It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, June 06, 2025
Ethical considerations for closing projects "well" in the context of withdrawal of USAID
A resident wades through flooded farmlands after the onslaught of the southwest monsoon coupled by a super typhoon in Pangasinan, Philippines, among the areas in the country with high exposure to multiple hazards such as typhoon winds and flooding.
Credit: Center for Disaster Preparedness, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Ethical considerations for closing projects "well" in the context of withdrawal of USAID are explored by researchers and members of an affected Philippines disaster-preparedness project.
Article Title: Thinking through abrupt closure in humanitarian assistance: Key ethical considerations in seemingly impossible conditions
Author Countries: Canada, Philippines, United States
Funding: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada (4330-220-00743 to LE; 4330-220-00743 to IMB; 4330-220-00743 to ML; 4330-220-00743 to SRH; 4330-220-00743 to LS; 4330-220-00743 to MH). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
For this study, writing styles in digitized manuscripts were analyzed using BiNet, a previously developed deep neural network for detection of handwritten ink-trace patterns. By combining writing styles with carbon-14 dates of manuscripts using artificial intelligence, the date-prediction model Enoch is able to produce an accurate date for the manuscript.
Since their discovery, the historically and biblically hugely important Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our understanding of Jewish and Christian origins. However, while the general date of the scrolls is from the third century BCE until the second century CE, individual manuscripts thus far could not be securely dated. Now, by combining radiocarbon dating, palaeography, and artificial intelligence, an international team of researchers led by the University of Groningen has developed a date-prediction model, called Enoch, that provides much more accurate date estimates for individual manuscripts on empirical grounds. Using this model, the researchers demonstrate that many Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previously thought. And for the first time, they establish that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed biblical authors. They presented their results in the journal PLOS One on 4 June.
Until now, the dating of individual manuscripts was mostly based on palaeography–the study of ancient handwriting–alone. However, the traditional palaeographic model has no solid empirical foundation. For most Dead Sea Scrolls, a calendar date is not known, and there are no other date-bearing manuscripts from the time period available for palaeographic comparison. Between the few date-bearing manuscripts in Aramaic/Hebrew from the fifth–fourth centuries BCE and the late first and early second century CE a gap is present that prevents accurate dating of the more than one thousand scrolls and fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls collection.
Digitized manuscripts
This gap is now closed by researchers in the ERC project The Hands That Wrote the Bible by combining radiocarbon dates from 24 scrolls samples, in combination with palaeographic analysis using a machine-learning-based model applying a Bayesian ridge regression method. The new radiocarbon dates are reliable, empirical time markers that bridge the palaeographic gap between the fourth century BCE and the second century CE. They provide an objective date for the writing styles in the tested manuscripts.
Based on this information, the researchers trained the date-prediction model named Enoch. They used a previously in-house developed deep neural network for detection of handwritten ink-trace patterns, BiNet, in digitized manuscripts. This allows for a subsequent geometric shape analysis at the microlevel of the ink trace, such as curvature (called textural), as well as at the level of character shapes (called allographic). It provides a quantitative and empirical basis for the style analysis of handwriting which traditional palaeography cannot deliver. Cross-validation then showed that Enoch can predict radiocarbon-based dates from style with an uncertainty of some 30 years (plus and minus). This is even more precise than direct radiocarbon dating results in the period range of 300–50 BCE.
The first machine-learning-based model
Now that Enoch is ready for use, it becomes possible to date the roughly one thousand Dead Sea manuscripts from this time period. The researchers took a first step in this by feeding Enoch the binarized images of 135 scrolls and having the date predictions evaluated by palaeographers. With Enoch, researchers have a powerful new tool that they can use to support, refine, or modify their own subjective estimates for specific manuscripts, often to an accuracy of only 50 years for manuscripts over 2,000 years old.
Enoch is the first complete machine-learning-based model that employs raw image inputs to deliver probabilistic date predictions for handwritten manuscripts, while ensuring transparency and interpretability through its explainable design. The combination of empirical evidence (radiocarbon from physics and character-shape-based analyses from geometry) brings a degree of quantified objectivity to palaeography never before achieved in the field. And the methods underpinning Enoch can be used for date prediction in other partially-dated manuscript collections.
