Inscription About Ancient 'Monkey Colony' Survives ISIS Attacks

A number of artifacts with inscriptions survived in the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, after the Islamic State group (also known as ISIS) destroyed the site.

The group targeted Nimrud, along with many other historical sites in Iraq and Syria, in an attempt to eradicate the history of the Assyrians, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and other peoples who live in Iraq and Syria. Countries and groups around the world have condemned this destruction of cultural heritage as a war crime.

Live Science showed photographs of some of the surviving inscriptions to scholars who translated or deciphered their meanings.  The inscriptions tell a number of stories about the AssyrianKing Ashurnasirpal II (reign 883–859 B.C.), including the lands he conquered, the treasures he took, the palace he constructed and the ancestors he had.

All the surviving inscriptions found so far are written in the king's name, who turned Nimrud into his capital, building a vast palace in the city.

For instance, one story, inscribed on a statue that ISIS had tried to destroy, tells of a monkey colony that Ashurnasirpal II bred at Nimrud, stating that "herds of them in greatnumbers" lived at Nimrud during the king's reign. The inscription also tells of how Ashurnasirpal IIcaptured lions and kept them at Nimrud.

ISIS is under siege in Mosul, Iraq, and the group's remaining territories in Syria and Iraq are shrinking. So the monkey-colony inscription, and its tale of a time when Nimrud was a flourishing place filled with life, may survive far longer than the terrorist group that tried to destroy the statue bearing the inscription.

Nimrud's surviving inscriptions

The Iraq army retook the ancient city of Nimrud (also known as Calah or Kalhu) and surrounding areas on Nov. 13. Photographers who have visited the site, including photojournalist John Beck, have revealed the devastated remains of the ancient city. [Photos: Restoring Life to Iraq's Ruined Artifacts]

Grant Frame, a professor of Near Eastern languages and civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania who is an expert in Neo-Assyrian (ninth to sixth century B.C.) writing, examined some of the images captured by Beck and others. Frame told Live Science what the inscriptions, in general, say, noting that the surviving texts were duplicates of original versions; multiple copies with similar text were made in ancient times.

Monkey colony

The monkey colony is perhaps the most interesting story that Ashurnasirpal II tells. "The section here is a summary of the areas in the west — in Lebanon and Syria — who gave him tribute and the bringing of animals, monkeys and lions, to his capital city of Kalhu [another name for Nimrud]" said Frame.

At least eight "copies" of this monkey tale have been found in the past by archaeologists and historians, Frame said. The Assyrian historian Albert Kirk Grayson published a translation of these texts in 1991 in the book "Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC" (University of Toronto Press).

Grayson translated these eight copies as reading, "I brought them [the monkeys] to my land Aššur. I bred herds of them in great numbers in Calah [and] displayed [them] to all the people of my land."

That mention of breeding in great numbers appears even though the translation mentions only the female monkeys. This means that the king already had, or also received, male monkeys and got the newly acquired female monkeys to breed with them. [Photos: New Archaeological Discoveries in Northern Iraq]

The inscription also mentions how Ashurnasirpal II captured lions. "With my outstretched hand and my fierce heart, I captured 15 strong lions from the mountains and forests. I took away 50 lion cubs. I herded them into Calah and the palaces of my land into cages," the inscription reads, as translated by Grayson.

Surviving ancient stories

The surviving inscriptions tell more tales from Ashurnasirpal II's reign, including the pride he felt for his palace.

Two of the surviving inscriptions, Frame said, preserve part of a text in which Ashurnasirpal II says that, at Nimrud, "I founded therein my lordly palace. I built this palace for the eternal admiration of rulers and princes [and] decorated it in a splendid fashion. I made [replicas of] all beasts of mountains and seas," placing the animal replicas in the palace doorways, as translated by Grayson.

ISIS largely destroyed the palace, although a bit of it appears to have survived, said Clemens Reichel, a curator at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, who viewed some of the photographs.

Two other inscriptions were found written on two surviving works of art — one showing a winged genie and the other, which is damaged, seeming to show multiple male individuals. These works of art contain a widely used ancient text that modern-day scholars sometimes call a "standard inscription," Frame said.

The two inscriptions indicate that Ashurnasirpal II owned these works of art: "[Property of] the palace of Ashurnasirpal, vice regent of Assur, chosen of the gods Enlil and Ninurta, beloved of the gods Anu and Dagan, destructive weapon of the great gods, strong king, king of the universe, king of Assyria," as translated by Grayson.

