Category: Scoop.it

 

If our eyes could see high-energy radiation called gamma rays, the Moon would appear brighter than the Sun! That’s how NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has seen our neighbor in space for the past decade. Gamma-ray observations are not sensitive enough to clearly see the shape of the Moon’s disk or any surface features. Instead, Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT) detects a prominent glow centered on the Moon’s position in the sky.

 

Mario Nicola Mazziotta and Francesco Loparco, both at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Bari, have been analyzing the Moon’s gamma-ray glow as a way of better understanding another type of radiation from space: fast-moving particles called cosmic rays. “Cosmic rays are mostly protons accelerated by some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe, like the blast waves of exploding stars and jets produced when matter falls into black holes,” explained Mazziotta.

 

Because the particles are electrically charged, they’re strongly affected by magnetic fields, which the Moon lacks. As a result, even low-energy cosmic rays can reach the surface, turning the Moon into a handy space-based particle detector. When cosmic rays strike, they interact with the powdery surface of the Moon, called the regolith, to produce gamma-ray emission. The Moon absorbs most of these gamma rays, but some of them escape.

 

Mazziotta and Loparco analyzed Fermi LAT lunar observations to show how the view has improved during the mission. They rounded up data for gamma rays with energies above 31 million electron volts — more than 10 million times greater than the energy of visible light — and organized them over time, showing how longer exposures improve the view.

 

“Seen at these energies, the Moon would never go through its monthly cycle of phases and would always look full,” said Loparco. As NASA sets its sights on sending humans to the Moon by 2024 through the Artemis program, with the eventual goal of sending astronauts to Mars, understanding various aspects of the lunar environment take on new importance. These gamma-ray observations are a reminder that astronauts on the Moon will require protection from the same cosmic rays that produce this high-energy gamma radiation.

 

While the Moon’s gamma-ray glow is surprising and impressive, the Sun does shine brighter in gamma rays with energies higher than 1 billion electron volts. Cosmic rays with lower energies do not reach the Sun because its powerful magnetic field screens them out. But much more energetic cosmic rays can penetrate this magnetic shield and strike the Sun’s denser atmosphere, producing gamma rays that can reach Fermi.

 

Although the gamma-ray Moon doesn’t show a monthly cycle of phases, its brightness does change over time. Fermi LAT data show that the Moon’s brightness varies by about 20% over the Sun’s 11-year activity cycle. Variations in the intensity of the Sun’s magnetic field during the cycle change the rate of cosmic rays reaching the Moon, altering the production of gamma rays.

 

Download the graphic and related multimedia in HD formats from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio

Read the full article at: www.nasa.gov

The rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence has been nothing short of revolutionary, impacting every domain from finance to the arts. In the world of

Read the full article at: petapixel.com

Google has been busy injecting AI-powered features into all of its services this year, and some of the most promising are in Google Maps. Well, this week those features – including the long-awaited Immersive View for Routes – are going to start rolling out on your Android or iOS phone, alongside some new tricks.

The biggest news is the rollout of Immersive View for Routes in 15 cities, starting this week. The feature combines Street view, aerial imagery, and live information like weather and traffic to give you an aerial, photo-realistic preview of your planned Google Maps route – so we’re excited to take it for a spin soon.

Read the full article at: www.techradar.com

Some employers are either tacitly or outright banning access to generative AI tools like ChatGPT. But employees who love them are finding ways to discreetly backchannel.

Read the full article at: www.bbc.com

 

Turn a radio telescope to the stars in the sky, and it’s instantly deafened. From pulsars to radio galaxies, and ionospheric disturbances in the atmosphere to radio-frequency interference (RFI) from our own technology, the sky is a cacophony of radio noise. And somewhere, among all that, may lie a needle in a haystack: a signal from another world.

 

For over 60 years scientists have been scanning the skies in the search for extraterrestrial life but have yet to find any aliens. When you consider the sheer volume of search space — all those stars, all those radio frequencies — versus our limited searches so far, then it’s little wonder we’ve not found ET yet. It’s a daunting task, especially for a human. Thankfully, we’ve got some non-human intelligence to join the search.

 

 

 

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is reaching critical mass, in our everyday lives and in science, so it is no surprise that it’s now being employed in Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). AI is already helping astronomers make incredible discoveries. Here’s how. We’re not talking about Skynet, or the machines from The Matrix movies, or even Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Data. The AI that is so in vogue at present is based on machine-learning algorithms designed to do very specific jobs, even if it’s just to talk to you on ChatGPT.

 

To explain how AI is assisting in SETI, astronomer and SETI researcher Eamonn Kerins of the University of Manchester compares it to the needle in a haystack problem. “You basically treat the data as though it’s the hay,” Kerins told Space.com Space.com. “Then you’re asking the machine-learning algorithm to tell you if there is anything in the data that isn’t hay, and that hopefully is the needle in the haystack — unless there’s other stuff in the haystack too.”

