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Iridium folds Aireon aviation safety service into Rocket Lab-bound business

TAMPA, Fla. — Iridium Communications has completed its takeover of Aireon, bringing the aircraft-tracking venture fully in-house ahead of the satellite operator’s planned $8 billion sale to Rocket Lab.

McLean, Virginia-based Iridium said July 6 it had bought the remaining 61% of Aireon it did not already own from air navigation service providers in Canada, England, Denmark, Ireland and Italy.

Aireon, which has provided an aviation safety service since 2019 using Iridium satellites and the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) signals aircraft broadcast, will continue to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary following the $367 million deal.

Hugo de Garis on AI: Are We Building Gods or Terminators?

In 2012, I sat down with Hugo de Garis, and he told me billions of people could die this century over one question: should we build machines smarter than ourselves?

Back then, it sounded like pure science fiction. He called the coming conflict the Artilect War. On one side, the Cosmists who want to build godlike machine intelligence. On the other hand, the Terrans who would rather go to war than gamble on human extinction. In between, the Cyborgists who just want to become gods themselves. He even had a word for the body count:

Gigadeath.

Fourteen years later, the war he predicted hasn’t arrived. The question underneath it has moved to the center of the room.

Because de Garis got one thing profoundly right, even if the timeline was lurid. The hard part was never whether we could build these systems. It’s whether we should, and who gets to decide. That is not a #technology question. Technology is only ever the How. This is a Why and a What, a question about power, values, and what kind of species we choose to become.

He was asking it when almost nobody else was. That is why this conversation still holds up.

Continue reading “Hugo de Garis on AI: Are We Building Gods or Terminators?” | >

A new route to electrically controlled helimagnetic structures

Advanced magnetic memory and spintronic devices rely on the ability to control magnetic states using electricity. Today, such technologies work by manipulating relatively simple magnetic structures found in ferromagnets, where all the magnetic moments point the same way. However, researchers are becoming increasingly interested in controlling more complex magnetic systems because these could offer higher information density and improved efficiency.

Helimagnets are a prime example of such systems. In these materials, the magnetic moments form spiral or helical patterns that wind through the material. The direction in which these magnetic patterns propagate plays an important role in determining the material’s electrical and magnetic behavior.

However, researchers had not established a reliable way to reversibly control the orientation of helical magnetic structures using an electric current, and current-driven techniques developed for ferromagnets do not directly carry over to helimagnetic systems.

Capturing the cosmic ‘drift’ before a star is born

Stars like our sun are formed from the collapse of stellar objects called prestellar cores, cold and dense concentrations of gas and dust held together by gravity. While many questions remain about the exact mechanisms of star formation, advanced radio telescopes have given researchers new insights into the inner workings of infant stars.

Now, publishing in Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers from Kyushu University and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have, for the first time, detected a phenomenon known as ambipolar diffusion occurring in a prestellar core. This phenomenon weakens the magnetic support of the core, leading to gravitational collapse to form an infant star called a protostar.

These findings provide further insight into the key processes of early star formation and, by extension, how stellar systems are created.

Evidence reveals that the language of thought is not natural language

Some people find it useful to talk through their problems—but language isn’t necessary for logical reasoning, cognitive neuroscientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research say.

In research published in the journal PNAS, researchers led by MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Evelina Fedorenko have shown that people can perform well on tasks that require logical reasoning even if their language abilities are severely impaired. What’s more, brain imaging shows that language-processing parts of the brain are not called on for logical reasoning.

Philosophers, linguists and cognitive scientists have debated the relationship between language and thought for thousands of years, with many arguing that we use language to think. There are good reasons to suspect a close relationship between logic and language, acknowledges Hope Kean, a postdoctoral researcher and former K. Lisa Yang, Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center graduate fellow in Fedorenko’s lab.

AI identifies new particle models that may explain neutrinos’ tiny mass

Physicists at the University of California, Irvine, have developed an artificial intelligence system that can autonomously design theoretical physics models, a task traditionally carried out by human theorists. The approach allows researchers to explore large, uncharted areas of particle physics theory, helping identify promising new explanations for the behavior of neutrinos.

The system is called Autonomous Model Builder (AMBer), and was developed by a research team led by UC Irvine doctoral candidates Victoria Knapp-Pérez and Jake Rudolph in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. The work is published in Communications Physics.

AMBer uses reinforcement learning, a form of artificial intelligence that learns through trial and error rather than by following predefined instructions. As it explores possible particle physics theories, the system evaluates its own choices and improves over time.

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