Spoiler Alert: Artificial Intelligence Can Predict How Scenes Will Play Out

A new artificial intelligence system can take still images and generate short videos that simulate what happens next similar to how humans can visually imagine how a scene will evolve, according to a new study.

Humans intuitively understand how the world works, which makes it easier for people, as opposed to machines, to envision how a scene will play out. But objects in a still image could move and interact in a multitude of different ways, making it very hard for machines to accomplish this feat, the researchers said. But a new, so-called deep-learning system was able to trick humans 20 per cent of the time when compared to real footage.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) pitted two neural networks against each other, with one trying to distinguish real videos from machine-generated ones, and the other trying to create videos that were realistic enough to trick the first system.

This kind of setup is known as a "generative adversarial network" (GAN), and competition between the systems results in increasingly realistic videos. When the researchers asked workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform to pick which videos were real, the users picked the machine-generated videos over genuine ones 20 percent of the time, the researchers said.

Early stages

Still, budding film directors probably don’t need to be too concerned about machines taking over their jobs yet — the videos were only 1 to 1.5 seconds long and were made at a resolution of 64 x 64 pixels. But the researchers said that the approach could eventually help robots and self-driving cars navigate dynamic environments and interact with humans, or let Facebook automatically tag videos with labels describing what is happening.

"Our algorithm can generate a reasonably realistic video of what it thinks the future will look like, which shows that it understands at some level what is happening in the present," said Carl Vondrick, a Ph.D. student in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who led the research. "Our work is an encouraging development in suggesting that computer scientists can imbue machines with much more advanced situational understanding."

The system is also able to learn unsupervised, the researchers said. This means that the two million videos — equivalent to about a year's worth of footage — that the system was trained on did not have to be labeled by a human, which dramatically reduces development time and makes it adaptable to new data.

In a study that is due to be presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference, which is being held from Dec. 5 to 10 in Barcelona, Spain, the researchers explain how they trained the system using videos of beaches, train stations, hospitals and golf courses.

"In early prototypes, one challenge we discovered was that the model would predict that the background would warp and deform," Vondrick told Live Science. To overcome this, they tweaked the design so that the system learned separate models for a static background and moving foreground before combining them to produce the video.

AI filmmakers

The MIT team is not the first to attempt to use artificial intelligence to generate video from scratch. But, previous approaches have tended to build video up frame by frame, the researchers said, which allows errors to accumulate at each stage. Instead, the new method processes the entire scene at once — normally 32 frames in one go.

Ian Goodfellow, a research scientist at the nonprofit organization OpenAI, who invented GAN, said that systems doing earlier work in this field were not able to generate both sharp images and motion the way this approach does. However, he added that a new approach that was unveiled by Google's DeepMind AI research unit last month, called Video Pixel Networks (VPN), is able to produce both sharp images and motion. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

"Compared to GANs, VPN are easier to train, but take much longer to generate a video," he told Live Science. "VPN must generate the video one pixel at a time, while GANs can generate many pixels simultaneously."

Vondrick also points out that their approach works on more challenging data like videos scraped from the web, whereas VPN was demonstrated on specially designed benchmark training sets of videos depicting bouncing digits or robot arms.

The results are far from perfect, though. Often, objects in the foreground appear larger than they should, and humans can appear in the footage as blurry blobs, the researchers said. Objects can also disappear from a scene and others can appear out of nowhere, they added.

"The computer model starts off knowing nothing about the world. It has to learn what people look like, how objects move and what might happen," Vondrick said. "The model hasn't completely learned these things yet. Expanding its ability to understand high-level concepts like objects will dramatically improve the generations."

Another big challenge moving forward will be to create longer videos, because that will require the system to track more relationships between objects in the scene and for a longer time, according to Vondrick.

"To overcome this, it might be good to add human input to help the system understand elements of the scene that would be difficult for it to learn on its own," he said.

Mystery Solved! Cause of London's 1952 'Killer Fog' Revealed

London may be known for its drizzly weather, but in 1952 the city's quintessential fog cover turned deadly, and no one knew why — until now.

