Reuters: Belgian museum, US mining company at odds over colonial-era Congo archive. “A U.S. mining company backed by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates is in a tangle with Belgium’s AfricaMuseum over who should digitise antique maps of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo ‌in the museum’s archive.”

TechCrunch: Google is using old news reports and AI to predict flash floods. “Google researchers used Gemini — Google’s large language model — to sort through 5 million news articles from around the world, isolating reports of 2.6 million different floods, and turning those reports into a geo-tagged time series dubbed ‘Groundsource.'”

France 24: Researchers turn to UK archive to solve under-50s bowel cancer mystery. “As growing numbers of younger people are being diagnosed with bowel cancer, researchers in the UK are hoping an archive dating back more than 100 years could provide answers. In a study which began in January, researchers are using cutting-edge technology to compare archived tumours with ones from the present […]

Space Daily: Century-old solar records refine future cycle forecasts. “An international team of astronomers has developed a new way to extract solar polar magnetic information from more than a century of historical observations, improving prospects for predicting future solar cycle activity.”

A student trained an AI only on 1800-1875 London texts, then asked about 1834. The model described street protests and Lord Palmerston - details the student hadn't encoded, but which turned out historically accurate. The "quarantine strategy" may reveal how models encode information in unexpected ways, raising questions about what else they capture without deliberate training.

#AI #MachineLearning #HistoricalData

https://www.implicator.ai/an-ai-answered-a-question-about-1834-it-was-right/

TimeCapsuleLLM: LLM trained only on data from 1800-1875

https://github.com/haykgrigo3/TimeCapsuleLLM

#HackerNews #TimeCapsuleLLM #LLM #1800s #AI #research #historicaldata

National Bureau of Economic Research: Effects of WIC on Birth Outcomes: Evidence from Newly Digitized Data from the National Archives. “This paper examines the effect of nutrition—delivered during pregnancy via the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)—on infant health. We contribute to the literature by adding new data on WIC rollout from the […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/12/04/effects-of-wic-on-birth-outcomes-evidence-from-newly-digitized-data-from-the-national-archives-national-bureau-of-economic-research/

West Virginia University: Knee Regulatory Research Center Releases Occupational Licensing Law Research Project Database to Study U.S. Licensure in Unprecedented Depth and Detail. “Today, the Knee Regulatory Research Center—a nonpartisan research center focused on labor, health, and regulatory frontiers—announced the release of the Occupational Licensing Law Research Project Database […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/10/23/west-virginia-university-knee-regulatory-research-center-releases-occupational-licensing-law-research-project-database-to-study-u-s-licensure-in-unprecedented-depth-and-detail/