The border between Egypt and Gaza “must” be closed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday – a move that would give Israel complete control over the Palestinian enclave’s access to the world.

During a press briefing, Netanyahu said that Israel would not consider the war finished until it closes the Philadelphi Corridor, a 14km strip of land that serves as a buffer zone on the border between Egypt and Gaza.

“We’ll destroy Hamas, we’ll demilitarize Gaza, and military equipment and other deadly weapons will continue to enter this southern opening, so of course we need to close it,” Netanyahu said.

Egypt has previously warned Israel against military operations in the corridor, according to Egypt’s Ahram Online. The state-run news outlet, citing an unnamed source, reported in October that any Israeli incursion into the Philadelphi Corridor would be seen as a violation of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979.

Gaza borders Israel on two sides, and its Mediterranean coast and airspace are also under tight Israeli blockades. Its border crossing with Egypt, at the town of Rafah, is the only crossing point not controlled by Israel, though it has still been subject to limited access and lengthy Egyptian bureaucratic and security processes.

Israeli officials have not decided exactly how they would proceed with closing Gaza’s border with Egypt, according to Netanyahu, but doing so would signify a renewed Israeli control over the enclave not seen in years and a blow to Palestinians’ limited sovereignty in Gaza.

Years of blockade

Israel held Gaza under occupation until 2005, when it withdrew troops and settlers. In 2006, Hamas won a surprise landslide victory in Palestinian legislative elections – the last polls to be held in Gaza. The Islamist militant group, whose charter calls for Israel’s “obliteration,” has controlled the enclave since then.

But Israel never relinquished control of most of the coastal enclave’s perimeter. For nearly 17 years, Gaza has been almost totally cut off from the rest of the world, with severe restrictions on its population’s movement. Smugglers have long turned to the enclave’s underground tunnel network to bring in commercial goods, people and weapons – a key reason why Israel aims to cut it off from Egypt.

Israel’s longstanding blockade has been fiercely criticized by international bodies including the United Nations, which said in a 2022 report that restrictions have had a “profound impact” on living conditions in Gaza and have “undermined Gaza’s economy, resulting in high unemployment, food insecurity and aid dependency.”

But Israel argues that the blockade is vital to protect its citizens from Hamas – an argument that has gathered force since the militant group’s devastating attacks in Israel on October 7, which killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities.

Following the terror attacks, Netanyahu’s government declared a “complete siege” of Gaza and shuttered all of its crossings, leaving Rafah the sole avenue for negotiated deliveries of supplies of basic humanitarian assistance like food and water, and for evacuations of foreign nationals. In recent weeks, some aid has also been allowed to enter Gaza through Israel’s Kerem Shalom border crossing, following intense diplomatic pressure from the United States and other parties.

But aid groups say it is still far from enough and warn of a growing risk of famine for Gaza’s isolated population if Israeli restrictions on imports persist.

In three months of siege, more than 23,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to health authorities in the Hamas-controlled enclave. Almost 70% of those killed have been women and children, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a December report.

At least 34 people have been confirmed dead following landslides in Colombia’s northwestern department of Chocó, the governor’s office said in a statement Saturday.

So far, 17 bodies have been transferred to Medellin for forensic examination, and another 17 are expected to be transported as well, the statement read.

“We are experiencing a very sad weekend for Chocó,” Governor Nubia Carolina Córdoba Curi said. “Our people feel the pain of the victims. I will not rest until I make sure that all Chocoans have information about their relatives.”

The landslides came down on a road between the cities of Quibdó and Medellín, Colombia’s Vice President Francia Marquez said Friday on X, after the area endured 24 hours of heavy rainfall.

Images on social media showed the moment a large piece of land dislodged from a mountain and fell on top of several cars that were moving along the flooded road below, Reuters reported.

Colombia’s National Unit for Disaster Risk Management, Colombian Civil Defense, the National Army, the Ministry of Health and Social Protection and the Choco police department have been mobilized to respond to the incident, Marquez also said.