For five days in December 1952, a fog that contained pollutants enveloped all of London. By the time the dense fog cover lifted, more than 150,000 people had been hospitalized and at least 4,000 people had died. Researchers now estimate that the total death count was likely more than 12,000 people, as well as thousands of animals. Despite its lethal nature, the exact cause and nature of the killer fog has largely remained a mystery. Recently, a team of researchers has determined the likely reasons for its formation.

Researchers have for a long time connected emissions from burning coal with the killer fog, but the specific chemical processes that led to the deadly mix of pollution and fog were not fully understood. To determine what turned the fog into a killer, an international team of scientists from China, the U.S. and the U.K. recreated the fog in a lab using results from laboratory experiments and atmospheric measurements from Beijing and Xi’an, two heavily polluted cities in China.

Study lead author Renyi Zhang, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University, said that sulfate was a big contributor to the deadly London fog. Sulfuric acid particles, which formed from the sulfur dioxide that was released from the burning of coal, were also a component of the fog. The question was, How did sulfur dioxide get turned into sulfuric acid?

"Our results showed that this process was facilitated by nitrogen dioxide, another co-product of coal burning, and occurred initially on natural fog," Zhang said in a statement. "Another key aspect in the conversion of sulfur dioxide to sulfate is that it produces acidic particles, which subsequently inhibits this process."

The natural fog contained larger particles, Zhang explained, with the smaller acidic particles evenly distributed throughout. When those fog particles evaporated, an acidic-haze was left covering the city.

The 1952 killer fog led to the creation of the Clean Air Act, which the British Parliament passed in 1956. Researchers still consider it the worst air pollution event in European history.

The air of cities in China, which is often heavily polluted, has a chemistry that's similar to the killer fog in London, Zhang and his colleagues found. China has battled air pollution for decades, and it is home to 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities, according to the researchers. For instance, air pollution in Beijing often far exceeds the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's acceptable air standards.

The researchers said that the main difference between China's smog and the killer London fog is that China's haze is made up of much smaller nanoparticles. Also, the formation of sulfate is only possible with ammonia, the scientists added.

"In China, sulfur dioxide is mainly emitted by power plants. Nitrogen dioxide is from power plants and automobiles, and ammonia comes from fertilizer use and automobiles," Zhang said. "Again, the right chemical processes have to interplay for the deadly haze to occur in China. Interestingly, while the London fog was highly acidic, contemporary Chinese haze is basically neutral."

A better understanding of air chemistry is key to developing effective regulatory actions in China, Zhang said.

"We think we have helped solve the 1952 London fog mystery and also have given China some ideas of how to improve its air quality," Zhang said. "Reduction in emissions for nitrogen oxides and ammonia is likely effective in disrupting this sulfate-formation process."

Having Family for Dinner: 'Cannibalism' Author Dishes

When you think of cannibals, you may picture the headline-grabbing psychopaths who, every so often, commit horrific crimes.

But elsewhere in the animal kingdom, cannibalism might involve a self-sacrificing mother or a hungry fetus snacking down on its siblings.

Now, Bill Schutt's "Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History" (Algonquin Books, 2017) shows just how prevalent, and just how diverse, cannibalism is among animals.

In one example, Schutt tells how the black lace-weaver spider (Amaurobius ferox) feeds her offspring her own eggs — and then her own body. In "an extreme act of parental care," she lowers herself onto her hungry little progeny, who then eat her alive and drain her of bodily fluids, Schutt writes. In another saga, Schutt describes how embryonic sand tiger sharks (Carcharias taurus) chow down on their siblings while still in the womb, making this shark the only known species to consume embryos in utero.

Schutt, a biology professor at Long Island University (LIU-Post) in New York and a research associate in residence at the American Museum of Natural History, recently spoke with Live Science about nature's colorful array of cannibals and what people's fascination with such cannibals may mean. (His answers have been edited for clarity and length.)

Live Science: How did you become interested in the topic of cannibalism?

Bill Schutt: I've always had a real interest in both natural history and the macabre, which is certainly why none of my friends or relatives were surprised that, once I became a zoologist, I chose to study bats. Likewise, nobody was shocked that my first nonfiction book, "Dark Banquet" [Crown, 2008], was all about blood-feeding creatures. [Photos: Best Wild Animal Selfies]

Basically, I enjoy investigating subjects that seem horrific or disgusting (or both), then writing about them through the eyes of a zoologist. The topic of cannibalism seemed like an interesting topic to work on after blood feeding. And when I found all sorts of misinformation and an unfortunate, but understandable emphasis on sensationalism and gore, cannibalism turned out to be a perfect subject for me. 

