Read moreBased on the concentration of Fe-60 in the crust, Knie estimated that the supernova exploded at least 100 light-years from Earth—three times the distance at which it could’ve obliterated the ozone layer—but close enough to potentially alter cloud formation, and thus, climate. While no mass-extinction events happened 2.8 million years ago, some drastic climate changes did take place—and they may have given a boost to human evolution. Around that time, the African climate dried up, causing the forests to shrink and give way to grassy savanna. Scientists think this change may have encouraged our hominid ancestors as they descended from trees and eventually began walking on two legs.
That idea, as any young theory, is still speculative and has its opponents. Some scientists think Fe-60 may have been brought to Earth by meteorites, and others think these climate changes can be explained by decreasing greenhouse gas concentrations, or the closing of the ocean gateway between North and South America. But Knie’s new tool gives scientists the ability to date other, possibly more ancient, supernovas that may have passed in the vicinity of Earth, and to study their influence on our planet. It is remarkable that we can use these dull, slow-growing rocks to study the luminous, rapid phenomena of stellar explosions, Fields says. And they’ve got more stories to tell.
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Read moreNasa scientist Daniel Glavin described the results from the first “wet chemistry” experiment carried out by Curiosity.
A long-chain carboxylic acid, or fatty acid, was a good fit for one of the data peaks detected in a mudstone called Cumberland, he told an audience at the meeting. A form of alcohol molecule may also be among the compounds analysed.
The preliminary result will excite scientists because fatty acids are key components of the cell membranes found in all life forms, including microbial organisms.
Dr Glavin told an audience that the result was “provocative”, and said the link to biology was the “million-dollar question”. But he explained that a non-biological origin was equally plausible at this stage of the research.
One scientist commenting on the presentation suggested that contamination could not be ruled out as a cause of the signal.
The SAM team have been working to address the leak of a pre-existing chemical called MTBSTFA within the instrument.
The fact this is also an organic molecule has complicated the search for indigenous carbon-containing compounds in Martian rocks.
However, team members say they have turned the leak into an advantage, using their understanding of how MTBSTFA reacts with other compounds to identify Martian organics.
Using NASA’s Kepler satellite, astronomers have found about 1,000 planets around stars in the Milky Way and they have also found about 3,000 other potential planets. Many of the stars have planetary systems with 2-6 planets, but the stars could very well have more planets than those observable with the Kepler satellite, which is best suited for finding large planets that orbit relatively close to their stars.
Planets that orbit close to their stars would be too scorching hot to have life, so to find out if such planetary systems might also have planets in the habitable zone with the potential for liquid water and life, a group of researchers from the Australian National University and the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen made calculations based on a new version of a 250-year-old method called the Titius-Bode law.The Titius-Bode law was formulated around 1770 and correctly calculated the position of Uranus before it was even discovered. The law states that there is a certain ratio between the orbital periods of planets in a solar system. So the ratio between the orbital period of the first and second planet is the same as the ratio between the second and the third planet and so on. Therefore, if you knew how long it takes for some of the planets to orbit around the Sun/star, you can calculate how long it takes for the other planets to orbit and can thus calculate their position in the planetary system. You can also calculate if a planet is ‘missing’ in the sequence.
“We decided to use this method to calculate the potential planetary positions in 151 planetary systems, where the Kepler satellite had found between 3 and 6 planets. In 124 of the planetary systems, the Titius-Bode law fit with the position of the planets. Using T-B’s law we tried to predict where there could be more planets further out in the planetary systems. But we only made calculations for planets where there is a good chance that you can see them with the Kepler satellite,” explains Steffen Kjær Jacobsen, PhD student in the research group Astrophysics and Planetary Science at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
In 27 of the 151 planetary systems, the planets that had been observed did not fit the T-B law at first glance. They then tried to place planets into the ‘pattern’ for where planets should be located. Then they added the planets that seemed to be missing between the already known planets and also added one extra planet in the system beyond the outermost known planet. In this way, they predicted a total of 228 planets in the 151 planetary systems.
“We then made a priority list with 77 planets in 40 planetary systems to focus on because they have a high probability of making a transit, so you can see them with Kepler. We have encouraged other researchers to look for these. If they are found, it is an indication that the theory stands up,” explains Steffen Kjær Jacobsen.
Planets that orbit very close around a star are too scorching hot to have liquid water and life and planets that are far from the star would be too deep-frozen, but the intermediate habitable zone, where there is the potential for liquid water and life, is not a fixed distance. The habitable zone for a planetary system will be different from star to star, depending on how big and bright the star is.
The researchers evaluated the number of planets in the habitable zone based on the extra planets that were added to the 151 planetary systems according to the Titius-Bode law.
***The result was 1-3 planets in the habitable zone for each planetary system.***
Out of the 151 planetary systems, they now made an additional check on 31 planetary systems where they had already found planets in the habitable zone or where only a single extra planet was needed to meet the requirements.
“In these 31 planetary systems that were close to the habitable zone, our calculations showed that there was an average of two planets in the habitable zone. According to the statistics and the indications we have, a good share of the planets in the habitable zone will be solid planets where there might be liquid water and where life could exist,” explains Steffen Kjær Jacobsen.
