Lifeboat Foundation

A deep-space mission is celebrating the first anniversary of its launch from Earth by zipping closer to the planet than the International Space Station’s orbit.

NASA’s Lucy mission launched on Oct. 16, 2021, bound on a 12-year journey to explore the Trojan asteroids, which no spacecraft has ever visited. These asteroids are found at the same distance from the sun as Jupiter, with one phalanx orbiting ahead of the planet and one behind it. All told, Lucy will whiz past nine different asteroids.

Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.

The innovative materials, known as thermoformable ceramics, were created by “accident” in a lab but had potential applications, including more effective and long-lasting heat sinks.

The first mission for SpaceX’s newest Dragon crew capsule could hardly have gone more smoothly.

The spacecraft, named Freedom, flew SpaceX’s Crew-4 astronaut mission to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA, which wrapped up Friday afternoon (Oct. 14) with a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida.

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Text-to-image AI systems such as DALL-E 2, Imagen and Midjourney are growing in popularity and capability right now, offering creators a revolutionary new way to produce content.

Generating images from text prompts is a radical new approach to art-making and creative expression. But it also gives us the first glimpse of a fundamental shift in how we can better communicate and collaborate with our machines. And it is this underlying innovation in human-computer interaction that will disrupt the near-future possibilities for how we are able to work and play.

If we take the Moon’s current rate of recession and project it back in time, we end up with a collision between the Earth and the Moon around 1.5 billion years ago. However, the Moon was formed around 4.5 billion years ago, meaning that the current recession rate is a poor guide for the past.

Along with our fellow researchers from Utrecht University and the University of Geneva, we have been using a combination of techniques to try and gain information on our solar system’s distant past.

We recently discovered the perfect place to uncover the long-term history of our receding Moon. And it’s not from studying the Moon itself, but from reading signals in ancient layers of rock on Earth.

From a platypus to a blue whale, all living mammals today are descended from a common ancestor that existed some 180 million years ago. Although we don’t know a lot about this animal, a global team of experts has recently computationally reconstructed the organization of its genome. The findings were recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Our results have important implications for understanding the evolution of mammals and for conservation efforts,” said Harris Lewin, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, and senior author on the paper.

The researchers used high-quality genome sequences from 32 living species, spanning 23 of the 26 known mammalian orders. Humans and chimpanzees were among these species, as were wombats and rabbits, manatees, domestic cattle, rhinos, bats, and pangolins. The chicken and Chinese alligator genomes were also used as comparison groups in the analysis. Some of these genomes are being produced as part of the Earth BioGenome Project and other large-scale biodiversity genome sequencing initiatives. Lewin is the chair of the Earth BioGenome Project’s Working Group.

This week, travel deep beneath the waves to explore ocean trenches, marvel at the Rosetta stone, spy a stellar spiderweb in space, celebrate the year’s best wildlife photography, meet brain cells that can play Pong, and more.

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Many observers were disappointed with the recent demo of the AI-enabled “Optimus” robot at Tesla’s AI Day. One reviewer cleverly titled his article “Sub-Optimus.” However, these views actually miss the point. Whatever else may be said of Elon Musk, he is a genius at sensing timing and opportunity, applying technology and providing the necessary resources.

Continue reading “We are entering a new era powered robotics” »

Essays written by AI language tools like OpenAI’s Playground are often hard to tell apart from text written by humans.