Live Science: What surprised you the most during your research on cannibalism?

Schutt: I was surprised at how common cannibalism is across the entire animal kingdom. There are literally thousands of species, from microbes to monkeys, that consume their own kind for all sorts of reasons that make perfect evolutionary sense. This isn't abnormal behavior. It's absolutely normal, and this also holds true in some of the most infamous cases of human cannibalism — the Donner Party, for example. [The Donner Party was a group of American pioneers who traveled west by wagon in the 1840s, only to become stuck in the Sierra Nevada during the winter. They resorted to cannibalism to survive.]

Live Science: Your book aims to debunk some common myths about cannibalism. What were some of the most prevalent myths you encountered?

Schutt: That cannibalism in the animal kingdom is rare and [that] it only happens in instances where you're dealing with abnormal behaviors, such as captive conditions or a lack of food. That was the party line among scientists for a long time, until probably starting in the 1970s, when they discovered that all sorts of different animals cannibalize for many different reasons that had nothing to do with stress or a lack of food. That, to me, was really interesting.

Live Science: You mention in your book that cannibalism serves a variety of functions in animals. Could you elaborate on a few?

Schutt: Cannibalism is sometimes done as an act of parental care. There are spiders, for example, that lay eggs that have not been fertilized, called trophic eggs, just for their newly hatched spiderlings to eat. But when these run out, the mother calls her offspring to her by drumming on their web. As she hunkers down, they climb all over her body and then they eat her alive, leaving a husk-like corpse. 

Another function of cannibalism is that it helps animals survive in stressful environmental conditions. If there's suddenly a lack of alternative food options, many species will eat their young in order to survive to mate another day.

Live Science: What is the biggest difference between human and animal cannibalism?

Schutt: Western cultures, or those cultures that have been influenced by them (whether voluntarily or not), decided long ago that human cannibalism is probably the ultimate taboo. In societies where that concept wasn't determined to be a taboo or where Western rules weren't imposed on individuals, ideas about cannibalism turned out to be very different. For example, until relatively recently, there were indigenous groups in South America where people were as mortified at the concept of burying their dead as Western missionaries and anthropologists were about consuming their own departed loved ones.

In nature, there are no culture-generated rituals to either promote or fear. In many fish species, adults can be a million times larger than their own eggs. As a result, most fish exhibit about as much individual recognition of their offspring as humans do a handful of raisins. [[Creative Creatures: 10 Animals That Use Tools] 

Live Science: You also investigated whether the human taboo against cannibalism was biological or social. What did you find?

Schutt: I definitely came away thinking that there are aspects of both. It's no secret that culture plays a huge part in determining whether something is permissible (and even sacred) or forbidden. But I also came away with an understanding that there may very well be strong selection pressure for humans not to eat other humans.

One selection pressure against cannibalism in humans comes from diseases called spongiform encephalopathies, such as kuru, which destroy the brain and are always fatal. As with other versions of this disease — which can infect mink, sheep and, perhaps most infamously, cows — the human form can be caused by consuming infected tissue, especially nervous system tissue.

So cannibalism may have dire consequences for humans. Some researchers have even hypothesized, using computer modeling, that cannibalism — and the spread of a kuru-like disease — may have sped up the ultimate demise of the Neanderthals. 

Live Science: Why do you think cannibalism continues to fascinate us? What does that fascination say about us?

Schutt: I think our deep fascination with the topic of cannibalism stems from the fact that, since the dawn of Western culture, we've been taught that it's arguably the worst thing that a person can do to another person. That in itself makes it both horrifying and interesting.

Add this ultimate taboo to the fact that most of us love a good scare, and you have an explanation for why Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter was voted the greatest screen villain of all time by the American Film Institute.

We're all fascinated with food as well, and with human cannibalism, I suppose many of us are dealing with the ultimate in scary food.

Really, the theme of this book is that you start off with these preconceived notions of what cannibalism is, and then when you explore it more, you find out that it is something completely different. That it makes all sorts of sense, in some ways, and that the examples that you find in the animal kingdom can be used to explain the circumstances behind some of the more infamous examples of human cannibalism. You can then look at those examples in a completely new light. That's one thing I'd like to get across.