The gold accessory was found in a Bronze Age grave near the town of Mold in Wales. (Image credit: Alamy)QUICK FACTSName: Mold gold capeWhat it is: A hammered gold accessoryWhere it is from: Bryn yr Ellyllon (Goblins' Hill), WalesWhen it was made: Circa 1900 to 1600 B.C.In 1833, stone quarry workers discovered an ancient burial mound at Goblins' Hill near the town of Mold in Wales. At the center was a stone-lined grave that contained a fragmented skeleton and a gold, cape-like accessory that had been crushed over time. The Mold gold cape has a unique shape and style, and it is one of the finest examples of prehistoric goldwork ever found, according to the British Museum, where the artifact is on display.The cape dates to Britain's Early Bronze Age (2500 to 1200 B.C.), a time that saw a metalworking revolution as artisans shifted from crafting flint tools to making weapons and jewelry out of gold, copper and bronze. When the cape was originally unearthed, experts assumed that it had belonged to an ancient warrior, chief or religious leader, due to the spectacular design of the object, Benjamin Roberts, then curator for the European Bronze Age collections at the British Museum, told the BBC in 2010. But after the broken pieces of the cape were put back together, the small size of the artifact suggested it may have been worn by a woman or a child.The Mold gold cape measures roughly 9.3 inches (23.5 centimeters) tall and 18.3 inches (46.5 cm) wide. It weighs about 1.2 pounds (560 grams) and was probably crafted from a single lump of gold about the size of a ping-pong ball. The gold ingot was beaten incredibly thin, fashioned into a cape, and then embellished with decorations that mimicked beads or necklaces, according to the British Museum. Additionally, several hundred amber beads were found on the cape in the grave, which likely added to the gilded appearance of the accessory. Perforations around the neck opening suggest the cape originally had a lining made of leather or another perishable material that did not survive.Because the gold cape, when worn, would restrict a person's upper arm movements, it may have been a ceremonial accessory that conferred religious authority and was worn only on special occasions. But experts are still unsure why the cape was buried in a grave. Nor can they confirm whether the person it was interred with was male or female, as the skeleton was not recovered by the quarry workers in the 19th century."The cape is unique — there is really nothing to compare it to in the whole of Europe," Roberts told the BBC. "This makes it more difficult to understand why it was made and what significance it had." For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.Inuit FigurineMaya Death UrnBattersea ShieldCan you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

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People who rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to solve simple problems do worse at, and are more likely to give up on, similar tasks when that assistance is removed, compared with people who do not use AI for quick answers, new research finds.The study, which was presented at the 2026 Conference on Language Modeling in San Francisco earlier this month, investigated the impacts of shifting mental work onto an AI chatbot across arithmetic and reading comprehension tasks. A growing body of research suggests this process of "cognitive offloading" harms long-term learning and critical thinking abilities."The concern is about what cognitive scientists call 'desirable difficulties' — the productive struggle that builds skill over time," study first author Grace Liu, a doctoral student in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, told Live Science in an email. "If AI routinely removes that struggle, people may get the right answer in the moment but develop less robust independent capability."Liu and her colleagues recruited 1,222 participants for the study, which was released as a preprint earlier this year and has now undergone peer review. The researchers designed three randomized controlled experiments, including two sets of mathematical fraction problems and a series of reading comprehension questions. The participants were split into three groups, so there was no overlap between the experiments. Each experiment took 13 to 15 minutes to complete.In the first experiment, the team randomly assigned 354 participants to two groups: one that had access to an AI chatbot and one that didn't. The researchers gave both groups the same 12 fraction problems, which the AI group could get the answer to immediately or obtain clues about by prompting the chatbot. Then, the researchers removed the AI assistant without warning for a final set of three fractions, which all of the participants were given, regardless of their group.Both groups had the option to skip problems. The researchers explicitly told the participants that there was no penalty for wrong answers, so skipping a problem was a deliberate decision to not engage with it, they wrote in the study. The participants in both groups were also given the correct answer to each problem if they got it wrong, so they could learn from their mistakes.This first experiment showed that the participants in the AI group were more likely to solve fractions and less likely to give up when they had access to the chatbot compared with the other group. But when the AI was removed, their performance dropped and they skipped or failed more problems, suggesting that using AI impaired unassisted task performance, persistence and motivation.The second experiment was a copy of the first experiment, but it had 667 participants and small tweaks in the trial design, including the addition of a pretest phase that helped the researchers eliminate participants who were unable to solve the most basic problems. The findings were similar to those of the first experiment, hinting that the use of AI for simple tasks harms perseverance and drive to complete those same tasks without AI, especially when AI is used to get direct solutions.Liu acknowledged that calculators also allow people to offload computations, which could cause similar declines in independent performance. But "the reason we study AI specifically is that it allows people to offload reasoning across tasks across many domains," she said.Calculators allow people to offload math problems, but their effects on reasoning aren't as far-reaching as the effects of AI. (Image credit: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images)In a third experiment, the team explored the impacts of AI assistance on reading comprehension, which draws on meaning-making skills and mental-model construction — the cognitive process of building internal representations of external reality. The trial included 201 participants, who were divided into a group with access to AI and a control group. The researchers gave both groups five comprehension questions before disabling the AI chatbot and handing each participant another three questions.The results mirrored those of the first two experiments, suggesting that reduced persistence, in particular, was not an artifact of the math problems but a general outcome of cognitive offloading onto AI."The most significant finding is that people who offload more have higher declines in persistence (increased skip rate), which is an important skill that cuts across domains," Liu said.One possible reason people stop trying once they have experienced help from AI is that they get used to the immediacy of answers and perceive any method that takes longer as inefficient, the researchers wrote in the study. But studies show that persistence through difficulty is essential for skill acquisition and learning, raising concerns about the long-term impacts of using AI for simple tasks.RELATED STORIESThe more that people use AI, the more likely they are to overestimate their own abilitiesAI hallucinations work both ways, study shows — using chatbots can amplify and reinforce our own delusionsGoogle scientists removed a critical 'consciousness safeguard' from AI in new study. What happened next?Scientists don't yet have a full picture of how small instances of cognitive offloading affect lasting competence and independent ability. To find out, researchers would need to track the same people for a long time and regularly measure their learning outcomes across a wide range of tasks, Liu said. But research so far suggests that an overreliance on AI erodes our cognitive fitness and mastery of subjects, according to the study.To encourage long-term learning, capability and autonomy in people, AI models and chatbots should be designed to give directions and instructions toward a solution, rather than the solution itself — more like a tutor, the researchers argued."We need to work toward a future in which human abilities are, as much as possible, augmented rather than supplanted," study co-author Brian Christian, a computer scientist and researcher in the Center for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.

Every egg cell and sperm cell depends on meiosis, a tightly choreographed process in which chromosomes find their partners, exchange genetic material and then divide. When meiosis goes awry in humans, the consequences can include infertility, miscarriage and birth defects.

Two black holes can collide and merge into one. But could the opposite happen: could a single black hole split into two smaller ones? That question is explored in a new theoretical study: "When Black Holes Admit Pair-of-pants Topologies," published in the journal Physical Review D.