Colombia has been plagued by deadly mudslides before. In 2017, hundreds of people were killed in a remote southern area of the country, after torrential rains sent a torrent of mud surging through the city of Mocoa.

A viral video of more than 150 men, clad in black and raising their right arms in a fascist salute in central Rome, has caused a stir everywhere but in the office of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

The event, now under investigation by Rome’s special anti-fascism police unit, took place on the evening of January 7 to mark the 46th anniversary of the Acca Larentia massacre, when three young neo-fascist militants from the Italian Social Movement (MSI) were killed on the street of that name.

Two, Franco Bigonzetti and Francesco Ciavatta, were murdered by suspected left-wing activists on the street in front of the MSI party headquarters and the third, Stefano Recchioni, by a police officer responding to riots against the first killings.

No one has ever been charged with the 1978 murders.

In the videos shot by onlookers last weekend, the saluting men can be clearly heard yelling “present” three times as they raise their right arms.

One then shouts a common neo-fascist battle cry: “For all fallen comrades.”

A commemoration of their deaths takes place every January 7, with police providing security under both left and right-wing administrations. It is consistently attended by members of both extremes of the political spectrum, who lay wreaths on a monument to the young men.

The MSI party grew from the ashes of Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party after it was dismantled at the end of World War II when the dictator was deposed and killed.

It is the party through which Meloni first entered politics; she led the MSI before melding it into her own more moderate Brothers of Italy party, which won snap elections in 2022.

Meloni has attended the commemoration on the Via Acca Larentia many times in the past, according to her own social media, but never as prime minister.

Italy’s opposition, including Democratic Party leader Elly Schlein, have called on Meloni to ban neo-fascist groups.

While the Italian constitution bans fascist ideology, all over the country monuments to Italy’s fascist past remain, such as an obelisk bearing Mussolini’s name in front of Rome’s Olympic Stadium.

It is a complicated area and the law – like many in Italy – is ambiguous. Being “apologetic” to old-style fascism is a crime in Italy, but neo-fascist groups are not illegal: such groups are often careful not to adopt overtly fascist ideology in their constitutions.

Nor are fascist memorabilia or gestures like the fascist salute illegal, something that critics say must change.

“This is Rome, 7 January 2024. It seems like 1924,” Schlein wrote on social media with an image of the salute. “What happened is unacceptable. Neo-fascist groups must be disbanded.”

Calling for the government to condemn the salute, Noemi Di Segna, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, said laws should be tightened, calling such acts “dangerous nostalgia.”

“For a very long time, we have been calling for the regulations concerning the nostalgia for neo-fascism to be strengthened,” she said.

The episode was also condemned by Meloni’s deputy and foreign minister, Antonio Tajani – now head of the Forza Italia party after the death of Silvio Berlusconi – who said his party was anti-fascist, and that no party should celebrate dictatorships.

Meloni wasn’t at the commemoration Sunday night, and she has only addressed the uproar by branding the backlash and the calls for her to ban neo-fascist groups “attacks” on her government.

“This government continues to respond to the gratuitous attacks and exploitative controversies of recent days by certain opposition parties with facts and results,” she wrote on Facebook.

A spokesperson for Meloni said the prime minister would likely not comment further.

This stands in contrast to other countries like Germany, which have zero tolerance to other forms of fascism. Berizzi said that “in this moment neo-fascist groups feel protected by Meloni’s silence, her ambiguity. Meloni is not able to cut the cord with her past. In some ways she is hostage to her past.”

Rome’s main prosecutor has opened an investigation into the event, to determine if anyone broke the “apology for fascism” law with the fascist salute.

Italy’s General Investigations and Special Operations Division (DIGOS) has identified 150 participants, all men, of whom nine are known right-wing militants with previous fascism-related criminal charges against them, according a spokesperson for the agency.

In her first year of power, Meloni proved her promise that she had distanced herself from her neo-fascist upbringing by becoming one of the most moderate leaders in Europe, where she has been praised for her leadership on issues ranging from Ukraine to migration. But her silence on the domestic issue now shaking the country may change all that.

