NASA is debating whether to work with commercial partners to get to Mars.
And while SpaceX is the “elephant in the room,” as Ars Technica put it, NASA is keeping its options wide open.
It’s a notable change, as the first time the space agency has openly raised the possibility of working with private space companies to reach Mars.
Anthropogenic plastic pollution is often experienced through evocative images of marine animals caught in floating debris, yet its reach is far more expansive. The polar regions of the Arctic and Antarctica are increasingly experiencing the impacts of plastic reaching floating ice and land, not solely as larger macroplastics (>5 cm), but as microplastics (0.1 µm—5 mm) and nanoplastics (<0.1 µm) that may be carried vast distances from their source or be ingested in more populated areas during seasonal migration.
In an attempt to protect its forests and famous wildlife, Virunga has become the first national park to run a Bitcoin mine. But some are wondering what the hell crypto has to do with conservation.
Anthropic’s new AI chatbot Claude 3 Opus has already made headlines for its bizarre behavior, like claiming to fear death.
Now, Ars Technica reports, a prompt engineer at the Google-backed company claims that they’ve seen evidence that Claude 3 is self-aware, as it seemingly detected that it was being subjected to a test. Many experts are skeptical, however, further underscoring the controversy of ascribing humanlike characteristics to AI models.
“It did something I have never seen before from an LLM,” the prompt engineer, Alex Albert, posted on X, formerly Twitter.
Using sugarcane waste as bricks for construction.
Architecture studio Grimshaw and the University of East London have collaborated to create Sugarcrete, a biomaterial construction block with an interlocking shape made from the sugarcane by-product bagasse.
Sugarcrete was developed to be a low-cost and low-carbon reusable construction-material alternative to brick and concrete.
The concept, design and fabrication of the material were led by staff and fellows of the University of East London (UEL), including senior architecture lecturer Armor Gutierrez Rivas, Sustainability Research Institute co-director Alan Chandler and research fellow Bamdad Ayati.
Petunias that glow in the dark are a thing now. The genetically modified flowers actually generate their own light, and are now legal to sell.
Year 2021 😗😁😘
Researchers Prof. Judith Haendeler from the Medical Faculty and the molecular biologist Prof. Joachim Altschmied from the Department of Biology, together with their teams, have shown for the first time in the cardiovascular system that telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) within the mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cells, has a protective function in myocardial infarction. This work, which was performed together with other groups from the University Hospital Düsseldorf and the University Hospital Essen within the frame of the Collaborative Research Center 1,116, was recently published in the journal Circulation.
Cardiac muscle cells benefit from the increased mitochondrial function and are protected from cell death. Other cell types also profit from increased mitochondrial function such as fibroblasts, which are essential for stable scarring after an infarction, and endothelial cells, which are needed for vascularization and thus blood supply in the infarct area.
In the cell nucleus, TERT is a component of the so-called “immortality enzyme” telomerase, for the discovery of which the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded in 2009. Meanwhile, it has been shown by the two research groups at HHU, that TERT is also present in mitochondria in the cells of the cardiovascular system. However, until now it has not been possible to clearly distinguish between its functions in these two cell organelles.
Ahead of building a fine arts museum in Vannes, Brittany, French archaeologists have uncovered an elaborate castle from the 1300s.
If you were to throw a message in a bottle into a black hole, all of the information in it, down to the quantum level, would become completely scrambled. Because in black holes this scrambling happens as quickly and thoroughly as quantum mechanics allows. They are generally considered nature’s ultimate information scramblers.
The new BREAD experiment, which was designed to search the cosmos for mysterious dark matter, has returned its first results.
