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While it’s an exciting discovery, it falls short of demonstrating that carbon-based lifeforms once lived on the surface of the Red Planet. It is, however, a step in that direction.

“This experiment was definitely successful,” Maëva Millan, postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center and lead author of a new study published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, told Inverse.

“While we haven’t found what we were looking for, biosignatures, we showed that this technique is really promising,” she added.

Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said it will bring a US astronaut back to Earth from the International Space Station at the end of this month, despite tensions between the two countries.

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei will return as planned on March 30 together with cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov in a Russian Soyuz space capsule, the agency said in Moscow on Monday.

“Roscosmos has never given partners any reason to doubt our reliability,” the agency said, adding that the safe operation of the space station is its top priority.

Little did he know that we would one day have telescopes powerful enough to image distant galaxies.

“[Einstein] had a sense of the natural sublime.”

The first known image of an Einstein ring was captured in 1987 at the Very Large Array radio observatory in New Mexico. A little over a decade later, Hubble found the first complete one. Since then astronomers have found many more of Einstein Rings including this one, which Tommaso Treu’s group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Californa, Los Angeles, produced with the Hubble.

Over the past decade or so, many researchers worldwide have been trying to develop brain-inspired computer systems, also known as neuromorphic computing tools. The majority of these systems are currently used to run deep learning algorithms and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have recently conducted a study assessing the potential of neuromorphic architectures to perform a different type of computations, namely random walk computations. These are computations that involve a succession of random steps in the mathematical space. The team’s findings, published in Nature Electronics, suggest that neuromorphic architectures could be well-suited for implementing these computations and could thus reach beyond machine learning applications.

“Most past studies related to focused on cognitive applications, such as ,” James Bradley Aimone, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “While we are also excited about that direction, we wanted to ask a different and complementary question: can neuromorphic computing excel at complex math tasks that our brains cannot really tackle?”