On Tuesday, the European Parliament in Strasbourg will take up the case when it debates the resurgence of neo-fascism in Europe. Ewan MacPhee, spokesperson for the Social Democrats in the European Parliament, warned they plan to take the debate seriously.

“We find the prime minister’s silence even more disconcerting, and we wonder why she didn’t condemn the events of January 7,” MacPhee said ahead of the Tuesday meeting, according to the Italian media. “The debate becomes necessary and it is important that Parliament does what Meloni seems unable to do: that is, condemn what happened.”

The stakes in the Middle East have rarely been higher.

Simmering tensions reached new levels on Friday when the US and UK launched strikes on Houthi fighters in Yemen, in an effort to force them to halt their months-long attacks in the Red Sea. A day later, the US unilaterally carried out fresh strikes, targeting a Houthi radar facility.

The strikes risk further fanning the flames of a wider regionaI conflict that neither the US nor the Houthis’ backers in Iran appear to want.

Since Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel and the Israeli offensive in Gaza that followed, Iran’s so-called axis of resistance — a network of Shia militias that span four Middle Eastern countries — has been activated from one end of the region to the other.

Hezbollah entered daily confrontations with Israeli forces on the Lebanon-Israel border. Houthi rebels launched a series of attacks on commercial ships and Western military vessels in the Red Sea, a major artery for international trade. Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria launched dozens of attacks aimed at US military positions in those countries, leading to a number of close calls.

It has been a relatively low-rumbling tit-for-tat that has stayed just below the threshold of a full-blown regional war. And it has sharpened US President Joe Biden’s foreign policy dilemmas while Iran seeks to balance tactical military gains against the dangers of a larger conflict.

Iran’s network of armed groups have coalesced around a single stated goal: bringing about a ceasefire in Gaza, where the staggering civilian death toll and wide-scale devastation wrought by Israel’s assault has led to allegations of genocide at the United Nations’ top court (claims Israel has strenuously denied).

It has been a risky venture for which each of the armed groups have paid a hefty price. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has lost nearly 200 fighters since October 8. In Iraq, US strikes have dealt major blows to the infrastructure of Iranian-backed fighters. In Yemen, the damage wrought by the deadly strikes on Thursday is not yet clear, but the US and the UK say they have targeted positions used by the Houthis to launch attacks on the Red Sea, potentially weakening the group’s stranglehold over the shipping route.

“These strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea – including the use of anti-ship ballistic missiles for the first time in history,” Biden said in a statement. “These attacks have endangered US personnel, civilian mariners, and our partners, jeopardized trade, and threatened freedom of navigation.”

But the escalation in violence has also brought gains to Iran’s proxies, as well as their backers in Tehran. The popularity of these groups has soared in the region. They have largely redeemed themselves in a galvanized Arab and Muslim street, after having been mired in internal politics and plagued by allegations of corruption for years.

“It is clear that the Houthis were grabbing the opportunity of the current war to go through a quite effective rebranding exercise,” said Rym Momtaz, Consultant Research Fellow for European Foreign Policy and Security, transforming them “from a malign Iran-backed terror group destroying Yemen into an effective military outfit inflicting pain on the US in support of the Palestinians.”

There are other tactical gains beyond their boosted popularity. In Yemen, a muscular rebel group has more to gain from its ongoing peace talks with Saudi Arabia, which maintains a blockade over Houthi-controlled northern Yemen, and has been visibly nervous about the US and UK attacks jeopardizing its efforts to turn the page on its conflict with Sanaa.

In Lebanon, the border flareup seems to have turned the country’s devastating economic crisis, and the role Hezbollah has played in fuelling it, into a distant memory. With Israel on the backfoot in its border area with Lebanon, from which the vast majority of its residents have fled, Hezbollah has been empowered to push for a negotiated settlement where it aims to retrieve slivers of Israeli-controlled territories claimed by Lebanon.