If you then take the calculations further out into space, it would mean that just in our galaxy, the Milky Way, ***there could be billions of stars with planets in the habitable zone***, where there could be liquid water and where life could exist.
He explains that what they now want to do is encourage other researchers to look at the Kepler data again for the 40 planetary systems that they have predicted should be well placed to be observed with the Kepler satellite.
Planets in the habitable zone around most stars, researchers calculate – http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150318074515.htm
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Read moreThe dust cloud surrounds Mars and reaches altitudes more than 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) from the planet’s surface, said MAVEN lead scientist Bruce Jakosky, also with University of Colorado.
“We think the source is the (Martian) atmosphere, however we have no process to take dust from low altitude to bring it up to 200 kilometers (124 miles). So if the source is the atmosphere, we don’t understand which process is moving them up,” Andersson said.
The dust also could have come from Mars’ moons, Phobos and Deimos, from dust in the solar wind or from comet dust that fills interplanetary space.
Read moreIs everything in the movie explicable?
Everything there has a point, has a reason. Even the orbs, the glowing orbs.
i was gonna ask about them.
Those are remote antennas for the Fluid Karma energy field. You got one of those orbs around, the energy field is more highly concentrated and that’s sort of explained briefly in the graphic novels. Even when Justin Timberlake’s character, Pilot Abilene, when he’s talking about a ‘sea of black umbrellas’ in his crazy, drug-fueled monologue, he’s talking about seeing back into time, to the early 20th Century at the Santa Monica Pier, with all of the umbrellas.
Oh, was that a thing?
In the Cannes cut, there’s a scene where Boxer bleeds back in time to the 1920s and he sees a fortune-teller. He sees Beth Grant in a fortune-teller tent on the beach. There’s a lot of stuff that didn’t even make—there’s a lot of material that people haven’t seen…
There’s still some visual effects that are not where I want them to be. There’s some visual effects work. There are some shots at the end of the movie that I would like to add visual effects. Even just adding some of the content from the Cannes cut and even some of the content that never has still seen the light of day. And the animated—I have always hoped to do the first three chapters as a low-budget, animated feature. To just complete the whole thing or visualize the entire six-chapter story.
” All culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are culture” : Artificial Intelligence as Alien Intelligence
Read more "” All culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are culture” : Artificial Intelligence as Alien Intelligence"“Arguably,” argues Bratton, “the Anthropocene itself is due less to technology run amok than to the humanist legacy that understands the world as having been given for our needs and created in our image. We hear this in the words of thought leaders who evangelize the superiority of a world where machines are subservient to the needs and wishes of humanity… This is the sentiment – this philosophy of technology exactly – that is the basic algorithm of the Anthropocenic predicament, and consenting to it would also foreclose adequate encounters with A.I.” The Anthropocene in this formulation names the emergence of environmental or planetary consciousness, an emergence sometimes coupled to the global circulation of the image of the fragility and interdependence of the whole earth as seen by humans from outer space. It is the recognition that the world in which we evolved to flourish might be impacted by our collective actions in ways that threaten us all. Notice, by the way, that multiculture and historical struggle are figured as just another “algorithm” here.
I do not agree that planetary catastrophe inevitably followed from the conception of the earth as a gift besetting us to sustain us, indeed this premise understood in terms of stewardship or commonwealth would go far in correcting and preventing such careless destruction in my opinion. It is the false and facile (indeed infantile) conception of a finite world somehow equal to infinite human desires that has landed us and keeps us delusive ignoramuses lodged in this genocidal and suicidal predicament. Certainly I agree with Bratton that it would be wrong to attribute the waste and pollution and depletion of our common resources by extractive-industrial-consumer societies indifferent to ecosystemic limits to “technology run amok.” The problem of so saying is not that to do so disrespects “technology” – as presumably in his view no longer treating machines as properly “subservient to the needs and wishes of humanity” would more wholesomely respect “technology,” whatever that is supposed to mean – since of course technology does not exist in this general or abstract way to be respected or disrespected.
The reality at hand is that humans are running amok in ways that are facilitated and mediated by certain technologies. What is demanded in this moment by our predicament is the clear-eyed assessment of the long-term costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific interventions into finite ecosystems to the actual diversity of their stakeholders and the distribution of these costs, risks, and benefits in an equitable way. Quite a lot of unsustainable extractive and industrial production as well as mass consumption and waste would be rendered unprofitable and unappealing were its costs and risks widely recognized and equitably distributed. Such an understanding suggests that what is wanted is to insist on the culpability and situation of actually intelligent human actors, mediated and facilitated as they are in enormously complicated and demanding ways by technique and artifice. The last thing we need to do is invest technology-in-general or environmental-forces with alien intelligence or agency apart from ourselves.
