Lifeboat Foundation

An international team of astronomers has discovered a new warm Jupiter exoplanet orbiting a distant G-type star. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-4515 b, is similar in size to Jupiter but about two times more massive than it. The finding was detailed in a paper published Nov. 20 on the pre-print server arXiv.

TESS is currently performing a survey of approximately 200,000 of the brightest nearby stars with the main goal of searching for transiting exoplanets. So far, it has identified nearly 7,000 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOI), of which 402 have been confirmed.

Warm Jupiters are gas giant planets with orbital periods between 10 and 200 days. This makes them challenging targets for transit detection and radial velocity (RV) follow-up studies compared to their shorter-orbit counterparts, dubbed hot Jupiters.

Meta, IBM and dozens of startups and researchers have launched an alliance defending a more open and collaborative method to develop artificial intelligence, setting up a clash with OpenAI and Google over the technology’s future.

The philosophical debate has become the central battleground for AI’s future, with increasing concern that Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google will alone underpin a technology that could become increasingly crucial to our everyday lives.

“This is a pivotal moment in defining the future of AI,” said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in the statement announcing the AI Alliance on Tuesday.

Researchers from EPFL have resolved a long-standing debate surrounding laser additive manufacturing processes with a pioneering approach to defect detection.

The progression of laser additive manufacturing —which involves 3D printing of metallic objects using powders and lasers—has often been hindered by unexpected defects. Traditional monitoring methods, such as thermal imaging and machine learning algorithms, have shown significant limitations. They often either overlook defects or misinterpret them, making precision manufacturing elusive and barring the technique from essential industries like aeronautics and automotive manufacturing.

But what if it were possible to detect defects in real-time based on the differences in the sound the printer makes during a flawless print and one with irregularities? Up until now, the prospect of detecting these defects this way was deemed unreliable. However, researchers at the Laboratory of Thermomechanical Metallurgy (LMTM) at EPFL’s School of Engineering have successfully challenged this assumption.

Amid the rubble of large-sale earthquake, war or other disaster—and as aging buildings and infrastructure are replaced—mountains of concrete are often taken to landfill or pounded into rubble for roads.

For a more sustainable approach, Flinders University and The University of Melbourne experts are developing a ‘value add’ for old broken concrete to ‘upcycling’ coarse aggregate to produce a strong, durable and workable concrete using a small amount of a secret ingredient—graphene.

The novel method is gaining ground every day as new graphene deposits are discovered and mined—bringing the price of that raw material down as the cost of cement and aggregates continues to rise, the researchers say.

Recent research conducted at Georgia State University shows that native language affects how people convey information from a young age and hints at the presence of a universal system of communication.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, a professor in the Psychology Department, has been researching the connection between language and thought for years. Her latest study, “What the development of gesture with and without speech can tell us about the effect of language on thought,” published in Language and Cognition, is a continuation of previous work with adults.

For this study, Özçalışkan, in collaboration with Susan Goldin-Meadow at the University of Chicago and Che Lucero at Cornell University, focused on children ages 3 to 12. The children either spoke English or Turkish. They were asked to use their hands to act out specific actions, such as running into a house.

Researchers have precisely measured the electrical-transport properties of a highly ordered Wigner solid—a crystalline state formed of electrons rather than atoms.

Can technology be developed to identify small objects in space? This is something the U.S. Air Force hopes to address and they recently awarded a $5 million grant to a Georgia State University professor with the goal of identifying, charting, and imaging small objects in space, also known as Space Domain Awareness (SDA). This grant holds the potential to improve SDA regarding small objects between the Earth and the Moon, which could benefit national security as well as observational astronomy.

This grant comes as the number of objects launched into space continues to increase every year. For example, while the total of objects launched into space worldwide in 2016 was 221, that number jumped to 456 in 2017, experienced a slight decrease to 454 in 2018, increased to 586 in 2019, but then experienced massive spikes to 1,274 in 2020, 1,813 in 2021, and 2,478 in 2022, more than a tenfold increase in six years. So many objects not only pose threats to observational astronomy but to national security, as well.

“Detecting objects in the space region between where many communications satellites are located extending to the distance at which the Moon orbits the Earth presents a substantial challenge,” said Dr. Stuart Jefferies, who is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Georgia State University, and recipient of the grant. “The faintness of these objects makes observation difficult using ground-based telescopes, as they are starved of photons from the target of interest, creating a potential vulnerability that adversaries could exploit.”

Researchers have come up with a solution to the “Hubble tension,” arguing that Einstein didn’t consider we’re in the middle of a cosmic void.

The material developed by researchers in Panama uses a mixture of newspaper, rice husk, borax, and glue.

Bilanol/iStock.

The construction industry ranks as the second-largest consumer of plastic globally, contributing to over a third of greenhouse gas emissions associated with energy usage worldwide. The manufacturing procedures involved in producing construction materials have detrimental effects on air, land, and water quality.

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