In Iraq, the revived attacks on US troops – and the US’ retaliatory strikes on Iranian-backed groups – have prompted the government to renew a push to end America’s military presence in the country, a move that would delight the leaders of the Iranian regime. 

But stoking tensions only benefits Iran up to a certain point. If these relatively low-level confrontations eventually escalate into all-out war with the US, Tehran’s paramilitary partners could face decimation. That would compromise Iran’s growing influence in the region, deal a blow to the lynchpin of its foreign policy, and stir up trouble at home, where the regime is still reeling from protests that engulfed the country one year ago.

“The Iranians are trying to stay out of a war. Their population absolutely does not want a war,” said Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President of the DC-based Quincy Institute. “I think they would find themselves in a very similar situation to (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu, which is that if there is a war, there will be a rallying around their country and not their leadership.”

Parsi warns against downplaying the importance of a ceasefire in Gaza bringing about a de-escalation in the region. The Biden administration, according to Parsi, is “trying to walk a fine balance in which they maximize the maneuverability of Israel without it leading to a regional war.”

“As long as the war in Gaza goes on, that war is what is fuelling the Houthi attacks, the militia attacks, as well as the tensions between Lebanon and Israel,” said Parsi, adding that the Houthis temporarily stopped their attacks on the Red Sea during a six-day truce between Hamas and Israel in November.

Meanwhile, the escalation is likely to persist, even as both the US and Iran-backed actors seek to calibrate their confrontations and pray that it doesn’t spiral. The clashes will also continue to give Tehran leverage, argues IISS’s Momtaz, as evidenced by the strikes in Yemen on Thursday.

“That is a strategic challenge that the US is dealing with now,” said Momtaz. “They need to restore freedom of navigation and secure international trade in the Red Sea while continuing to make sure that the other fronts don’t escalate into a real war.”

Nearly 900 people have been arrested in Ecuador since Tuesday in a national security operation to stop an outburst of gang violence, Ecuador’s presidency said.

The presidency says 94 of the 859 people detained are members of what they call “terrorist” groups.

Ecuador has been rocked by blasts, police kidnappings and prison disturbances in a wave of violence beginning with the prison escape of one of Ecuador’s most powerful drug lords last weekend.

Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa on Tuesday declared the country to be in a state of “internal armed conflict,” ordering security forces to “neutralize” several criminal gangs accused of spreading extreme violence.

Noboa also designated 22 criminal gangs to be “terrorist” organizations in the presidential decree.

In a further measure, the Ecuadorian government announced on Thursday that foreigners who want to enter the country from Colombia or Peru will have to provide a criminal record certificate in a measure designed to “prevent and control the entry of individuals who constitute a threat or risk to public safety.”

Noboa has claimed that 90% of the foreign prisoners in Ecuador are Colombians, Peruvians, and Venezuelans.

The violence was triggered by the escape of high-profile gang leader Adolfo “Fito” Macías from a prison in Guayaquil on Sunday.

Following Fito’s escape and the declaration, Ecuador’s prison agency reported incidents in at least six prisons in different provinces on Sunday.

Criminal groups then embarked on a wave of violent attacks in a show of strength designed to discourage efforts to crack down on their activities.

Ecuador, home to the Galapagos islands and a tourist-friendly dollar economy, was once known as an “island of peace,” nestled between two of the world’s largest cocaine producers, Peru and Colombia.

But the country’s deep ports have made it a key transit point for cocaine making its way to consumers in the United States and Europe.

Russia unleashed another large barrage of missiles and drones against Ukraine on Saturday, the fourth such attack since December 29, amid concerns that Moscow is trying to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defence.

The Russian assault was comprised of 40 attack weapons including cruise, aeroballistic, ballistic, aircraft, anti-aircraft guided missiles as well as strike UAVs, according to the Ukrainian Air Force.

Ukraine managed to take down eight missiles, its air force said. Additionally they stated that “over 20 launched air attack weapons did not reach their targets due to extensive electronic warfare countermeasures.”

