Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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We’re only days into James Webb’s scientific operations, and the giant infrared observatory has already broken its own record for the most distant galaxy ever observed.

Last week, a team unearthed an observation of a galaxy that existed 400 million years after the Big Bang. This week, a new analysis revealed a galaxy a mere 235 million years after the Big Bang. It is located 35 billion light-years away from Earth.

James Webb peers further into the universe than ever before

The researchers behind the new discovery, from the University of Edinburgh, compiled a catalog of early galaxies observed by Webb to investigate the luminosity function of galaxies that formed shortly after the Big Bang. They hadn’t actually planned to observe the most distant galaxy known to humans, so the new finding was a happy accident.

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Circa 2015

New software being developed at MIT is proving able to autonomously repair software bugs by borrowing from other programs and across different programming languages, without requiring access to the source code. This could save developers thousands of hours of programming time and lead to much more stable software.

Bugs are the bane of the software developer’s life. The changes that must be made to fix them are often trivial, typically involving changing only a few lines of code, but the process of identifying exactly which lines need to be fixed can be a very time-consuming and often very frustrating process, particularly in larger projects.

But now, new software from MIT could take care of this, and more. The system, dubbed CodePhage, can fix bugs which have to do with variable checks, and could soon be expanded to fix many more types of mistakes. Remarkably, according to MIT researcher Stelios Sidiroglou-Douskos, the software can do this kind of dynamic code translation and transplant (dubbed “horizontal code transplant,” from the analogous process in genetics) without needing access to the source code and across different programming languages, by analyzing the executable file directly.

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New York (AP) — Buzz Aldrin’s jacket worn on his historic first mission to the moon’s surface in 1969 has been auctioned off to a bidder for nearly $2.8 million.

The $2,772,500 paid for the Apollo 11 Inflight Coverall Jacket is the highest for any American space-flown artifact sold at auction, according to Sotheby’s, which handled the sale. The unidentified winning bidder, who participated by phone, outlasted several others in a bidding that spanned almost 10 minutes.

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While the University of Hawai’i has until 2028 to officially hand off its management duties to the group, locals like native activist Noe Noe Wong-Wilson are optimistic about the change. She and others note that it feels like policy makers are finally listening to Native Hawaiians’ voices regarding the stewardship and care of their own community.

“This is the first time with the new authority that cultural practitioners and community members will actually have seats in the governing organization,” says Wong-Wilson, who is the executive director of the Lālākea Foundation, a nonprofit Native Hawaiian cultural organization. Wong-Wilson, who is a member of the working group that helped develop the bill proposal, says that the choice to bring in people and ideas from all over the community is what helped make the new law a reality.

She adds that the law’s mutual stewardship model takes into account all human activities on the mountain, and is designed to help “protect Mauna Kea for future generations,” as Native Hawaiians believe the mountain is a sacred place—a part of their spirituality as well as their culture. But years of mismanagement has created a mistrust in the state’s stakeholders, which included the University and Hawaiian government officials, and deepened a rift between Indigenous culture and western science.

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“It is very exciting to see this unusual phase of matter realized in an actual experiment, especially because the mathematical description is based on a theoretical ‘extra’ time dimension,” Philipp Dumitrescu, study co-author and research fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics, told the magazine.

In order to successfully create the topological phase, and thus the “extra” dimension, the scientists targeted a quantum computer’s quantum bits — or qubits — with a quasi-periodic laser pulse based on the Fibonacci sequence. Think quasicrystal.

“The Fibonacci sequence is a non-repeating but also not totally random sequence,” study co-author Andrew Potter, a quantum physicist at the University of British Columbia, told Vice. “Which effectively lets us realize two independent time-dimensions in the system.”

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