 

That other stuff is usually RFI, but the machine-learning algorithm is trained to recognize all the types of RFI we already know about. Those signals — the familiar patterns of mobile phones, local radio transmitters, electronics and so on — are the hay. The training involves “injecting signals into the data and then the algorithm learns to look for signals that are like that,” Steve Croft, an astronomer with the Breakthrough Listen SETI project at the University of California, Berkeley, told Space.com The algorithm learns to spot the patterns of these familiar signals and disregard them. Should it spot something in the data that it hasn’t been trained on, then it flags this up as something interesting that requires a human to follow up on.

 

“There have been attempts recently at sifting through some of the Breakthrough Listen data with a machine-learning algorithm,” said Kerins. “The data had already been combed through quite carefully previously by more conventional means, but yet the algorithm was still able to pick out new signals after being trained on the stuff that we know about.”

 

This project was led by Croft and an undergraduate student, Peter Ma of the University of Toronto, who wrote the algorithm and put it to work analyzing data from 820 stars observed by the 100-meter radio telescope at Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. The data, totaling 489 hours’ worth of observations, contained millions of radio signals, almost all of which were human-made interference. The algorithm checked every single one of them and found eight signals that did not match anything it had been trained on and which had been missed by earlier analyses of the data.

Read the full article at: www.space.com

 

A study of a lizard species in Arizona revealed that nearly 70 years’ worth of climate-related extinction occurred in just seven years.

 

Researchers surveyed populations of the Yarrow’s spiny lizard in 18 mountain ranges in southeastern Arizona and analyzed the rate of climate-related extinction over time. “The magnitude of extinction we found over the past seven years was similar to that seen in other studies that spanned almost 70 years,” says John J. Wiens, a professor in the ecology and evolutionary biology department at the University of Arizona and senior author of the study in Ecology Letters.

 

The Yarrow’s spiny lizard native to the southwestern US and western Mexico can be spotted in oak and pine forests in 18 of Arizona’s Sky Islands mountain ranges. Wiens and his group did initial surveys of the Yarrow’s spiny lizard in these mountain ranges in 2014 and 2015.

 

In 2021 and 2022, Wiens, along with Kim Holzmann, his former master’s student and the new study’s lead author, and Ramona Walls, a part-time researcher at the University of Arizona’s BIO5 institute, resurveyed to investigate if there had been any changes in the lizard populations since then.

 

They found that about half of the lizard populations at lower elevations had disappeared. This is because temperatures are warmer at lower elevations, Wiens says, and the lizards at lower elevations were presumably not able to tolerate the increasing heat. This loss of low-elevation populations is a signature pattern of climate change, he says. “The rate of extinction in such a short time period was shocking,” Wiens says.

 

After comparing the findings to historical records from the same mountain ranges, Wiens’ group found that the average extinction rate of the lizard populations at low elevations had tripled over the past seven years, relative to the preceding 42 years. Although previous studies have predicted that climate-related extinctions will increase with the rising pace of global warming, Wiens says he hasn’t seen any showing that this acceleration of extinction has already happened.

 

Also, a distinct 3-million-year-old lineage of the Yarrow’s spiny lizard from the Mule Mountains, near Bisbee, may be completely extinct by 2025, Wiens says. “The low-elevation populations in the Mules were fine in 2014. Now the only ones that we have found left were within about 300 feet of the top of the mountain in 2022, and they appear to have been losing about 170 feet per year,” he says.

 

However, not all low-elevation populations went extinct between the surveys, Wiens says. For example, two populations that occurred at very low elevations survived. Before they disappeared, the research group had collected genomic data from most of those populations in 2014 and 2015. They found that those populations that were less genetically variable and were exposed to greater climate change effects were the ones that tended to go extinct. This suggests that the populations with less genetic variation had less ability to adapt to climate change.

Read the full article at: www.futurity.org

 

 

Initial studies of the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu sample collected in space and brought to Earth by NASA show evidence of high-carbon content and water, which together could indicate the building blocks of life on Earth may be found in the rock. NASA made the news Wednesday from its Johnson Space Center in Houston where leadership and scientists showed off the asteroid material for the first time since it landed in September.

 

This finding was part of a preliminary assessment of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) science team. “The OSIRIS-REx sample is the biggest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever delivered to Earth and will help scientists investigate the origins of life on our own planet for generations to come,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Almost everything we do at NASA seeks to answer questions about who we are and where we come from. NASA missions like OSIRIS-REx will improve our understanding of asteroids that could threaten Earth while giving us a glimpse into what lies beyond. The sample has made it back to Earth, but there is still so much science to come – science like we’ve never seen before.”  

 

Although more work is needed to understand the nature of the carbon compounds found, the initial discovery bodes well for future analyses of the asteroid sample. The secrets held within the rocks and dust from the asteroid will be studied for decades to come, offering insights into how our solar system was formed, how the precursor materials to life may have been seeded on Earth, and what precautions need to be taken to avoid asteroid collisions with our home planet.

 

Read the full article at: www.nasa.gov