Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day: Amid the recent years’ wave of antisemitism worldwide, the “For A Righteous Cause” report, published for the fourth year by the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, highlights an encouraging phenomenon: new exhibitions and museums commemorating the Holocaust and heroism that have opened or are under construction in Muslim countries.

Scientists studying pine trees and juniper shrubs in northern Scandinavia are revealing the weather of the past by looking at tree rings — which can tell us far more than just the trees’ age. ‘Blue’ tree rings, which indicate that the cell walls of that year’s growth never lignified properly, show us when a summer was too cold for the plants to grow. The scientists identified blue rings caused by particularly cold summers in 1877 and 1902, which could potentially have been caused by the eruptions of far-off volcanoes Cotopaxi in Ecuador and Mount Pelée in Martinique.  

Peter Turchin, from the Complexity Science Hub, and an international team of collaborators decided to evaluate the historical knowledge of advanced A.I. models such as ChatGPT-4, Llama, and Gemini. According to the results, the A.I. chatbots struggled with historical knowledge. GPT-4-Turbo emerged as the best-performing model but still only achieved a 46% balanced accuracy—barely above the baseline of random guessing. 

Archaeologists have uncovered a rare Tetrarchic boundary stone at the site of Abel Beth Maacah in northern Israel. Originally marking land borders under Roman Emperor Diocletian’s tax reforms, the stone provides insight into ancient land ownership, local settlement patterns, and imperial administrative practices. The discovery also introduces two previously unknown place names, expanding our understanding of the region’s historical geography and socio-economic landscape.

A long-standing question about when archaic members of the genus Homo adapted to harsh environments such as deserts and rainforests has been answered in a new research paper.

An early human ancestor of our species successfully navigated harsher and more arid terrains for longer in Eastern Africa than previously thought, according to a new study.

Homo erectus, the first of our relatives to have human-like proportions and the first known early human to migrate out of Africa, was the focus of the new study led by the international research team.