The air raid warnings and defences were activated across the country. There were impacts in several regions, including the city of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine and Dnipro in the east.

In Chernihiv, missile fragments caused damage to unoccupied civilian residential buildings in the city, according to the police.

“The fragments of an enemy missile caused destruction in the private residential area of Chernihiv. Luckily, no people were injured”, the police wrote on Telegram.

The area was previously damaged which is why there were no civilian casualties, the local mayor said.

In Dnipro, there were incoming hits in the city, according to the head of Dnipropetrovsk region military administration Serhii Lysak.

“We are now establishing the extent of the damage caused by the strikes. However, people are always the priority. Luckily, everyone is safe”, Lysak wrote on Telegram.

Saturday’s attacks are the fourth largest since Russia started large countrywide barrages on December 29.

Changing tactics

Analysts say the recent onslaught of Russian missiles aims to overload Ukraine’s limited missile defense.

In a previous attack on January 7, Ukraine was only able to shoot down on 18 out of the 59 missiles launched.

The Russian army has also been using new tactics as part of its aerial campaign, such as painting its Iranian-made drones black, camouflaging them against the night sky.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said during a press conference with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Friday that the country is far from having comprehensive air cover.

“We lack Patriot systems, and we lack appropriate systems of different ranges. It is coming little by little. Something is on its way. We have agreed on something new. However, we still lack appropriate systems that fight against ballistic missiles especially, for instance,” Zelensky said.

Ukraine has been relying on mobile firing groups for air defenses to shoot down drones as anti-air missiles stocks run low.

“They are now the backbone unit that destroys enemy UAVs. We are counting on them so that we can save guided anti-aircraft missiles, which are quite scarce for us under such massive attacks,” Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said after a barrage of 29 Iranian Shahed UAVs were launched across the country last week.

An unprecedented and highly contagious bird flu outbreak in the sub-Antarctic has spread to mammals, British officials said Thursday, as experts warned the disease poses a significant threat to the region’s fragile ecosystem.

It comes after the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in October confirmed the first case of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) in the Antarctic region in brown skua on Bird Island, South Georgia, a British overseas territory in the Southern Atlantic Ocean.

In a news release Thursday, the United Kingdom’s Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) said the disease had now been detected in elephant and fur seals on South Georgia, which lies east of South America’s tip and just above Antarctica’s main landmass.

“The presence of High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza (HPAI) has today been confirmed for the first time in mammals in the sub-Antarctic,” it said.

Bird flu is caused by infections that occur naturally among wild aquatic birds, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Infected birds can transmit the virus to other animals through their saliva and other bodily discharges.

In its October statement, BAS said its analysis showed the virus had most likely been introduced to South Georgia through migratory bird movement from South America.

In December, experts from APHA and BAS spent three weeks collecting samples from dead mammals and birds in the affected islands.

These samples from elephant seals, fur seals, brown skuas, kelp gulls and Antarctic terns have tested positive for HPAI H5N1, APHA said.

Fragile ecosystem at risk

Antarctica and its offshore islands are home to more than 100 million breeding birds, six seal species and 17 species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises, according to global avian influenza experts network OFFLU, which has previously warned of the possibility of “efficient virus transmission” in the region.

“Given Antarctica is such a unique and special biodiversity hotspot it is sad and concerning to see the disease spread to mammals in the region,” said Ian Brown, APHA’s director of scientific services.

“If avian influenza continues to spread throughout the sub-Antarctic region this could significantly threaten the fragile ecosystem, and potentially put a number of very large populations of seabirds and sea mammals at risk.”

Samples collected from albatross and giant petrel colonies on Bird Island tested negative, APHA said. “There have been no reports of above average mortality in any penguin species to date,” it added.

BAS, which operates two research stations on South Georgia, has out of caution suspended “most fieldwork involving contact with animals,” it said.

