NASA is ramping up its lunar ambitions by awarding nearly $600 million for four commercial Moon landings planned for late 2028. Each mission will carry the same trio of science instruments to improve lunar navigation, study dangerous dust kicked up during landings, and map the Moon's radiation environment. The agency also revealed plans for new rovers, communication satellites, and additional cargo missions as it lays the groundwork for a permanent Moon Base.
When can we trust the results we get from AI, and when is learning impossible? Researchers have shown that there are some problems that even the most powerful AI cannot reliably solve, no matter how much data it is given.
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the University of California, Santa Barbara, designed “adversarial” mathematical systems to fool any AI algorithm. Like ethical hackers stress-testing a network’s security, these adversarial systems were designed to map out exactly where and why AI prediction breaks down.
Many real-world systems—like those in the oceans, the human brain or robotics—are too complex to describe neatly with equations, so researchers often learn how they behave by using machine learning. But these AI methods don’t always work well, returning unreliable results or poor predictions.
Mesothelioma is a rare but aggressive cancer, usually caused by exposure to asbestos. Inhaled asbestos fibers become lodged in the lungs, causing inflammation that can lead to tumor formation decades later. Worldwide, about 30,000 people are diagnosed with mesothelioma each year.
Current treatments—immunotherapy and chemotherapy—offer limited benefit. Patients—often men who worked in shipbuilding, oil refining and asbestos manufacturing—face a median survival of approximately 12 months and a five-year survival rate of around 10%.
“It’s a disease of a significant unmet medical need,” says Brian Cunniff, a professor at the University of Vermont.
Astronomers have detected signs of a type of sugar in gas clouds near the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Sugars provide energy and are key building blocks of life on Earth, such as DNA, but how they got here is a mystery.
It is not uncommon to find sugar in the cosmos — simple sugars such as ribose and glucose have been previously discovered on asteroids in our Solar System.
MIT engineers have developed a noninvasive pacemaker that stimulates the heart using ultrasound. The design could one day provide a surgery-free alternative to traditional cardiac implants.
The new device is designed as a small sticker that can be worn on the chest. Tiny transducers on the sticker send ultrasound pulses through the chest to stimulate the heart. The ultrasound waves trigger the opening of certain ion channels in heart cells, an effect the researchers amplified through genetic engineering. When the channels open, they let in calcium, which signals a heart cell to squeeze and beat.
In experiments in the lab, the researchers applied ultrasound waves to engineered human cardiac cells and found that the pulses effectively maintained the cells’ healthy contractions. They also tested the ultrasound sticker on rats and found the device quickly, safely, and noninvasively corrected arrhythmias and restored normal, regular heart contractions.
New observations appear to have undermined our leading theories of the universe — so claims Kansas State University computer scientist Lior Shamir, who has identified that far more spiral galaxies spin clockwise than counter-clockwise as seen from Earth. This is a near 50% asymmetry, visible to the naked eye. And it grows stronger the deeper into cosmic history we look. Under the cosmological principle, the century-old assumption that the universe looks the same from every vantage point, an observer anywhere should see a roughly even split. Shamir’s data suggests otherwise, and the implications may require a whole new cosmological theory. Furthermore, the same systematic bias that could explain the spiral galaxy asymmetry may also be inflating the measurements behind two of cosmology’s most stubborn open problems: dark energy, the unexplained force thought to be accelerating the universe’s expansion, and the Hubble tension, the unresolved disagreement over how fast the universe is expanding.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the most powerful astronomical imaging device ever built. With its ability to image the early universe, it provides observations that challenge our understanding of the cosmos, gradually leading to a new era in cosmology.
One of the unexpected observations made by JWST is the asymmetry between the number of galaxies that rotate in one direction and the number of galaxies that rotate in the opposite direction. That is, the number of galaxies imaged by JWST that rotate clockwise is not the same as the number of galaxies that rotate counterclockwise. That can be seen by observing spiral galaxies imaged by JWST deep field images.
