balloon entered US airspace in February.
In the news, it was claimed that Volt Typhoon’s activity in February was focused on the communication infrastructure between the USA and the island of Guam.
The island of Guam is the most critical point in the US strategy to contain China and is home to the largest US military base in the region.
Following Microsoft’s warning, the US has issued a joint Cybersecurity Alert with the cybersecurity authorities of the four countries to draw attention to a set of actions associated with the Chinese state-backed cyber actor.
Joint alert is the United States’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and NSA, as well as Australian Signals Agency Australian Cybersecurity Center (ACSC), Canadian Communications Security Authority Cybersecurity Center (CCCS), New The National Cyber Security Center of Zealand (NCSC-NZ) and the UK’s National Center for Cyber Security (NCSC-UK) also participated.
In the warning published, it was reported that the relevant institutions believed that the actor identified by Microsoft could apply the same techniques to other countries and other sectors.
Stating that one of Volt Typhoon’s main tactics is to hide using built-in network management tools, the institutions included the information, “Some of the built-in tools used by this actor are wmic, ntdsutil, netsh and PowerShell.”
Science and Tech
Creator of ChatGPT: My biggest fear is the possibility of harming the world
Published
2 years agoon
17/05/2023By
Berry Fox
“My biggest fear is that we, as the tech industry, may cause significant damage to the world,” said Samuel Harris Altman, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of OpenAi, which developed ChatGPT.
Speaking at the US Senate Judiciary subcommittee, OpenAi’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Samuel Harris Altman, said: “My biggest fear is that we, as the technology industry, may cause significant damage to the world. I think it could be different,” he said.
“As with all technological revolutions, I expect a significant impact on employment, but it’s very difficult to predict exactly what that impact looks like,” said Altman, warning the Senate that ChatGPT technology “could go to a very bad place”.
According to the newspaper Oxygen, Samuel Harris Altman, speaking about the growing popularity of ChatGPT and the positive and negative possibilities of artificial intelligence, acknowledged that the government should step in to ensure these changes are managed.
In the 3-hour meeting, Altman advised the US Senators to establish an independent mechanism to conduct licensing audits of artificial intelligence technologies, and stated that this would allow a set of security standards, including the assessment of their dangerous capabilities, to be established.
This way, Altman said, we can ensure that the models “can’t self-replicate and move on their own.”
Speaking to the committee meeting, some senators also warned about corporate cooperation in the artificial intelligence market, pointing to the problems that will be faced if a small number of technology companies dominate this sector.
Science and Tech
Warnings about artificial intelligence from Geoffrey Hinton, scientist who left Google
Published
2 years agoon
02/05/2023By
Berry Fox
Scientist Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence, made statements that warned against progress in this field.
Hinton, 75, recently resigned from his position at Google.
“Now I can talk about what the dangers are,” Hinton said in an interview with the BBC, adding that some of these dangers are “very frightening.”
The scientist, who has British and Canadian citizenship, says that chatbots, known as chatbots, may soon exceed the information capacity of the human brain.
Hinton played a role in reaching the present point of artificial intelligence with his research on deep learning and artificial neural networks.
Advanced systems like ChatGPT are at the center of warnings about the future as well as the possibilities they provide.
Hinton also draws attention to this point:
“Right now, GPT-4 can far outshine a human in the amount of general knowledge it holds. In terms of reasoning, they are not equally good, but they can make simple reasoning.
Considering the rate of progress, we know that these systems will become more effective very quickly. And that should worry us. At the moment, as far as I know, they are not smarter than us. But they may soon be smarter.”
In the article he wrote for the New York Times, Hinton emphasizes that “bad people” can do “bad things” with artificial intelligence.
Answering the BBC’s question about this point, Hinton replies, “This is one of those nightmare scenarios”:
“Suppose one of the villains, Putin, allows robots to create their own sub-purposes. This may eventually lead to sub-objectives such as ‘I need to get more power’.
Hinton continues:
“I came to the conclusion that the type of intelligence we create is very different from what we have.
“We are a biological system, but these are digital systems. The biggest difference with digital systems is that you can make multiple copies of the same size.