Several countries experienced record outbreaks of bird flu least year. In Japan, nearly 10 million birds were killed to limit the spread of the disease, straining poultry supplies and sending the price of eggs soaring.

Archaeologists working deep in the Amazon rainforest have discovered an extensive network of cities dating back 2,500 years.

The highly structured pre-Hispanic settlements, with wide streets and long, straight roads, plazas and clusters of monumental platforms were found in the Upano Valley of Amazonian Ecuador, in the eastern foothills of the Andes, according to a study published in the journal Science on Thursday.

The discovery of the earliest and largest urban network of built and dug features in the Amazon so far was the result of more than two decades of investigations in the region by the team from France, Germany, Ecuador and Puerto Rico.

The research began with fieldwork before deploying a remote sensing method called light detection and ranging, or lidar, which used laser light to detect structures below the thick tree canopies.

Lead study author Stéphen Rostain, an archeologist and director of Research at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), described the discovery as “incredible.”

‘Advanced engineering’

Rostain said the first people who lived there, 3,000 years ago, had small, dispersed houses.

However, between approximately 500 BCE and 300 to 600 CE, the Kilamope and later Upano cultures began to build mounds and set their houses on earthen platforms, according to the study authors. These platforms would be organized around a low, square plaza.

Data from LiDAR revealed more than 6,000 platforms within the southern half of the 600-square-kilometer (232-square-mile) area surveyed.

The platforms were mostly rectangular, although a few were circular, and measured about 20 meters by 10 meters (66 feet by 33 feet), according to the study. They were typically built around a plaza in groups of three or six. The plazas also often had a central platform.

The team also discovered monumental complexes with much larger platforms, which, they said, probably had a civic or ceremonial function.

At least 15 clusters of complexes identified as settlements were discovered.

Some settlements were protected by ditches, while there were obstructions to roads near some of the large complexes. This suggests the settlements were exposed to threats, either external or resulting from tension between groups, the researchers said.

Even the most isolated complexes were linked by pathways and an extensive network of larger, straight roads with curbs.

In the empty buffer zones between complexes, the team found features of land cultivation, such as drainage fields and terraces. These were linked to a network of footpaths, according to the study.

“For that reason, I call this garden cities,” said Rostain, who added: “It’s a complete revolution in our paradigm about the Amazon.”

“We have to think that all the Indigenous (people) in the rainforest were not semi-nomadic tribes lost in the forest, looking for food. They’re a big variety, diversity of cases and some were also with (an) urbanistic system, with (a) stratified society,” he said.

The overall organization of the cities suggests “the existence of advanced engineering” at the time, according to the study authors, who concluded that the garden urbanism of the Upano Valley “provides further proof that Amazonia is not the pristine forest once depicted.”

Rostain said we should imagine pre-Columbian Amazonia “like a nest of ants,” with everybody busy with activities.

Similar sites found across the Americas

This newly discovered urban network aligns closely with other sites that have been found across the tropical forests of Panama, Guatemala, Belize, Brazil and Mexico, according to landscape archeologist Carlos Morales-Aguilar, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the study.

In 2022, Morales-Aguilar was part of a team of researchers that used LiDAR to uncover a vast site in northern Guatemala, with hundreds of ancient, interconnected Mayan cities, towns and villages, as well as a 110-mile (177-kilometer) network of raised stone trails connecting communities.

He said the findings in this latest study mirror the advanced techniques in agriculture and urban planning that he observed in northern Guatemala and “offer new insights into the complexities of these early societies.”

“Do you think that every fingerprint is actually unique?”

It’s a question that a professor asked Gabe Guo during a casual chat while he was stuck at home during the Covid-19 lockdowns, waiting to start his freshman year at Columbia University. “Little did I know that conversation would set the stage for the focus of my life for the next three years,” Guo said.

Guo, now an undergraduate senior in Columbia’s department of computer science, led a team that did a study on the subject, with the professor, Wenyao Xu of the University of Buffalo, as one of his coauthors. Published this week in the journal Science Advances, the paper seemingly upends a long-accepted truth about fingerprints: They are not, Guo and his colleagues argue, all unique.

