Lifeboat Foundation

NASA’s Perseverance rover has found a diverse menagerie of organic molecules in a Martian crater, a new study reports.

Organic compounds are molecules composed of carbon, and often include other elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur. Previously, scientists had detected several types of organic molecules of Martian origin — in meteorites blasted off Mars by cosmic impacts that landed on Earth, and in Gale Crater on the Red Planet, which NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring since 2012.

The xAI team says it will work closely with Twitter and Tesla.

To celebrate the completion of the James Webb Space Telescope’s first year of science operations, NASA has released a close-up image of the birth of sun-like stars.

The image, captured on Webb’s telescope is a small star-forming region in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex – the nearest star-forming region to Earth.

The region’s proximity at 390 light-years allows for a highly detailed close-up, with no foreground stars in the intervening space.

The European Southern Observatory continues to build the largest telescope in the world, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). Construction of the telescope began in 2014 with flattening the top of a mountain named Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

ESO just announced that progress on construction has crossed the 50% mark. The remaining work should take another five years. When it finally comes online in 2028, the telescope will have a 39-meter (128 ft) primary mirror of 798 hexagonal segments, making it the largest telescope in the world for visible and infrared light. The new telescope should help to answer some of the outstanding questions about our Universe, such as how the first stars and galaxies formed, and perhaps even be able to take direct images of extrasolar planets.

Continue reading “The Biggest Telescope in the World is Half Built” »

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has unveiled a stunning 3D visualization of 5,000 galaxies, providing a glimpse into the vast cosmic expanse.

The visualization, part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, takes viewers on a journey through nearby galaxies to those in the far reaches of the universe, including one that has never been seen before by the telescope.

Continue reading “NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Unveils 3D Visualization of 5,000 Galaxies” »

Qualcomm recently released a white paper titled, “The Future of AI is Hybrid.” In the paper, they outline a clear case that for AI to develop to its maximum capabilities, it needs to be processed both on the cloud and the edge. Computing at the edge would improve issues like cost, energy use, reliability, latency issues, privacy—all of the things that make scaling and growing a technology difficult. And they’re right: for AI to optimize fully, it needs more than one partner, more than one solution. But the greater lesson here is: that’s true for all technology moving forward.

When we hear the term “hybrid,” many of us think of hybrid cars—cars that run on both gasoline and electricity. We in the tech space eventually grabbed that term to refer to things like hybrid cloud —a situation where companies may process some of their data on the public cloud, private cloud, or data center in some type of mix. The goal in creating these hybrid models in technology was the same as it was with hybrid cars—to reduce energy consumption, improve costs, enhance performance.

The hybrid cars grew in popularity because they allowed users the enjoy the best qualities of both types of cars—gas and electric. Gas engines allow the hybrid to refuel quickly and move longer distances before needing fuel. The electric side helps cut emissions and save money. A similar concept is true for AI. AI needs somewhere powerful and stable for model training and inference, which require huge amounts of space for processing complex workloads. That’s where the cloud comes in. At the same time, AI also needs to happen fast. For it to be useful, it needs to process closer to where the action actually happens—the edge of a mobile device.

“Our model, based on laboratory experiments, confirms that the majority of chromium in Mercury is concentrated within its core.”

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, yet it is also the least understood. Mercury.

This odd planet features some of the most enduring mysteries, for instance, scientists aren’t sure where Mercury came from. How did its metallic core get so dense and big? Or how does this small planet, so near to the Sun, sustain even a thin atmosphere?

“Siri, play gold dust by flux pavilion”

The James Webb Space Telescope detected a cosmic phenomenon known as a kilonova, which can create gold, platinum, and uranium in space.

In 2003, the data visualization expert Edward Tufte traced that year’s Columbia disaster—in which seven astronauts died when their shuttle disintegrated—to a piece of software. It was PowerPoint, he argued, that prevented people at NASA from understanding the gravity of the risks facing the shuttle. PowerPoint all but forced “breaking up narratives and data into … minimal fragments,” “a preoccupation with format not content,” and “a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch.” Serious dangers got buried at the bottom of a multilevel hierarchy of bullet points under a bigger, sunnier title. If only the information had been delivered in a proper technical report, Tufte implied, the astronauts might still be alive.

Twenty years later, there’s a new office tool keeping us from fully expressing and processing important information: the digital whiteboard. These boards are vast canvases on which you can add and drag around virtually limitless quantities of text, images, tables, diagrams, emoji, and shapes. In their typical state, they are mostly covered with sticky notes on which people have written a word or three. What the words signify in context can quickly become hard to remember, but that’s OK. Like books used as decorations, they get their value from the fact that they signify something.