New chronology
First results from Enoch’s date predictions, presented in the PLOS One paper, demonstrate that many Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previously thought. This also changes how researchers should interpret the development of two ancient Jewish script styles which are called ‘Hasmonaean’ and ‘Herodian’. Specifically, manuscripts in Hasmonaean-type script can be older than the current estimate of ca. 150–50 BCE. And the Herodian-type script emerged earlier than previously thought, suggesting that these scripts existed next to each other since the late second century BCE instead of the mid-first century BCE which is the prevailing view.
This new chronology of the scrolls significantly impacts our understanding of political and intellectual developments in the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic and early Roman periods (late fourth century BCE until second century CE). It allows for new insights to be developed about literacy in ancient Judaea in relation to historical, political, and cultural developments such as urbanization, the rise of the Hasmonaean dynasty, and the rise and development of religious groups such as those behind the Dead Sea Scrolls and the early Christians.
Anonymous authors
Furthermore, this study establishes 4QDanielc (4Q114) and 4QQoheleta (4Q109) to be the first known fragments of a biblical book from the time of their presumed authors. We do not know who exactly finished the Book of Daniel but the common assumption is that this author did that during the early 160s BCE. Likewise, for Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) scholars assume that an anonymous author from the Hellenistic period (third century BCE) was behind this biblical book, instead of the view of tradition that it was King Solomon from the tenth century BCE. Our novel radiocarbon dating for 4Q114 and the Enoch date prediction for 4Q109 place these manuscripts in the same time as these anonymous authors from respectively the second and third centuries BCE. Thus, these results have now created the opportunity to study tangible evidence of hands that wrote the Bible.
Reference:Mladen Popović, Maruf A. Dhali, Lambert Schomaker, Johannes van der Plicht, Kaare Lund Rasmussen, Jacopo La Nasa, Ilaria Degano, Maria Perla Colombini, Eibert Tigchelaar, Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis. PLOS One, 4 June 2025.
This photo shows prof. Mladen Popovic, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism and Director of the Qumran Institute (front) and his colleauge Dr. Maruf Dhali, Assistant Professor in Artificial Intelligence, working with Enoch to date a manuscript from the Dead Sea scrolls.
This is a still from a short video on the project, which is linked from the PLOS One paper.
Enoch’s date prediction estimate for 4Q319. (a) from full spectrum color image to binarized image to 14C plot for 4Q259 that went into the training of Enoch. (b), from full spectrum color image to binarized image to Enoch’s date prediction plot for 4Q319 (see also illustration 9 in S5 Appendix). Red bars represent the probability of each date bin. The blue curve shows the smoothed distribution. Grey spikes indicate the local uncertainty of the estimate.
Credit: Popović et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
An AI program trained to study the handwriting styles of centuries-old manuscripts from the Middle East suggests that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls might be older than previously thought, according to a study published June 4, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Mladen Popović from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and colleagues. This method could give researchers a new way to place undated manuscripts into the timeline of ancient history.
While some ancient manuscripts have dates written on them, giving archaeologists a precise understanding of when they were created, many manuscripts have no date information. By studying the evolution of handwriting styles over time, researchers can sometimes determine the approximate age of some undated manuscripts by evaluating their handwriting. But to use this method, researchers need enough manuscripts with accurate dates from that period of history to create a reliable timeline of handwriting styles.
For this new paper, researchers evaluated the age of historic manuscripts from various sites in modern-day Israel and the West Bank through radiocarbon dating, and then used machine learning to study the handwriting styles of each document. By pairing those two datasets together, the team could create an AI program — named Enoch, after the biblical figure — that could use the handwriting style of other manuscripts from the region to objectively determine an approximate age range.
To test the program, ancient handwriting experts evaluated Enoch’s age estimates for 135 of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The experts determined that approximately 79% of the AI’s estimates were “realistic,” with the remaining 21% determined to be either too old, too young, or indecisive.
Enoch has already helped the research team discover new things about these ancient manuscripts. For example, both Enoch and radiocarbon dating methods estimated older ages for many of the Dead Sea Scrolls than did traditional handwriting analysis. Although the authors note that more data and further research could help understand the timeline, their work provides new insights into when these documents might have been created.
The authors add: “With the Enoch tool we have opened a new door into the ancient world, like a time machine, that allows us to study the hands that wrote the Bible, especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors.”
