Lifeboat Foundation

Last year, Voyager 1’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS) started sending random data back to Earth, and it took NASA engineers months to figure out why. It turns out the AACS had entered an incorrect mode, but it’s unclear why the mode switch happened in the first place. This software patch is meant to stop the same thing happening to Voyager 2 (and to Voyager 1 again).

Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager, explains “this patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible … These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they’re sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe.”

As Voyager 2 is over 12 billion miles away, it took over 18 hours to send the software patch to the probe on Friday. There is a risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have unintended consequences, so a readout of AACS memory is being carried out to make sure it’s in the right place. If no anomalies are found, the update will be triggered on Oct. 28.

Heat pumps are ubiquitous in the form of air conditioners. Scientists just invented one that avoids harmful refrigerant gases.

The study found that bacterial cells store memory in the guise of cellular iron levels.

Artur Plawgo/iStock.

While humans accumulate countless memories over the years, bacterial memories are limited to certain factors, such as iron levels. This aids the bacteria’s adaptation to their surroundings.

The three-year project aims to advance radar and communication capabilities in modern battlefields.

Lockheed Marting.

Commencing on November 21, 2023, this ambitious three-year project aims to advance and revolutionize methods for detecting and classifying elusive radar and telecommunications signals, marking a transformative leap in Finland’s defense technology capabilities.

Li is one of the tech leaders we interviewed for the latest issue of MIT Technology Review, dedicated to the biggest questions and hardest problems facing the world. We asked big thinkers in their fields to weigh in on the underserved issues at the intersection of technology and society. Read what other tech luminaries and AI heavyweights, such as Bill Gates, Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Ng, Joelle Pineau, Emily Bender, and Meredith Broussard, had to say here.

In her newly published memoir, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, Li recounts how she went from an immigrant living in poverty to the AI heavyweight she is today. It’s a touching look into the sacrifices immigrants have to make to achieve their dreams, and an insider’s telling of how artificial-intelligence research rose to prominence.

When we spoke, Li told me she has her eyes set firmly on the future of AI and the hard problems that lie ahead for the field.

A single-celled organism with no brain or nervous system to speak of may still form memories and pass those memories on to future generations, according to new research.

The ubiquitous bacterium, Escherichia coli, is one of the most well-studied life forms on Earth, and yet scientists are still discovering unexpected ways that it survives and spreads.

Researchers at the University of Texas and the University of Delaware have now uncovered a potential memory system that allows E. coli to ‘remember’ past experiences for several hours and generations thereafter.

Following the completion of The Spiral in New York, we take a look at seven of the latest skyscrapers designed by its architect, Danish studio BIG, along with a “landscaper”

From CapitaSpring in Singapore to O-Tower in China, a mix of recently completed projects and others still under construction make up the list of towers by the studio, which was founded in 2005 by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels.

Common threads throughout the projects are the incorporation of greenery to bring occupants closer to nature and unusual forms that challenge traditional boxy skyscrapers that dominate many city skylines.

Numerical simulations reveal that an impact crater’s shape can depend on the impactor’s spin and its degree of cohesion.

Artificial intelligence (AI) not only delivers impressive performance but also demands significant energy. The more complex the tasks it undertakes, the greater the energy consumption. Scientists Víctor López-Pastor and Florian Marquardt from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany, have developed a method for more efficient AI training. Their method utilizes physical processes, diverging from traditional digital artificial neural networks.

Open AI, the company responsible for the development of GPT-3, the technology powering ChatGPT, has not disclosed the amount of energy needed for the training of this advanced and knowledgeable AI Chatbot.

According to the German statistics company Statista, this would require 1,000 megawatt hours – about as much as 200 German households with three or more people consume annually. While this energy expenditure has allowed GPT-3 to learn whether the word ‘deep’ is more likely to be followed by the word ‘sea’ or ‘learning’ in its data sets, by all accounts it has not understood the underlying meaning of such phrases.