In fact, journals rejected the work multiple times before the team appealed and eventually got it accepted at Science Advances. “There was a lot of pushback from the forensics community initially,” recalled Guo, who had no background in forensics before the study.

“For the first iteration or two of our paper, they said it’s a well-known fact that no two fingerprints are alike. I guess that really helped to improve our study, because we just kept putting more data into it, (increasing accuracy) until eventually the evidence was incontrovertible,” he said.

A new look at old prints

To get to its surprising results, the team employed an artificial intelligence model called a deep contrastive network, which is commonly used for tasks such as facial recognition. The researchers added their own twist to it and then fed it a US government database of 60,000 fingerprints in pairs that sometimes belonged to the same person (but from different fingers) and sometimes belonged to different people.

As it worked, the AI-based system found that fingerprints from different fingers of the same person shared strong similarities and was therefore able to tell when the fingerprints belonged to the same individual and when they didn’t, with an accuracy for a single pair peaking at 77% — seemingly disproving that each fingerprint is “unique.”

“We found a rigorous explanation for why this is the case: the angles and curvatures at the center of the fingerprint,” Guo said.

For hundreds of years of forensic analysis, he added, people have been looking at different features called “minutiae,” the branchings and endpoints in fingerprint ridges that are used as the traditional markers for fingerprint identification. “They are great for fingerprint matching, but not reliable for finding correlations among fingerprints from the same person,” Guo said. “And that’s the insight we had.”

The authors said they are aware of potential biases in the data. Although they believe the AI system operates in much the same way across genders and races, for the system to be usable in actual forensics, more careful validation is required through the analysis of a larger and broader database of fingerprints, according to the study.

However, Guo said he’s confident that the discovery can improve criminal investigations.:

“The most immediate application is it can help generate new leads for cold cases, where the fingerprints left at the crime scene are from different fingers than those on file,” he said. “But on the flip side, this won’t just help catch more criminals. This will also actually help innocent people who might not have to be unnecessarily investigated anymore. And I think that’s a win for society.”

‘A tempest in a teacup’?

Using deep learning techniques on fingerprint images is an interesting topic, according to Christophe Champod, a professor of forensic science at the School of Criminal Justice of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. However, Champod, who wasn’t involved in the study, said he doesn’t believe the work has uncovered anything new.

“Their argument that these shapes are somewhat correlated between fingers has been known from the early start of fingerprinting, when it was done manually, and it has been documented for years,” he said. “I think they have oversold their paper, by lack of knowledge, in my view. I’m happy that they have rediscovered something known, but essentially, it’s a tempest in a teacup.”

In response, Guo said that nobody had ever systematically quantified or used the similarities between fingerprints from different fingers of the same person to the degree that the new study has.

“We are the first to explicitly point out that the similarity is due to the ridge orientation at the center of the fingerprint,” Guo said. “Furthermore, we are the first to attempt to match fingerprints from different fingers of the same person, at least with an automated system.”

Simon Cole, a professor in the department of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, agreed that the paper is interesting but said its practical utility is overstated. Cole was also not involved in the study.

“We were not ‘wrong’ about fingerprints,” he said of forensic experts. “The unproven but intuitively true claim that no two fingerprints are ‘exactly alike’ is not rebutted by finding that fingerprints are similar. Fingerprints from different people, as well as from the same person have always been known to be similar.”

The paper said the system could be useful in crime scenes in which the fingerprints found are from different fingers than those in the police record, but Cole said that this can only occur in rare cases, because when prints are taken, all 10 fingers and often palms are routinely recorded. “It’s not clear to me when they think law enforcement will have only some, but not all, of an individual’s fingerprints on record,” he said.

The team behind the study says it’s confident in the results and has open-sourced the AI code for others to check, a decision both Champod and Cole praised. But Guo said the importance of the study goes beyond fingerprints.

