The European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft captured a stunning new view of the Red Planet’s complex surface geology.
The new image, taken using the orbiter’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), focuses on the flanks of a vast volcanic plateau called Thaumasia Planum. Deep surface fractures and water-carved valleys stream down the side of this volcanic region, offering clues about Mars’ ancient past.
Died: 13 October 1987, Seattle, WA, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA
Prize motivation: “for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect”
The Earth-like planet is almost the same size as Earth, but it has a four-day year.
An international team of astronomers discovered a new planet that greatly resembles Earth in size.
The astronomers confirmed the existence of K2-415b, an exoplanet orbiting an M dwarf star some 72 light-years away from Earth, according to a press release.
## Discovering an alien world
The team behind the discovery set out to look for stars that could be suitable hosts for planets that may harbor life.
In a paper available in the preprint server arXiv, they explain how they used a method called radial velocity. Essentially, the gravity of orbiting exoplanets causes small wobbles in the light emitted by the planet’s host star. These wobbles change the color of the light, allowing astronomers to detect them from Earth.
Radial velocity is one of several methods astronomers use to detect exoplanets — any planet that is not part of our solar system. Other methods include direct imaging and the transit method, which measures the periodic drop in light of a distant star as an exoplanet passes between the star and an observatory’s field of view.
If your work involves analyzing and reporting on data, then it’s understandable that you might feel a bit concerned by the rapid advances being made by artificial intelligence (AI). In particular, the viral ChatGPT app has captured the imagination of the general public in recent months, acting as a powerful demonstration of what AI is already capable of. For some, it may also seem like a warning about what might be in store for the future.
Undoubtedly, one of the strengths of AI is its ability to make sense of large amounts of data – searching out patterns and putting it into reports, documents, and formats that humans can easily understand. This is the day-to-day “bread and butter” of data analysts as well as many other knowledge economy professionals whose work involves working with data and analytics.
It’s true that artificial intelligence – a term that generally, in business and industry, refers to machine learning – has been used for years in these fields. What ChatGPT and similar tools built on large language models (LLM) and natural language processing (NLP) bring to the table is that it can be easily and effectively used by anybody. If a CEO can simply say to a computer, “what do I need to do to improve customer satisfaction?” or “how can I make more sales?” do they need to worry about hiring, training, and maintaining an expensive analytics team to answer those questions?
Well, fortunately, the answer probably, is yes. In fact, as AI becomes more accessible and mainstream, that team may well become even more critical to the business than it already is. What is beyond doubt, though, is that their jobs will substantially change. So, here’s my rundown of how this technology may affect the field of data and analytics as it becomes mainstream in the near future.
Firstly, what are ChatGPT, LLMs, and NLP?
ChatGPT is a publicly-available conversational (or chatbot) interface powered by a LLM called GPT-3, developed by the research institute OpenAI. The LLM (Large Language Model) is part of a field of machine learning known as natural language processing, which essentially means that it enables us to talk to machines, and for them to reply to us in “natural” (i.e., human) languages. In short, this means that we can ask it a question in English, or in fact, one of almost 100 languages. It can also read, understand and generate computer code in a number of popular programming languages, including Python, Javascript, and C++. We’ve gotten used to interacting with NLP technology for some time now thanks largely to AI assistants like Alexa and Siri, but the LLM powering GPT-3 and ChatGPT is orders of magnitude larger, enabling it to understand far more complex inputs and provide far more sophisticated outputs.
Some of the hottest spots in the Sun’s atmosphere appear in the telescope’s X-ray view.
A powerful plant-derived toxin with a unique way of killing harmful bacteria has been identified as one of the most promising new antibiotics in decades.
Albicidin, a new antibiotic, is produced by the plant pathogen Xanthomonas albilineans, responsible for causing sugar cane’s destructive leaf scald disease. The toxin is believed to aid the pathogen’s spread by attacking the plant. Albicidin has been shown to be highly effective against harmful bacteria, including drug-resistant superbugs such as E. coli and S. aureus.
Despite its antibiotic potential and low toxicity in pre-clinical experiments, pharmaceutical development of albicidin has been hampered because scientists did not know precisely how it interacted with its target, the bacterial enzyme DNA.
In a study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell on February 2, researchers show that brain organoids—clumps of lab-grown neurons—can integrate with rat brains and respond to visual stimulation like flashing lights.
Decades of research has shown that we can transplant individual human and rodent neurons into rodent brains, and, more recently, it has been demonstrated that human brain organoids can integrate with developing rodent brains. However, whether these organoid grafts can functionally integrate with the visual system of injured adult brains has yet to be explored.
“We focused on not just transplanting individual cells, but actually transplanting tissue,” says senior author H. Isaac Chen, a physician and Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania. “Brain organoids have architecture; they have structure that resembles the brain. We were able to look at individual neurons within this structure to gain a deeper understanding of the integration of transplanted organoids.”
Researchers are studying hibernating Arctic ground squirrels with the goal of harnessing the benefits of this odd natural state to protect astronauts’ health on long-duration space missions.
Hibernation is not just sleep. In fact, it’s quite different from sleep. While we sleep, our brains fire up and become highly active; in hibernation, on the contrary, brain activity completely slows down. The body temperature of hibernating animals also drops, in some cases close to the freezing point, cells stop dividing and heart rate decreases to two beats per minute.
As fantastic as this may seem this is not an impossible occurrence.
Before Einstein, time travel was just a story, but his calculations led us into the quantum world and gave us a more complicated picture of time. Kurt Godel found that Einstein’s equations made it possible to go back in time. What’s up? None of the ideas about how to go back in time were ever physically possible.
Before sending a particle back in time, scientists from ETH Zurich, Argonne National Laboratory, and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology asked, Why stick to physical grounds?
Many laws of physics treat the future and the past as if they are one thing. The second rule of thermodynamics says that in a closed system, order gives way to chaos (or entropy). When you scramble an egg to make an omelet, you add a lot of chaos to the egg, which was a closed system before.
A promo ad for Google’s unreleased artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot made an embarrassing mistake.