“All these copies can learn different things but instantly share their knowledge with each other. So it’s like you have 10 thousand people and one of them learns something and the others have this information at the same time. That’s why these chatbots have more information than any human.
Regarding his departure from Google, Geoffrey Hinton said, “I wanted to say good things about them. “If I had said these things while I was working there, they wouldn’t have been effective enough,” he said.
Science and Tech
New planet twice the size of Earth discovered
Published
2 years agoon
01/05/2023By
Berry Fox
Scientists announced the discovery of a new planet called TOI-733b, which is stated to be about twice the size of Earth.
Scientists have discovered a new planet about twice the size of Earth and covered with oceans.
It is stated that this planet, called TOI-733b, is only one of more than 5 thousand exoplanets that have been known after the first discovery in the 1990s.
TOI-733b was found 245 light-years away by NASA’s telescope TESS. It has been noted that the relative similarities of the planet orbiting a star slightly smaller than the sun in a period of only 4.9 days could play a key role in understanding the formation of planets in the universe.
THE INTERESTING SIDE OF THE PLANET ‘SIZE’
It was stated that the particularly interesting aspect of TOI-733b for researchers is its size.
Density measurements on the planet from a distance show that it has either lost the atmosphere it once had or is a planet that is completely covered with water.
However, several data points indicate that TOI-733b’s atmosphere is slowly depleting, which may be due to its proximity to its star’s heat.
Other theories suggest that TOI-733b lost its hydrogen and helium and instead retained an atmosphere filled with water vapor or regenerated a secondary atmosphere made up of heavier elements.
“ONE KEY PIECE”
The research on the planet by Astronomy & Astrophysics noted how exciting and “interesting” the discovery of the planet is in the field of astronomy, saying it has the potential to be “a small but key piece to solving the big puzzles in exoplanet science”.
“With the promise of increasingly in-depth theoretical analysis and high-precision follow-up by current and future facilities, we appear to be on our way to answering important questions about planet formation and evolution,” the research said.
Science and Tech
Research: Eating french fries can cause depression
Published
2 years agoon
28/04/2023By
Berry Fox
New research; found that fried foods are not only beneficial for physical health, but also cause mental disorders such as depression.
According to a study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, data from more than 140,000 people who consumed fried food for 11 years revealed a link between fried food consumption and anxiety disorder and depression.
The data obtained from the UK Biobank, which contains the health data of 500 thousand people in the United Kingdom, was analyzed by a group of scientists in Hangzhou, China.
Studies have shown that eating french fries increases the risk of anxiety disorder by 12 percent and the risk of depression by 7 percent.
The researchers put forward the thesis that the results obtained may be related to a chemical called acrylamide that occurs during the frying process.
However, the researchers stressed that the results from the study are preliminary, and there is no need to give advice to stop eating french fries.
“There is no need to panic about the ill effects of fried food,” Yu Zhang, co-author of the article, told CNN.
Science and Tech
Microsoft to pay US fine for sanctions violations
Published
2 years agoon
07/04/2023By
Berry Fox
It was reported that the US technology company Microsoft will settle in the investigation carried out on the grounds that it violated the US export controls and sanctions, and will pay a total fine of $ 3.3 million.
In a statement made by the US Department of Commerce, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) of the Department of Commerce and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the US Department of the Treasury gave a total of $ 3.3 million to Microsoft for violations of US export controls and sanctions laws. sentence was reported.
In the statement, which stated that Microsoft voluntarily disclosed the alleged violations to both BIS and OFAC, it was noted that the company cooperated in the joint investigation carried out by BIS’s Export Enforcement Office and OFAC.
In the statement, Microsoft reportedly took corrective measures after discovering the ongoing situation that preceded export controls and sanctions in connection with Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In the statement, it was stated that BIS imposed an administrative fine of 624 thousand 13 dollars on Microsoft, while OFAC imposed a fine of 2 million 980 thousand 266 dollars for 1,339 violations of the sanctions regulations covering Ukraine/Russia, Cuba, Iran and Syria.
