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Google DeepMind has unveiled new artificial-intelligence software that could help historians recover the meaning and context behind ancient Latin engravings.  Aeneas can analyze words written in long-weathered stone to say when and where they were originally inscribed. It follows Google’s previous archaeological tool Ithaca, which also used deep learning to reconstruct and contextualize ancient text, in its case Greek. But while Ithaca and Aeneas use some similar systems, Aeneas also promises to give researchers jumping-off points for further analysis. To do this, Aeneas takes in partial transcriptions of an inscription alongside a scanned image of it. Using these, it gives possible dates and places of origins for the engraving, along with potential fill-ins for any missing text. For example, a slab damaged at the start and continuing with … us populusque Romanus would likely prompt Aeneas to guess that Senat comes before us to create the phrase Senatus populusque Romanus, “The Senate and the people of Rome.”  This is similar to how Ithaca works. But Aeneas also cross-references the text with a stored database of almost 150,000 inscriptions, which originated everywhere from modern-day Britain to modern-day Iraq, to give possible parallels—other catalogued Latin engravings that feature similar words, phrases, and analogies. 
This database, alongside a few thousand images of inscriptions, makes up the training set for Aeneas’s deep neural network. While it may seem like a good number of samples, it pales in comparison to the billions of documents used to train general-purpose large language models like Google’s Gemini. There simply aren’t enough high-quality scans of inscriptions to train a language model to learn this kind of task. That’s why specialized solutions like Aeneas are needed.  The Aeneas team believes it could help researchers “connect the past,” said Yannis Assael, a researcher at Google DeepMind who worked on the project. Rather than seeking to automate epigraphy—the research field dealing with deciphering and understanding inscriptions—he and his colleagues are interested in “crafting a tool that will integrate with the workflow of a historian,” Assael said in a press briefing. 
Their goal is to give researchers trying to analyze a specific inscription many hypotheses to work from, saving them the effort of sifting through records by hand. To validate the system, the team presented 23 historians with inscriptions that had been previously dated and tested their workflows both with and without Aeneas. The findings, which were published today in Nature, showed that Aeneas helped spur research ideas among the historians for 90% of inscriptions and that it led to more accurate determinations of where and when the inscriptions originated. In addition to this study, the researchers tested Aeneas on the Monumentum Ancyranum, a famous inscription carved into the walls of a temple in Ankara, Turkey. Here, Aeneas managed to give estimates and parallels that reflected existing historical analysis of the work, and in its attention to detail, the paper claims, it closely matched how a trained historian would approach the problem. “That was jaw-dropping,” Thea Sommerschield, an epigrapher at the University of Nottingham who also worked on Aeneas, said in the press briefing.  However, much remains to be seen about Aeneas’s capabilities in the real world. It doesn’t guess the meaning of texts, so it can’t interpret newly found engravings on its own, and it’s not clear yet how useful it will be to historians’ workflows in the long term, according to Kathleen Coleman, a professor of classics at Harvard. The Monumentum Ancyranum is considered to be one of the best-known and most well-studied inscriptions in epigraphy, raising the question of how Aeneas will fare on more obscure samples.  Google DeepMind has now made Aeneas open-source, and the interface for the system is freely available for teachers, students, museum workers, and academics. The group is working with schools in Belgium to integrate Aeneas into their secondary history education.  “To have Aeneas at your side while you’re in the museum or at the archaeological site where a new inscription has just been found—that is our sort of dream scenario,” Sommerschield said.

We’re launching Web Guide, a Search Labs experiment that uses AI to intelligently organize the search results page, making it easier to find information and web pages.Web Guide groups web links in helpful ways — like pages related to specific aspects of your query. Under the hood, Web Guide uses a custom version of Gemini to better understand both a search query and content on the web, creating more powerful search capabilities that better surface web pages you may not have previously discovered. Similar to AI Mode, Web Guide uses a query fan-out technique, concurrently issuing multiple related searches to identify the most relevant results.For example, try it for open-ended searches like “how to solo travel in Japan.” Or try detailed queries in multiple sentences like, “My family is spread across multiple time zones. What are the best tools for staying connected and maintaining close relationships despite the distance?”

Switching to a vertical mouse is a hard sell. Having to change how you use a mouse completely can be an intimidating task, especially with how unnatural the new hand position feels at first—you’re going entirely against the muscle memory you’ve spent years building up.One of the largest challenges to the switch is the initial loss of pointer accuracy. If you’re in an office setting, you may find yourself wandering around a bit or struggling to move your new mouse as quickly as you did before. But in a slow-paced setting like that, all you struggle with is a few mis-clicks or slightly slower navigation. If you try to make this transition with gaming, it’s far more jarring, and the consequences are much more immediately noticeable.But even if it’s difficult to adapt to, could vertical mice be the future of gaming? Razer’s new Pro Click V2 Vertical Edition is a hybrid productivity and gaming vertical mouse. Vertical mice typically cater to office workers, but the focus on gaming performance makes the $120 Pro Click V2 one of a kind.Desk PresenceThe Pro Click V2 Vertical looks, more than anything else, like a modern gaming mouse. It has the textured exterior, metallic highlights, and slightly organic, H.R. Giger-esque curvature typical of Razer’s design language. But everything has been shifted around. The curved, cutting thumb rest sits on top of the mouse instead of on the side. A flare juts out from the right side as a place to rest the underside of your hand. The gunmetal highlight sits at the peak of the mouse rather than between the two buttons. Even the USB port is vertical, a humorous attention to detail.It’s intentionally designed as a gaming mouse that just happens to be vertical. Aesthetically, the only downside is the minimal RGB lighting. With only one section of lighting that runs along the bottom of the mouse, RGB lighting fans might feel disappointed. Still, it’s bright, reactive, and has great color accuracy. It’s more than enough for me, especially with how customizable it is with Razer’s Chroma software.The Pro Click V2 Vertical has the same specs as the standard Pro Click V2, with a 1,000-Hz polling rate, a 2.4-GHz dongle that can be stored on the underside, Bluetooth multi-device connectivity, and a reprogrammable button on top. The only features lost are the mouse wheel’s horizontal scrolling and toggleable non-ratcheted rotation.This mouse includes two major productivity features: app-specific profiles and multi-device connectivity, and both work effortlessly. Razer Synapse immediately detected different software and changed the active profile in response, and pressing the button on the underside of the mouse swapped between paired devices instantaneously.Beyond that, Razer Synapse is as impressive as always. I consistently find the software to be one of the best and most intuitive on the market, and that’s the case here. All of the menus are simple and efficient, the settings can be changed in real time, and the adjustments all have tooltips and explanations to tell you exactly what you’re changing.Annoyingly, Razer Synapse has advertisements on the homepage, something I’ve complained about when reviewing SteelSeries products in the past. However, unlike Steelseries GG, these “recommendations” can be permanently disabled in the app’s settings.Performance and PracticeThe overall hand position of the Pro Click V2 Vertical is natural, but incredibly upright. While some vertical mice, like those from Logitech or Hansker, find a middle ground between a standard and truly “vertical” hand position, Razer opted for a nearly perpendicular shape. While this is technically an ideal ergonomic shape, it will be harder to adapt if you’re moving directly from a standard mouse, and might not be as comfortable during the adjustment period.It felt unnatural for the first week or so, and required practice to use comfortably and confidently. Once I had acclimated, my speed and accuracy were nearly at the same level as a standard mouse, although consistent use still felt clunky and unfamiliar compared to the horizontal mice I’d been using for most of my life.