Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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India’s anti-satellite missile test created at least 400 pieces of orbital debris, the head of NASA says — placing the International Space Station (ISS) and its astronauts at risk.

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said Monday that just 60 pieces of debris were large enough to track. Of those, 24 went above the apogee of the ISS, the point of the space station’s orbit farthest from the Earth.

“That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station,” Bridenstine said in a live-streamed NASA town hall meeting. “That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight.”

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Google recently appointed an external ethics council to deal with tricky issues in artificial intelligence. The group is meant to help the company appease critics while still pursuing lucrative cloud computing deals.

In less than a week, the council is already falling apart, a development that may jeopardize Google’s chance of winning more military cloud-computing contracts.

On Saturday, Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist and privacy researcher, said he won’t be serving on the council. While I’m devoted to research grappling with key ethical issues of fairness, rights and inclusion in AI, I don’t believe this is the right forum for me to engage in this important work,’’ Acquisti said on Twitter. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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Bacteria are fast evolving resistance to antibiotics, which is fast-tracking us to a future where our best drugs no longer work and simple infections become life-threatening once again. While new antibiotics are in the works, the bugs will eventually develop resistances to those too, so a longer term strategy might be to prevent them from evolving in the first place. A new study has found that bacteria use clever gambles to adapt – and showed how we could rig the game in our favor.

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Discovering planets that nobody has ever seen before is even harder than it sounds. Space telescopes from NASA and other scientific bodies have gathered an incredible amount of data that will take astronomers years and years to sift through, and many times there’s just nothing there to be found.

But humans don’t have to do all of the work, and Anne Dattilo, a senior at the University of Texas in Austin enlisted the help of artificial intelligence to study data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope and found not one, but two new exoplanets in the process.

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