Science

Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats for humanity.
Hinton, who is known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.
“These two gentlemen were really the pioneers,” said Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce. “They … did the fundamental work, based on physical understanding which has led to the revolution we see today in machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
NOBEL PRIZE GOES TO 3 PHYSICISTS FOR WORK ON QUANTUM SCIENCE
The artificial neural networks — interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain — the researchers pioneered are used throughout science and medicine and “have also become par..

A severe solar storm that reached Earth on Thursday could stress power grids even more as the U.S. reels from back-to-back major hurricanes, according to space weather forecasters.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Thursday that a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) blasted from the Sun reached Earth at about 11 a.m.
The Space Weather Prediction Center issued multiple warnings and alerts for geomagnetic storm conditions, and by Thursday, the Earth was experiencing G4, or severe, conditions.
NOAA said a severe geomagnetic storm is a major disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field. The storms often have varying intensity between lower levels and severe storm conditions throughout the course of the event.
GEOMAGNETIC STORM EXPECTED TO HIT EARTH FOLLOWING AUTUMNAL EQUINOX
Geomagnetic storms could impact the power grid, satellites and GPS technology.
“Storm conditions are anticipated to occur overnight as CME progression continues,” NOAA said on its website. “Variati..

A NASA spacecraft is ready to set sail for Jupiter and its moon Europa, one of the best bets for finding life beyond Earth.
Europa Clipper will peer beneath the moon’s icy crust where an ocean is thought to be sloshing fairly close to the surface. It won’t search for life, but rather determine whether conditions there could support it. Another mission would be needed to flush out any microorganisms lurking there.
“It’s a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today — right now,” said program scientist Curt Niebur.
NASA RELEASES CLEAREST VIEW OF MARS, BLUE ROCKS SEEN ON LANDSCAPE
Its massive solar panels make Clipper the biggest craft built by NASA to investigate another planet. It will take 5 1/2 years to reach Jupiter and will sneak within 16 miles of Europa’s surface — considerably closer than any other spacecraft.
Liftoff is targeted for this month aboard SpaceX’s Fa..

In less than 48 hours, SpaceX pulled off a stunning feat, conducting four launches in three states, with huge implications for the future of space exploration.
The first launch came on Sunday, with the enormous Starship rocket blasting off from the southern tip of Texas. Remarkably, the first-stage booster flew back to the launch pad, where the tower’s metal arms caught the descending 232-foot booster.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk called it a “Big step towards making life multiplanetary.”
SPACEX LAUNCHES MISSION TO SPACE STATION THAT WILL BRING BACK STRANDED NASA ASTRONAUTS NEXT YEAR
The spacecraft continued its journey around the world, soaring more than 130 miles high before eventually landing in the Indian Ocean, piling on SpaceX’s achievements.
Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, with 33 methane-fuel engines on the booster alone.
The next day, a NASA spacecraft lifted off aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral,..

A U.S. startup company is reportedly offering wealthy couples the chance to screen their embryos for IQ and other favorable genetic traits, which has raised ethical concerns.
Heliospect Genomics is charging up to $50,000 to test 100 embryos and claims their technology can help couples undergoing IVF pick children with IQ scores six points higher or more over babies conceived naturally, The Guardian reports.
The company has already worked with more than a dozen couples, undercover video footage reviewed by the outlet reveals.
“Everyone can have all the children they want, and they can have children that are basically disease-free, smart, healthy; it’s going to be great,” CEO Michael Christensen said on a video call in November 2023, according to the report. The call was recorded by an undercover researcher for Hope Not Hate, an antifascist group that works to “expose and oppose far-right extremism.”
DESIGNER BABIES MAY BE ‘MORALLY’ ACCEPTABLE, UK ETHICS COUNCIL DECI..

The Orionids meteor shower, which is considered to be one of the most beautiful showers of the year, could light up the sky with shooting stars through most of next month.
NASA said the Orionids peak during mid-October every year, and the meteors are known for their brightness and speed.
The ability to see the shooting stars depends on clear nighttime skies, as a bright waning gibbous moon moves between full and last quarter phases, outshining more faint meteors and reducing the number of meteors visible to sky-gazers.
According to NASA, some of the Orionids leave behind glowing “trains,” or incandescent bits of debris in the wake of the meteor, which could last up to several minutes, and some faster meteors could also become fireballs.
NASA SPACECRAFT TO SCOUR JUPITER'S ICY MOON IN SEARCH OF LIFE-SUPPORTING CONDITIONS
The Orionids meteors are pieces of the Halley's Comet and are framed by some of the brightest stars in the night sky.
“Each time that Halley returns to the inn..

After a brief pause in communications with Voyager 1, NASA re-established a connection with the interstellar spacecraft located more than 15 billion miles away from Earth, using a frequency not used more than forty years.
Communication between NASA and Voyager 1 has been spotty at times. In fact, the spacecraft stopped sending readable data to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Nov. 14, 2023, and it was not until April that mission controllers began receiving commands once again.
More recently, the spacecraft turned off one of its two transmitters after what engineers suspected was due to Voyager 1’s fault protection system, which autonomously responds to onboard issues.
For instance, if the spacecraft uses too much power from its supply source, fault protection will kick in to conserve power by turning off non-essential systems, NASA explained.
VOYAGER 1 DETECTS ‘HUM’ WHILE IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE: REPORT
The space agency said the flight t..

Researchers have discovered a new species of glowing sea slug deep in the ocean’s midnight zone.
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) scientists said in a press release on Tuesday that while Bathydevius caudactylus is classified as a sea slug, it was nicknamed the “mystery mollusk” because the creature was unlike any other that’s been encountered before.
The mystery mollusk’s genus name, Bathydevius, is a play on the deep-sea animal’s “devious” nature that fooled researchers, the researchers said.
Bathydevius is the first nudibranch, or sea slug, known to live in the deep sea. The sea slug’s body is made up of a large gelatinous hood and paddle-like tail. It can glow with bioluminescence.
A LOOK AT THE WORLD'S LONGEST SNAKE WHICH MEASURES OVER 32 FEET, A RECORD-BREAKING SLITHERING SERPENT
It lives at an extreme depth of 1,000 to 4,000 meters, or 3,300 to 13,100 feet, below the surface in the ocean’s midnight zone, creating a unique challenge f..

Planet Earth is parting company with an asteroid that’s been tagging along as a “mini moon” for the past two months.
The harmless space rock will peel away on Monday, overcome by the stronger tug of the sun’s gravity. But it will zip closer for a quick visit in January.
NASA will use a radar antenna to observe the 33-foot asteroid then. That should deepen scientists’ understanding of the object known as 2024 PT5, quite possibly a boulder that was blasted off the moon by an impacting, crater-forming asteroid.
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER MASSIVE CAVE ON MOON THAT COULD BE USED TO SHELTER ASTRONAUTS
While not technically a moon — NASA stresses it was never captured by Earth’s gravity and fully in orbit — it’s “an interesting object” worthy of study.
The astrophysicist brothers who identified the asteroid’s “mini moon behavior,” Raul and Carlos de la Fuente Marcos of Complutense University of Madrid, have collaborated with telescopes in the Canary Islands ..