“It is very exciting to set a significant step into solving the dating problem of the Dead Sea Scrolls and also creating a new tool that could be used to study other partially dated manuscript collections from history. This would not have been possible without the collaboration between so many different scientific disciplines, a real team effort!"
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/44KpPfy
Citation: Popović M, Dhali MA, Schomaker L, van der Plicht J, Lund Rasmussen K, La Nasa J, et al. (2025) Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis. PLoS One 20(6): e0323185. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0323185
Author countries: The Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Belgium
Funding: This project has received funding by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 640497 (HandsandBible). The funding was received by M. Popović. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
New research from scientists at Trinity College Dublin strongly implies that heatwaves have a major influence on the spread of many diseases – and that many existing predictive models have overlooked this complexity. Specifically, the scientists have discovered that differences in heatwaves – such as how much hotter they are than normal temperatures, and how long they last – can increase disease burden by up to 13 times in a commonly used experimental animal model.
Their discovery and its implications come at an important time, with global climate change and related extreme weather events continuing to impact many in various ways (temperatures approached 50oC in Pakistan last month, while a cold snap in South Africa approached freezing conditions).
Given the increased frequency and intensity of heatwaves in particular, it's crucial to understand how these events will affect the spread of disease.
While scientists have a relatively good idea of how temperature impacts some viruses and disease-causing pathogens and parasites, they know much less about the effects of sudden heatwaves or cold snaps, or how influential variation in the duration of these events are.
That is what the scientists behind the new research, just published in the leading international journal PLOS Climate, set out to explore.
First author, Niamh McCartan, a PhD candidate from Trinity’s School of Natural Sciences, said: “In this study, we worked with the water flea (Daphnia magna) and a microsporidian pathogen (Ordospora colligata), which are a widely used model for environmentally transmitted diseases, to investigate the impacts of different heatwave attributes.”
“We manipulated the amplitude and duration of heatwaves across four average temperatures and four distinct time points at which the hosts were exposed to the pathogen. This approach gave us 64 unique heatwaves for comparison.”
The results revealed that complex interactions exist between heatwave attributes and baseline temperatures, which in turn drive context-dependent effects on both pathogen prevalence and proliferation.
Perhaps most importantly, when compared to other types of temperature variation (such as cold snaps), heatwaves behave differently – altering parasite burden up to 13-fold, and thus driving significant variation in infection outcomes.
Niamh McCartan added: “A recently published study reported that 58% of human pathogenic diseases have been aggravated by climate change, with temperature changes impacting host susceptibility due to altering biological properties such as how our immune systems function, as well as our behaviour.
“From a bigger-picture perspective, this work underlines the need for more detailed, context-specific models to help better predict the likely impact of heatwaves and climate change on different diseases. We now know that amplitude, duration, baseline temperature and the point at which exposure occurs have differing effects in shaping disease outcomes, so overly simplified models may miss critical complexities.”
“For example, other researchers have suggested almost 70% of COVID-19 cases in the summer of 2022 could have been avoided if there hadn’t been heatwaves around that time – imagine the difference that a better understanding of how heatwaves alter disease dynamics could have made to countless people.”
“Climate change is also causing mosquito species that carry diseases like dengue, Zika, and malaria to be increasingly found in parts of southern and central Europe, including Italy and France, areas that were previously too cool to support them. While Ireland has so far been less affected, the findings of our study highlight the urgent need to understand how warming and extreme weather events can alter disease dynamics more broadly.”
“With all of this in mind, it’s important that future disease-specific models must account for fluctuating and extreme temperatures, not just averages.”
In addition to this big-picture perspective, the findings of this work also have more specific, valuable insights for freshwater ecology, given that the water fleaplays an important role in freshwater food webs, helping to support numerous other species that use them as a food source. In other cases, when their numbers plummet, algae can take over and negatively impact water quality, which in turn has a suite of negative, knock-on effects.
Additional Notes to Editor
About animal disease models (such as the Daphnia magna and Ordospora colligate) model
Laboratory experiments with model species allow scientists to carefully control environmental conditions and isolate the effects of specific stressors like heatwaves. Such experiments are essential for teasing apart complex environmental effects that are difficult to study in wild or human diseases.
Although not all findings transfer directly across species, the animal model used in these experiments shares key features with many real-world disease systems, making it a powerful tool for uncovering general principles about how climate extremes might reshape disease dynamics.
