Lifeboat Foundation

The planet Mercury seems like a place inhospitable to life, with surface temperatures reaching a blistering 800 degrees Fahrenheit due to its extremely close proximity to the Sun.

But new research suggests that there are regions on the Solar System’s smallest planet that may have the right conditions for biological life to survive.

Scientists at the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) in Arizona say they’ve found evidence of salt glaciers on the planet’s surface, regions that are similar to extremely harsh and salt-rich environments on Earth where life still finds a way to exist.

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. (AP) — Artificial intelligence employed by the U.S. military has piloted pint-sized surveillance drones in special operations forces’ missions and helped Ukraine in its war against Russia. It tracks soldiers’ fitness, predicts when Air Force planes need maintenance and helps keep tabs on rivals in space.

Now, the Pentagon is intent on fielding multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable AI-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026 to keep pace with China. The ambitious initiative — dubbed Replicator — seeks to “galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in August.

While its funding is uncertain and details vague, Replicator is expected to accelerate hard decisions on what AI tech is mature and trustworthy enough to deploy — including on weaponized systems.

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My name is Artem, I’m a computational neuroscience student and researcher. In this video we discuss the Tolman-Eichenbaum Machine – a computational model of a hippocampal formation, which unifies memory and spatial navigation under a common framework.

Continue reading “Can We Build an Artificial Hippocampus?” »

Astronomers have detected a rare and extremely high-energy particle falling to Earth that is causing bafflement because it is coming from an apparently empty region of space.

The particle, named Amaterasu after the sun goddess in Japanese mythology, is one of the highest-energy cosmic rays ever detected.

From IAC-The Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands [Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias] (ES)

11.21.23 Helmut Dannerbauer [email protected].

Artist’s impression of a protocluster of galaxies in the early Universe showing galaxies forming new stars and interacting with each other. Credit: M. Kornmesser/ESO.

“I’m proud to be a crew member on this mission, but especially to be participating as a Canadian astronaut,” Kutryk said. “I’m proud that our country continues to play a leading role in space. It’s very important for our country.”

But that isn’t all for our Canadian astronauts.

The CSA also announced that Jenni Gibbons will be Jeremy Hansen’s back-up for the Artemis II mission.

Scientists using the Telescope Array in Utah detected the second highest-energy cosmic ray ever. The singular subatomic particle was equivalent to dropping a brick on someone’s toe from waist height.

The Telescope Array comprises 507 surface detector stations arranged in a square grid located outside of Delta, Utah. It has been utilized to observe over 30 ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. These extreme cosmic rays have left scientists baffled about what produces them. The latest observation, as well as the highest-ever recorded event known as the Oh-My-God particle, appears to have originated from the Local Void, an empty area of space bordering the Milky Way galaxy.

“The particles are so high energy, they shouldn’t be affected by galactic and extra-galactic magnetic fields,” remarked John Matthews, Telescope Array co-spokesperson and co-author of the study. “You should be able to point to where they come from in the sky. But in the case of the Oh-My-God particle and this new particle, you trace its trajectory and there’s nothing high energy enough to have produced it. That’s the mystery — what the heck is going on?”

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a computer answer all of the biggest questions in the universe?

In his first year of graduate school, in 2013, Michael Wagman walked into his advisor’s office and asked, “Can you help me simulate the universe?”

Wagman, a theoretical physicist and associate scientist at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, thought it seemed like a reasonable question to ask. “We have all of these beautiful theoretical descriptions of how we think the world works, so I wanted to try and connect those formal laws of physics to my everyday experience of reality,” he says.

In 1991, the University of Utah Fly’s Eye experiment detected the highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed. Later dubbed the Oh-My-God particle, the cosmic ray’s energy shocked astrophysicists. Nothing in our galaxy had the power to produce it, and the particle had more energy than was theoretically possible for cosmic rays traveling to Earth from other galaxies. Simply put, the particle should not exist.

The Telescope Array has since observed more than 30 ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, though none approaching the Oh-My-God-level energy. No observations have yet revealed their origin or how they are able to travel to Earth.

Continue reading “Telescope Array detects second-highest-energy cosmic ray ever” »