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Mystery Unveiled: Massive Granite Deposits on the Moon May Give Clues to Ancient Lunar Volcanoes

A recent discovery shows that the moon’s far side was volcanically active. A team of geologists found a large granite deposit beneath a long-extinct lunar volcano, supporting the theory that the moon’s surface glowed with lava billions of years ago.

The lunar find was under Compton-Belkovich, a rumored volcanic structure on the moon’s surface. The feature is thought to have developed from the lava that cooled after fueling the violent eruptions of lunar volcanoes some 3.5 billion years ago, according to Space.com.

Although the discovery of volcanic leftovers in this area was not predicted, the study team was taken aback by the extent of the cooled magma patch. Its breadth is around 31 miles (50 kilometers) wide. This large mass of granite in the Compton-Belkovich volcanic complex may shed light on how the lunar crust formed early in the moon’s history.

‘Like a mirror’: Astronomers identify most reflective exoplanet

A scorching hot world where metal clouds rain drops of titanium is the most reflective planet ever observed outside of our Solar System, astronomers said on Monday.

This strange world, which is more than 260 from Earth, reflects 80 percent of the light from its , according to new observations from Europe’s exoplanet-probing Cheops space telescope.

That makes it the first exoplanet comparably shiny as Venus, which is the brightest object in our night sky other than the Moon.

A new neural machine code to program reservoir computers

Reservoir computing is a promising computational framework based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which essentially maps input data onto a high-dimensional computational space, keeping some parameters of artificial neural networks (ANNs) fixed while updating others. This framework could help to improve the performance of machine learning algorithms, while also reducing the amount of data required to adequately train them.

RNNs essentially leverage recurrent connections between their different processing units to process sequential data and make accurate predictions. While RNNs have been found to perform well on numerous tasks, optimizing their performance by identifying parameters that are most relevant to the task they will be tackling can be challenging and time-consuming.

Jason Kim and Dani S. Bassett, two researchers at University of Pennsylvania, recently introduced an alternative approach to design and program RNN-based reservoir computers, which is inspired by how programming languages work on computer hardware. This approach, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, can identify the appropriate parameters for a given network, programming its computations to optimize its performance on target problems.

Palm-Sized Powerhouse: RIKEN’s Handheld Terahertz Device to “X-Ray” Things Without Harmful Radiation

Using new palm-sized devices, RIKEN researchers may have finally harnessed the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum to effectively ‘X-ray’ things without using harmful ionizing radiation.

Countless technologies—from smartphones and TVs to infrared instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) is an orbiting infrared observatory that will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers longer wavelengths of light, with greatly improved sensitivity, allowing it to see inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today as well as looking further back in time to observe the first galaxies that formed in the early universe.

Found: Stars Over 12 Billion Years At The Heart Of Our Galaxy

Scientists have found a group of ancient stars orbiting close to the center of our galaxy that may have formed in just the first billion years of the universe. That’s news because old stars are generally only found around the very edges of the Milky Way within the 150+ globular clusters—also called “galactic wanderers”—which may be linked to supermassive stars.

The Pristine Inner Galaxy Survey (PIGS), which reported their results at this week’s National Astronomy Meeting 2023 at Cardiff University in Wales, UK, were looking near the galaxy’s center because galaxy formation models suggest that there ought to be ancient stars there—though very few have ever been seen before.


Most ancient stars we know of are found around the halo of our Milky Way galaxy, but a new study has discovered many close to the galaxy’s heart.

Sun unleashes powerful solar flare strong enough to cause radio blackouts on Earth

The sun emitted a solar flare this week that was strong enough to cause radio blackouts on Earth — and it reportedly did.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured an image of the event, which showed a bright flash in the top right area of the sun. The flare was classified as a X1.0 flare, which means it is in the most intense class of flares, according to the agency.

The flare peaked at 7:14 p.m. Eastern Time on July 2, NASA said. It erupted from a sunspot that is seven times the width of Earth, according to Space.com, a website that chronicles news and events in space.