Journal
PLOS Climate
'What's wrong with my lawn?' Research points toward possible answer
Article details pathology, progression, management of large patch disease
University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture
Turfgrass science graduate student Samuel Kreinberg, left, saw his first paper as lead author published in Crop Science journal. He was supervised by his adviser Wendell Hutchens, right, an assistant professor of turfgrass science.
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — With spring rains, warm-season turfgrasses such as bermudagrass and zoysiagrass are at risk of a fungal disease called large patch that can leave a lawn marked with large brown areas of dead and dying grass.
Large patch is caused by a fungus and affects warm-season turfgrasses, which go dormant in cooler months. This disease begins with small, round patches that can grow in diameter and are characterized by a yellow, orange or brown color as the affected grass dies.
It provides readers with comprehensive information covering the disease’s pathology, progression and management, and it highlights areas in turfgrass science research that require further attention, such as the environmental and soil elements that contribute to the spread of the fungus behind the disease. These could include soil salinity, pH and fertility.
The article identifies breeding for improved large patch resistance as another opportunity for further research.
The article’s first author, Samuel Kreinberg, is a University of Arkansas graduate student specializing in turfgrass science. He plans to defend his master’s thesis this month and present the paper at the 15th International Turfgrass Research Conference in Karuizawa, Japan, this summer.
Diagnosing turf
Wendell Hutchens, who is Kreinberg’s adviser and co-author, said he is often asked the question: “What’s wrong with my lawn this spring?”
Hutchens is an assistant professor of turfgrass science in the Horticulture Department with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service — the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s research and outreach arms — and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences.
Because the article includes information on the disease cycle and management strategies for large patch, Hutchens said it is useful as both a research and outreach resource to answer such a question.
“The paper is a helpful resource to send to a golf course superintendent, sod grower, sports field manager, or anybody that struggles with the disease large patch,” he said.
Hutchens noted that rainy climates and moderate temperatures can lead to a greater prevalence of large patch. As temperatures rise in the summer and the weather becomes drier, the disease will typically go away.
When it comes to managing large patch, Hutchens said many people often make the mistake of watering their grass too much. He said that mowing properly, fertilizing correctly and not overwatering grass will “alleviate the vast majority of the issues” with the disease.
Kreinberg said that large patch is one of the primary issues of zoysiagrass lawns in Arkansas, and he conducted a research trial in both Fayetteville and Alma, Arkansas, to analyze the spread of the disease in zoysiagrass.
Those who suspect that large patch has affected their lawns can submit samples to the Arkansas Plant Health Clinic through county extension offices, and by walk-in at the clinic in Fayetteville, located at 2601 N. Young Ave.
Inspiration behind the work
As for the motivation behind the research, Hutchens said he and Kreinberg “wanted to identify what had not been studied about the disease.”
Hutchens also credited Kreinberg for the accomplishment of serving as the first author of a piece that was published in Crop Science, the flagship journal of Crop Science Society of America.
“Sam is just a rock star student who is an exceptional writer and researcher,” Hutchens said.
The article also featured Division of Agriculture and Bumpers College faculty members Mike Richardson, professor of horticulture, and Terry Spurlock, associate professor and extension plant pathologist, as co-authors.
Jim Kerns, professor and extension specialist of turfgrass pathology with North Carolina State University, and Lee Miller, assistant professor of botany and plant pathology with Purdue University, were also co-authors.
The Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station and North Carolina State University are part of a system of agricultural research centers at land-grant universities in the southern United States where scientists collaborate to conduct research and outreach focused on conserving the region’s natural resources and sustainably feeding a growing global population.
The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s mission is to strengthen agriculture, communities, and families by connecting trusted research to the adoption of best practices. Through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service, the Division of Agriculture conducts research and extension work within the nation’s historic land grant education system.
The Division of Agriculture is one of 20 entities within the University of Arkansas System. It has offices in all 75 counties in Arkansas and faculty on three system campuses.
Pursuant to 7 CFR § 15.3, the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture offers all its Extension and Research programs and services (including employment) without regard to race, color, sex, national origin, religion, age, disability, marital or veteran status, genetic information, sexual preference, pregnancy or any other legally protected status, and is an equal opportunity institution.
Large patch, a fungal disease, can leave surfaces from homeowners’ lawns to sports fields and golf courses devastated by areas of dying grass.
