It's unclear how the treasure trove made it all the way to the Czech Republic. Credit: Museum of Eastern Bohemia Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 While the small aluminum can and iron box didn’t look like much at first, their contents stunned historians and two lucky hikers alike. The tourists initially stumbled across the containers during a hike in the Czech Republic’s Podkrkonosí Mountains earlier this year, but soon took their valuable findings to experts for evaluation. According to a recent assessment by experts at the Museum of Eastern Bohemia, the worth of the jewelry, artifacts, and nearly 600 gold coins inside the containers is estimated to be over $340,000. Now, researchers wonder how this treasure trove of items and currencies from multiple nations and eras made it all the way to the Czech Republic—and why no one ever claimed them. “When he opened it, my jaw dropped,” Museum of East Bohemia head archeologist Miroslav Novak said in an interview. The containers also contained gold jewelry, cigarette cases, and other personal items. Credit: Museum of Eastern Bohemia The iron box housed 16 snuff boxes, 10 bracelets, a wire bag, a comb, a chain, and a powder compact—all gold. Meanwhile, the can’s contents featured 598 gold coins divided into 11 columns separately wrapped in black cloth. According to numismatist Vojtěch Brádle, many are stamped with dates ranging from 1808 to 1915, and originated in the Austria-Hungarian empire under the reign of Franz Joseph I. “I found out that these coins did not travel from the Vienna mint to us, but to the Balkans,” said Brádle. “And there, after the collapse of the monarchy, in the then-Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians, marks, so-called countermarks, were minted.” The coins were likely in Serbia during the 1920s and 1930s, and were often used in typical Balkan necklaces and headdresses. Other coins in the collection come from countries including France, Belgium, Turkey, Romania, Italy, and Russia. However, it’s unclear how they all ultimately made it to eastern Bohemia. “We have no idea,” added Brádle. There are a number of potential theories to explain the treasure’s journey across Europe. One explanation is that the belongings were hidden amid Nazi Germany’s annexation of the region in the 1930s. Following the Munich Agreement of 1938, hundreds of thousands of Jews and Czechs fled further into the country to escape persecution, and it is possible that the cases were buried in hopes of hiding valuables from the invading armies. Another theory dates the stashes to the end of World War II, when Nazis themselves retreated in the face of Russian forces. Conservationists at the Museum of East Bohemia are now working to catalog and preserve the rare discoveries, and hope to display them in a future public exhibit. As for the two hikers, they are likely happy they chose that particular trail—Czech law entitles them to a reward of up to 10 percent of the find’s total value.

News Animals The axolotl is endangered in the wild. A discovery offers hope A recent finding presents a conservation opportunity for the popular pet amphibian Axolotls are common pets and used in research. But they are endangered in the wild. Paul Starosta/Stone/Getty Images Plus By Anna Gibbs 2 hours ago Despite capturing hearts around the world, the wild axolotl — an aquatic salamander with feathery frills and a soft smile — faces extinction. Fortunately, for both axolotls and their fans, a new conservation method shows promise. In captivity, axolotls abound as household pets and research subjects. But wild axolotls, endemic to a single lake in Mexico, are critically endangered due to degradation of their native wetlands, with only 50 to 1,000 individuals left in the wild. Introducing captive-bred axolotls to restored and artificial wetlands may be a promising option for conserving these charismatic critters, researchers report April 30 in PLOS One. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

Nature, Published online: 30 April 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08946-8Warming temperatures and interactions between plants are the main drivers of changes in Arctic plant communities in response to climate change, and there is no evidence of overall biotic homogenization.

The geology of the Cascadia subduction zone has largely staved off climate-related sea-level rise in the Pacific Northwest, but that could reverse in an instant.

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Xiaomi on Tuesday released an open-source reasoning-focused artificial intelligence (AI) model. Dubbed MiMo, the family of reasoning models innovate the optimisation of reasoning capability in a relatively smaller parameter size. This is also the first open-source reasoning model by the tech giant, and it competes with Chinese models such as DeepSeek R1 and Alibaba's Qwen QwQ-32B, and global reasoning models including OpenAI's o1 and Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. The MiMo family comprises four different models, each with unique use cases.Xiaomi's MiMo Reasoning AI Model to Compete With DeepSeek R1With the MiMo series of AI models, Xiaomi researchers aimed to solve the size problem in reasoning AI models. Reasoning models (at least ones that can be measured) have around 24 billion or more parameters. The large size is kept to achieve uniform and simultaneous improvements in both coding and mathematical capabilities of large language models, something considered difficult to achieve with smaller models.In comparison, MiMo features seven billion parameters, and Xiaomi claims that its performance matches OpenAI's o1-mini and outperforms several reasoning models with 32 billion parameters. The researchers claimed that the base AI model was pre-trained on 25 trillion tokens.The researchers claimed that such efficiency was achieved by optimising data preprocessing pipelines, enhancing text extraction toolkits, and applying multidimensional data filtering. Further, MiMo's pre-training included a three-stage data mixture strategy.Based on internal testing, the Xiaomi researchers claim that the MiMo-7B-Base scores 75.2 on the BIG-Bench Hard (BBH) benchmark for reasoning capabilities. The zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL)-based MiMo-7B-RL-Zero is claimed to excel in mathematics and coding-related tasks, and scores 55.4 on the AIME benchmark, outperforming o1-mini by 4.7 points. As MiMo is an open-source AI model, it can be downloaded from Xiaomi's listing on GitHub and Hugging Face. The technical paper details the model's architecture as well as the pre-training and post-training processes. It is a text-based model and does not have multimodal capabilities. Similar to most open-source releases, the details about the model's dataset is not known. For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube. Further reading: Xiaomi, MiMo, AI, Artificial Intelligence, AI Model, LLM Akash Dutta Akash Dutta is a Senior Sub Editor at Gadgets 360. He is particularly interested in the social impact of technological developments and loves reading about emerging fields such as AI, metaverse, and fediverse. In his free time, he can be seen supporting his favourite football club - Chelsea, watching movies and anime, and sharing passionate opinions on food. More Related Stories