I am beginning to wonder whether the unavoidable and in many ways humbling recognition (unavoidable not least because of environmental catastrophe and global neoliberal precarization) that human agency emerges out of enormously complex and dynamic ensembles of interdependent/prostheticized actors gives rise to compensatory investments of some artifacts – especially digital networks, weapons of mass destruction, pandemic diseases, environmental forces – with the sovereign aspect of agency we no longer believe in for ourselves? It is strangely consoling to pretend our technologies in some fancied monolithic construal represent the rise of “alien intelligences,” even threatening ones, other than and apart from ourselves, not least because our own intelligence is an alienated one and prostheticized through and through. Consider the indispensability of pedagogical techniques of rote memorization, the metaphorization and narrativization of rhetoric in songs and stories and craft, the technique of the memory palace, the technologies of writing and reading, the articulation of metabolism and duration by timepieces, the shaping of both the body and its bearing by habit and by athletic training, the lifelong interplay of infrastructure and consciousness: all human intellect is already technique. All culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are culture.
Read moreInstead of throwing things away in orbit (Skylab, Salyuts, Mir) we can now build upon these assets and move them around like Lego bricks to form new things as we need them – and then do this again and again. When the government is done with their hardware, it can be used by someone else – just like old military bases can become movie studios and shopping malls. The more orbital capacity that is available, the more customers it can collectively and individually serve. The more valuable these on-orbit assets become for government and non-government uses, the more everyone will want to safeguard that growing capacity (and isolate it from terrestrial squabbles) as has been the case with ISS recently.
Brave space robots literally make me misty. And it’s not just because they serve as a proxy for the East African Plains Apes millions of miles away, at their controls. In fact, I think most of the time we forget that our speciesmates are back there (back here!) on Earth, fiddling with joysticks and flipping toggles. Or tapping away on keyboards and puzzling over ambiguous shadows in photographs.
We say, “Curiosity discovered–” after all. We even construct gender for her and her and her sister Martian rovers–they’re female, a pack of brave, adventurous Girl Scouts out there earning merit badges and drilling in to rocks.
I may have shed a tiny tear when I stayed up way, way too late to ‘watch’ her land. I was certainly rooting for her with as much ferocity as I’ve ever rooted for a Bruce Willis character, and considerably more than I could muster for WALL-E. (That’ll be my unpopular confession for this column.)
It’s interesting to me that we can individually haul up this emotional connection, this strength of empathy, for a machine that–objectively speaking–is just a machine. Not a living creature with feelings and agency; nothing with an object position of its own. More than that, that that empathy is easy for us.
Collectively, we seem to have a hard time summoning that understanding, that complex imagining of the other, for beings who are far more similar to us than these brave space toasters. Who are separated only by a gene controlling pigmentation, or a religious or political belief structure. Possibly it’s because brave little robots are so alien. We don’t come with any installed stereotypes or unexamined prejudices, and they’re not exactly competition. Maybe it’s because robots don’t have political opinions, or a convoluted and shared history of competition and oppression.
In any case, maybe it’s a good sign.
If we can learn to care about robots, maybe we can learn to care about less alien but more strange creatures, such as each other.
Space Robot Sad Trombone – Charlie’s Diary guest post by Elizabeth Bear
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The 2022 probe, which is needed to upgrade NASA’s aging Mars telecommunications network, also will have a “robust” science component, Watzin said…
Watzin offered no further details about the planned Mars 2022 probe, which in some ways is at least conceptually similar to the canceled Mars Telecommunications Orbiter. That mission, scrapped in 2005 to clear room in NASA’s budget for other missions, would have launched in 2009.
Currently, NASA leans heavily on the 13-year-old Mars Odyssey orbiter to relay data collected by the landers and rovers on Mars to Earth. There is real concern that the aging spacecraft might fail, Fuk Li, Director of the Mars Exploration Directorate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told MEPAG after Watzin spoke.
One of Odyssey’s four reaction wheels — used to keep the spacecraft properly oriented — failed in 2012, and ever since, the craft has made do with three. The Mars Atmospheric Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, orbiter that arrived in martian orbit in September to study the planet’s upper atmosphere could serve as a backup communications relay in a pinch, but NASA would prefer not to take that route.
“We never wanted to use MAVEN for relay operations unless there was a sudden emergency,” Li said. However, “we [will] probably have to invoke the capability that MAVEN has” if older Mars satellites such as Odyssey fail.
NASA Eyes New Mars Orbiter for 2022 – SpaceNews.com or the status of our telecommunications infrastructure on Mars
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Read moreAn entity like Siri, for instance, is not aspiring to become more human; Siri would want to be many times more efficient than that. Siri does not have one conversation like the conversation we are having here. Siri has hundreds of thousands of conversations at once. It wants to look through more databases faster; it does not want to read its way through a book, quietly pondering, like Alan Turing might have done.
You do not want Siri to be more like Alan Turing, you want Siri to be more like Apple Inc. You want Siri to do everything that Apple can do: Geophysically locate things, run big databases, find apps for you, look for movie locations. Alan Turing does not know every movie in California! You are getting in the way when you say, “Siri, why can’t you be more like a Mid-20th century gay mathematician? So you can pass the Turing Test.” That would be metaphysically pleasing; it would have made Turing’s point. Me in one room, Siri in the other room, and we seem exactly the same; therefore, cognition equals computation. Cognition does not equal computation. You do not even want cognition to equal computation. You are getting in the way of making computation do things that are of genuine interest.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 