Lifeboat Foundation

China is on its way to the red planet: It launched a probe on Thursday, and hopes to land on Mars in February 2021.

Full story here: https://sc.mp/zf178

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Venus could serve as a model for many exoplanets soon to be discovered in the upcoming era of new space telescopes, such as James Webb and others.

So how did our sister planet evolve from a past “habitable” state to its present one, and how does that help us understand our own destiny?

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A Russian Soyuz rocket will launch a robotic cargo ship packed with tons of supplies to the International Space Station Thursday (July 29), and you can watch the launch live.

Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, will launch the uncrewed Progress 76 supply ship to the station at 10:26 a.m. EDT (1426 GMT) from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where the local time will be 7:26 p.m. You can watch the launch live here and on the Space.com homepage, courtesy of NASA TV.

However, to dismiss the subject as fantastical or unnecessary would be akin to telling scientists 100 years ago that landing on the moon was also irrelevant.

This is because, for pioneers and champions of artificial intelligence, quantum computing is the holy grail. It’s not a make-believe fantasy; rather, it’s a tangible area of science that will take our probability-driven world into a whole new dimension.

The relationship between mental imagery and vision is a long-standing problem in neuroscience. Currently, it is not known whether differences between the activity evoked during vision and reinstated during imagery reflect different codes for seen and mental images. To address this problem, we modeled mental imagery in the human brain as feedback in a hierarchical generative network. Such networks synthesize images by feeding abstract representations from higher to lower levels of the network hierarchy. When higher processing levels are less sensitive to stimulus variation than lower processing levels, as in the human brain, activity in low-level visual areas should encode variation in mental images with less precision than seen images. To test this prediction, we conducted an fMRI experiment in which subjects imagined and then viewed hundreds of spatially varying naturalistic stimuli. To analyze these data, we developed imagery-encoding models. These models accurately predicted brain responses to imagined stimuli and enabled accurate decoding of their position and content. They also allowed us to compare, for every voxel, tuning to seen and imagined spatial frequencies, as well as the location and size of receptive fields in visual and imagined space. We confirmed our prediction, showing that, in low-level visual areas, imagined spatial frequencies in individual voxels are reduced relative to seen spatial frequencies and that receptive fields in imagined space are larger than in visual space. These findings reveal distinct codes for seen and mental images and link mental imagery to the computational abilities of generative networks.

Keywords: encoding models; fMRI; generative network; mental imagery; receptive fields; vision.

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Mars in 4 K.

A world first. New footage from Mars rendered in stunning 4K resolution. We also talk about the cameras on board the Martian rovers and how we made the video.

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But now, all the Arab world’s universities must be ready to run with the baton that Hope is handing to them. Currently, the overwhelming majority of the young people who watched the launch on their smartphones and decided on a career in space science will have to study abroad, because the Arab world largely lacks the capacity to educate them in astrophysics or space science.

The United Arab Emirates’ Mars probe is a stunning and historic effort, but it needs to be transformational, too.

A new study identified 37 recently active volcanic structures on Venus. The study provides some of the best evidence yet that Venus is still a geologically active planet. A research paper on the work, which was conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland and the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, was published in the journal Nature Geoscience on July 20, 2020.

“This is the first time we are able to point to specific structures and say ‘Look, this is not an ancient volcano but one that is active today, dormant perhaps, but not dead,’” said Laurent Montési, a professor of geology at UMD and co-author of the research paper. “This study significantly changes the view of Venus from a mostly inactive planet to one whose interior is still churning and can feed many active volcanoes.”

Scientists have known for some time that Venus has a younger surface than planets like Mars and Mercury, which have cold interiors. Evidence of a warm interior and geologic activity dots the surface of the planet in the form of ring-like structures known as coronae, which form when plumes of hot material deep inside the planet rise through the mantle layer and crust. This is similar to the way mantle plumes formed the volcanic Hawaiian Islands.