In the statement, it was stated that Microsoft was given a loan of $ 276 thousand 382 by the BIS, subject to meeting its requirements under the settlement agreement with OFAC, and the total penalty amount was $ 3 million 327 thousand 897.
The U.S. Treasury Department said in a statement that most breaches between 2012 and 2019 were related to sanctioned Russian entities or individuals in the Crimea region, as a result of Microsoft’s failure to identify and block the use of its products by sanctioned parties.
Science and Tech
Feature that will delight Microsoft Teams users
Published
2 years agoon
05/04/2023By
Berry Fox
A new feature has been introduced for Microsoft Teams. Thanks to this feature, the background of your conversations will now look more realistic.
Microsoft is adding a new green screen feature for Teams. This new feature, which will make the background appear more realistic in video calls, will also increase the virtual background experience.
NEW FEATURE WILL SEPARATE THE USER PROPERLY FROM THE FUND
The new feature was announced in a blog post. There are some nuances to use this feature in Microsoft Teams. The wall or wallpaper in the background should be unstained and should be preferred plain without anything like a poster or frame on it. Users need to apply the background effect to enable the green screen effect and choose the background color carefully for the effect to be of better quality.
On the other hand, the effect works much better if you already have a green screen. But of course this is not a requirement.
The feature can be used on Windows devices and versions with Intel processors on macOS. So if you’re using a Mac with an M1 or M2 processor, you can’t use this feature right now.
The green screen feature, which does not currently support the together mode, is open to everyone. To enable it, you need to apply a background effect in your Teams meeting. You can choose the color of the wall behind you or green if you have a custom green screen.
Science and Tech
Russian satellites will offer internet access in the Arctic in 2026
Published
2 years agoon
05/04/2023By
Berry Fox
Thanks to the Russian spacecraft Skif, people in the Arctic will have access to the internet in 2026, the TASS news agency reported on Friday.
In the statement made by the press service of the Sphere Congress, it was noted that internet access will be provided in the North Pole from 2026 with the Skif satellites belonging to the project.
According to the press service, there is almost no Internet access in the Arctic. People in the region can access the Internet using American satellite phones, but this method is slow and expensive to access the global network.
In October 2022, Russia successfully placed a Skif-D satellite into orbit using the Soyuz-2.1b launch vehicle. In the future, eight Skif satellites are planned to enter orbit to form a multi-satellite orbital constellation.
Science and Tech
Apple stopped production of the M2 processor for a while
Published
2 years agoon
05/04/2023By
Berry Fox
According to new reports, Apple has stopped the production of M2 processors for a while.
Although Apple seems to be progressing well according to the numbers, it is having problems in some parts. Apple, which stopped the production of the iPhone mini series on the grounds that it did not see ‘as much demand’ as it wanted, this time prefers a similar scenario for the M2 processor.
APPLE’S SALES ARE DROPPING TOO
In the news, behind this decision of Apple lies the expectation of a decrease in Mac sales. In the news reported by SamMobile, it was also written that Apple’s decision will affect Samsung. According to reports, Apple completely stopped the production of M2 processors for MacBooks in January and February.
According to the allegations, although production started partially in March, it is produced in a much more limited way compared to the same period last year.
The source of these claims, which started in the South Korean media, is the decline in global demand for computers.
Apple, which has a significant share in computer sales, is also affected by this decline. Actually, it’s not a surprise for Apple either. There was a statement from Apple that ‘the PC market is in a difficult situation’ and that they ‘may have difficulties in the short term’.
Another crazy move came from Elon Musk, who bought Twitter.
Elon Musk replaced Twitter’s logo with Dogecoin.
Elon Musk has made a change that will be on the agenda on the social media platform Twitter. Musk replaced Twitter’s logo with Dogecoin.
After the logo started to be displayed on the Twitter homepage, there was a great increase in Dogecoin, gaining more than 30 percent in value. There was no official statement.
While there was no official statement from the company after the change, Elon Musk aroused curiosity with his tweet.
In the cartoon in the tweet, the Shiba dog gives his license to the police he was caught while driving. The blue bird photo on the driver’s license says, “That’s the old photo.”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2023
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