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Archaeologists in Turkey are slowly unravelling the secrets of a previously unknown ancient language. And among them are revelations that long-forgotten civilisations used language to promote multiculturalism and political stability. The ancient clay tablets unearthed from archaeologists, in the ancient capital of the Hittite Empire at Hattusa, were recently found to contain the previously unknown language. Researchers had dusted off nearly 30,000 unique tablets at the scene – a UNESCO World Heritage Site – with most written in Hittite, and a few in the brand new language. The ongoing excavations have since revealed that the imperial civil service had whole departments whose job it was to research their subject peoples’ religions. Back in the second millennium BC, Hittite leaders told their officials to record religious ceremonies and other traditions of subject peoples by writing them in their respective local languages. The idea was that the traditions would be preserved and incorporated into the wider empire, in what appears to be a push towards multiculturalism. The fact that multiculturalism was such a prominent part of Bronze Age culture certainly has resonances in the modern day, where debates around immigration and multiculturalism continue to be a hot topic. So far, experts have found at least five subject ethnic groups who have had the treatment, with the latest example unearthed two months ago. It was written in a previously unknown Middle Eastern language that had been lost for up to 3,000 years. The language is being called Kalasmaic, because it would have been spoken by a subject people in an area called Kalasma in the northwest of the empire. And while only five minority languages have so far been found on the Bronze Age tablets, the reality is that there were probably at least 30, archaeologists say. Daniel Schwemer, a Wurzburg University professor who is leading the investigation into the newly discovered texts, said: “Bronze Age Middle Eastern history is only partly understood – and discovering additional clay tablet documents is helping scholars to substantially increase our knowledge.” How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel Sign up to our free indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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NASA has held its first public meeting on the long-awaited report into UFOs. Last year, this new study was launched to investigate reports of UAP (unexplained anomalous phenomena) and for the first time the space agency has made the latest findings public. There have been around 800 events collected over the past 27 years, the expert panel says, with some reports of unexplained metallic flying orbs - all within Earth’s airspace. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the US Department of Defence’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) noted on the findings: “We see these all over the world, and we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers,” he said. “While we are still looking at it, I don’t have any more data other than that. Being able to come to some conclusion is going to take time, until we can get better-resolved data on similar objects that we can then do a larger analysis on." The Pentagon now receives between 50 and 100 monthly reports, Dr Kirkpatrick added, referring to a statistic from the report. Most sightings have some kind of explanation such as commercial aircraft or military drones, though there are still 2 to 5 per cent of those events which “display signatures that could be anomalous." Public Meeting on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (Official NASA Broadcast) www.youtube.com About half of these include some kind of metallic looking orbs or round spheres that have been noticed by aircraft at high altitudes. However, is this is not enough evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life, says astrophysicist and chair of the study group, David Spergel. “To make the claim that we’ve seen something that is evidence of non-human intelligence, it would require extraordinary evidence,” he added. “And we have not seen that. I think that’s important to make clear.” Meanwhile, online harassment was also a topic at the meeting as trolls have been targeting NASA’s UAP study team which Dr Nicola Fox, NASA Science Mission Directorate associate administrator said is "hindering scientific progress." “It is really disheartening to hear of the harassment that our panelists have faced online all because they're studying this topic," she said. “Harassment only leads to further stigmatization of the UAP field significantly hindering scientific progress and discouraging others to study this important subject matter. Harassment also obstructs the public's right to knowledge." Watch the full public meeting on NASA's YouTube channel. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Threads says it has been forced to limit how many posts people can see, amid an increase in “spam attacks”. The announcement drew mockery from Elon Musk, who had been widely criticised for introducing such “rate limits” on his own site, Twitter. Adam Mosseri, who serves as the head of Instagram and therefore Threads at Meta, said in a post on the site that it was being hit by more spam attacks and that it would have to take a range of responses as a result. “Spam attacks have picked up so we’re going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives),” he wrote. “If you get caught up [in] those protections let us know.” The change means that users who use Threads the most might run into limits on how many posts they can see and whether they can view the app. He did not give any indication of where the rate limit would be set or how many people mighttbe expected to run into problems. Threads users have complained about a significant increase in the amount of spam on the site, including in the replies to Mr Mosseri’s post. Mr Mosseri has made a number of announcements about the future of Threads on the site. The company – which appears to have been surprised by the success of its own app – has been looking both to add new and widely requested features as well as deal with any technical problems caused by the success of the app. The change drew mockery from Elon Musk, who announced days before the launch of Threads that Twitter would start rate limiting, in what he said was an attempt to stop AI companies scraping Twitter for data to train its models. That led to major problems for Twitter users, who were unable to see posts and more, and those technical issues have been pointed to as one of the reasons that so many users were eager to sign up to Threads in the first place. Mr Musk laughed and posted “copycat” in response to a screenshot of Mr Mosseri’s post. Mr Musk introduced his own rate limits earlier this month. But he announced the numbers of posts that users would be able to see – and did not invite feedback from those who might be swept up in the change. Read More DMs may come to Threads soon as app’s user base grows to one-fifth of Twitter’s Elon Musk posts series of explicit tweets about Mark Zuckerberg Twitter traffic ‘tanking’ after record-breaking Threads launch

Walt Disney Co said on Friday it has paused advertising on Elon Musk's social media site X. (Reporting

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 10, 2023--