“This isn’t just about forensics, it’s about AI. Humans have been looking at fingerprints since we existed, but nobody ever noticed this similarity until we had our AI analyze it. That just speaks to the power of AI to automatically recognize and extract relevant features,” he said.

“I think this study is just the first domino in a huge sequence of these things. We’re going to see people using AI to discover things that were literally hiding in plain sight, right in front of our eyes, like our fingers.”

A formerly unknown relative of the most iconic of all dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex, has been newly identified, according to a study released Thursday. The revelation adds a new clue that could help paleontologists unravel another step in the evolutionary chain that ended with the massive predatory tyrannosaur, T. rex.

Called Tyrannosaurus mcraeensis, the creature likely roamed Earth up to 7 million years before T. rex emerged. The bones have been dated to 72 million to 73 million years old during the late Campanian-early Maastrichtian Period.

But Tyrannosaurus mcraeensis’ bones were discovered decades before the creature officially got its scientific name. About one-quarter of its fossilized skull was found over the course of the 1980s and early ’90s in an area now known as Elephant Butte, New Mexico. Because of the size of the specimens, the bones were originally categorized by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science as T. rex, which grew up to 39 feet (12 meters) long and 10 tons in weight.

T. rex vs. its relative

There were two big differences between T. rex and T. mcraeensis.

“The lower jaw in a Tyrannosaurus rex is actually quite robust. Our jaw is obviously big and toothy, but it’s more slender than what we normally see in a Tyrannosaurus rex,” said Anthony R. Fiorillo, coauthor of the study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. The robust jaw of T. rex meant it “could do whatever it wanted. A more slender jaw, even with the big teeth, means that it would have less bite force.”

The other big difference was that, unlike T. rex, T. mcraeensis didn’t have a prominent ridge over its eyes. Scientists believe T. rex’s ridge was used to help attract mates, much like antlers on deer or elk, said Fiorillo, who is executive director of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science in Albuquerque. In T. mcraeensis, the ridge is much more subtle.

Why go large?

Massive tyrannosaurs probably emerged as an evolutionary adaptation to the availability of large herbivores, the authors wrote. However, exactly why giant plant-eating dinosaurs evolved is still an unexplained mystery, according to the study.

Fiorillo emphasized that it’s a “highly speculative” idea for now, but he added that, unlike the pygmy tyrannosaur found in the Arctic — called Nanuqsaurus hoglundi — T. mcraeensis probably didn’t experience dramatic shifts in temperature and light in southern North America so it was able to continue to grow. Arctic conditions may have played a role in N. hoglundi’s distinctly diminutive size, but in general other tyrannosaurids from the same time period were much smaller than T. mcraeensis.

The research team will now return to the rock formation where the specimen was unearthed to see whether they can find more bones.

“Then, because it’s so big, we need to actually shift some of our investigation to try to understand the paleoecology and environment in which this animal lived so we can begin to understand what was it about New Mexico that was so special that this animal’s adaptation to life was to get big,” Fiorillo said.

A tyrannosaur sleuth

When the lower jaw was first found, there weren’t many T. rex specimens out there, Fiorillo said.

The identity of T. mcraeensis was revealed all these decades later thanks to Sebastian G. Dalman, the study’s first author who is an associate researcher at the museum as well as a paleontological consultant with the Springfield Science Museum in Massachusetts. 

While studying the bones starting in 2013, Dalman was the first person to suggest that they “might be something different,” Fiorillo said.

As the largest apex predator of its time, T. rex has had near constant attention from the paleontological community, both professional and amateur, for decades. Fascination with the ferocious giant and outsize roles in popular films such as “King Kong” and “Jurassic Park” have upped the enthusiasm of scientists and amateur fossil hunters alike in their search for more T. rex bones, according to Fiorillo.

“And that improved our sample size,” he said. “That set the table for when Sebastian started to look at our specimen and say, ‘Hey, these don’t actually look the same as the famous Tyrannosaurus rex specimens from places like Montana.’”