J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in Letter 211, dated 14 October 1958, that the Argonath, the towering statues seen in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, were inspired by ancient Egyptian monuments.
Tolkien wrote that the Númenóreans of Gondor resembled the Egyptians in many ways, including their love of constructing gigantic monuments and their fascination with ancestry and tombs.
In this letter, he explicitly stated: "The Númenóreans of Gondor were proud, peculiar, and archaic, and I think are best pictured in (say) Egyptian terms.
In many ways they resembled 'Egyptians': the love of, and the power to construct, the gigantic and massive. And in their great interest in ancestry and in tombs."
He even noted that the Crown of Gondor was very tall like that of the Egyptian Pharaohs, contrasting it with the simple diadem of the Northern Kingdom, much like the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.
Based on this, Tolkien scholars Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, in their work The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion, pointed out that the Argonath recall ancient Egyptian statues, particularly the Colossi of Memnon at the Mortuary Temple of Amenhotep III.
They highlight how these twin monuments of Isildur and Anárion on the Anduin River mirror the massive twin stone guardians standing on the banks of the Nile.
In a significant breakthrough for surgical robotics, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed an AI system that enabled a robot to successfully perform gallbladder removal on a deceased pig with almost complete autonomy and no direct human control during the procedure.
The dual-layer AI model, trained on 17 hours of real human surgical video footage, interpreted live visual input and converted it into precise verbal-style commands (such as “clip the second duct”), which were then executed by the robot. Across eight separate procedures involving 17 distinct surgical tasks, the robot achieved a remarkable 100% success rate, demonstrating advanced real-time self-correction capabilities and only minimal human assistance (primarily for tool changes or occasional adjustments).
While fully autonomous surgery on living humans is still years away, this milestone represents a major step forward in the field. The robot’s ability to detect and fix its own mistakes highlights the growing potential of AI to enhance surgical precision and safety.
Researchers plan to advance testing to live animal models next, with the long-term vision of developing systems that can reduce complication rates, improve consistency, and help alleviate the workload on surgical teams.
[Kim, J. W., et al. (2026). SRT-H: A hierarchical framework for autonomous surgery using language-guided imitation learning. Science Robotics, 10(104), eadt5254. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adt5254]
The real back-breaker for the Rangers came in the 3rd period when number 68 scored a vintage Jaromir Jagr goal 🥅, dancing around Jeff Beukeboom and beating “Beezer” like a rented mule.
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