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Tesla has managed to attract the best artificial intelligence specialists to its Autopilot team who are committed to developing software that makes full self-driving possible. The company recently published two patents that relate to improvements in this area.
While scanning the skies, humanity has identified thousands of exoplanets orbiting distant stars. However, very few of them are at all similar to Earth. Now, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen reports a newly discovered exoplanet could be a “mirror image” of our own.
We currently lack the technology to directly image exoplanets, so we can only infer their presence via two methods. Astronomers either look for small wobbles in a star’s rotation caused by the gravity of planets or drops in brightness from our perspective on Earth, which indicates a planet has transited the star. Kepler used the latter method to identify more than 2,600 exoplanets, and that number will probably continue to rise. Teams like the one from the Max Planck Institute are still combing through the luminance data gathered by Kepler to uncover new exoplanets. That’s how they found the very Earth-like candidate exoplanet KOI-456.04.
If it exists, KOI-456.04 orbits a sun-like star called Kepler-160 about 3,000 light-years away from Earth. Previous analysis of Kepler-160 revealed two large exoplanets — these gas giants are much easier to spot in the background noise, so many of the worlds we’ve discovered are very unlike Earth. One of those planets, Kepler-160c, showed small perturbations in its orbit that could indicate another planet, so the Max Planck Institute set out to find it.
New research using ancient DNA is rewriting prehistory in India — and shows that its civilisation is the result of multiple ancient migrations, writes Tony Joseph.
Who are the Indians? And where did they come from?
Amateur astronauts, private space stations, flying factories, out-of-this-world movie sets — this is the future the space agency is striving to shape as it eases out of low-Earth orbit and aims for the moon and Mars.
It doesn’t quite reach the fantasized heights of George Jetson and Iron Man, but still promises plenty of thrills.
“I’m still waiting for my personal jetpack. But the future is incredibly exciting,” NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren said the day before SpaceX’s historic liftoff.
Are scientists who win Nobel Prizes different in key ways from their peer researchers? What happens to the quality of a scientist’s work after they win a Nobel Prize?
Summary: Optical illusions are helping researchers better understand attention and visual perception. Findings suggest attention operates periodically on the perceptual binding of visual information.
Source: University of Tokyo.
Rhythmic waves of brain activity cause us to see or not see complex images that flash before our eyes. An image can become practically invisible if it flashes before our eyes at the same time as a low point of those brain waves. We can reset that brain wave rhythm with a simple voluntary action, like choosing to push a button.
If you’ve wanted to learn more about SpaceX’s projects than you normally see in the news, now’s your chance. The company’s software team is holding a Reddit AMA session today starting at 3PM Eastern to answer questions on the software that guides SpaceX’s projects, including Crew Dragon and Starlink. Six key staffers will be on hand, so you can expect a fair number of responses.
The spaceflight firm doesn’t hold AMAs often, and it’ll likely be worth following the discussion to see what emerges. When Elon Musk held a Reddit chat about BFR (now Starship) in 2017, for instance, he touched on everything from engine design to his vision for Mars colonies. You won’t necessarily get any shocking revelations, but this could fill in some knowledge gaps and satisfy your curiosity.
Summary: Hippocampal adult-born neurons are responsible for memory consolidation during REM sleep.
Source: University of Tsukuba.
The presence of dreaming during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep indicates that memory formation may occur during this sleep stage. But now, researchers from Japan have found that activity in a specific group of neurons is necessary for memory consolidation during REM sleep.
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors that could fit on a computer chip would grow exponentially —- and they did, doubling about every two years. For half a century Moore’s Law has endured: computers have gotten smaller, faster, cheaper and more efficient, enabling the rapid worldwide adoption of PCs, smartphones, high-speed Internet and more.
This miniaturization trend has led to silicon chips today that have almost unimaginably small circuitry. Transistors, the tiny switches that implement computer microprocessors, are so small that 1000 of them laid end-to-end are no wider than a human hair. For a long time, the smaller the transistors were, the faster they could switch.
But today, we’re approaching the limit of how small transistors can get. As a result, over the last decade researchers have been scratching their heads to find other ways to improve performance so that the computer industry can continue to innovate.
