“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.
A recent discovery shows that the moon’s far side was volcanically active. A team of geologists found a large granite deposit beneath a long-extinct lunar volcano, supporting the theory that the moon’s surface glowed with lava billions of years ago.
The lunar find was under Compton-Belkovich, a rumored volcanic structure on the moon’s surface. The feature is thought to have developed from the lava that cooled after fueling the violent eruptions of lunar volcanoes some 3.5 billion years ago, according to Space.com.
Although the discovery of volcanic leftovers in this area was not predicted, the study team was taken aback by the extent of the cooled magma patch. Its breadth is around 31 miles (50 kilometers) wide. This large mass of granite in the Compton-Belkovich volcanic complex may shed light on how the lunar crust formed early in the moon’s history.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has photographed a fiery spiral galaxy that has a very violent past and is located 131 million light-years away.
A scorching hot world where metal clouds rain drops of titanium is the most reflective planet ever observed outside of our Solar System, astronomers said on Monday.
This strange world, which is more than 260 light years from Earth, reflects 80 percent of the light from its host star, according to new observations from Europe’s exoplanet-probing Cheops space telescope.
Continue reading “‘Like a mirror’: Astronomers identify most reflective exoplanet” »
The near-perfect roundness deepens the mystery behind how the universe came to be filled with matter as opposed to antimatter.
Reservoir computing is a promising computational framework based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which essentially maps input data onto a high-dimensional computational space, keeping some parameters of artificial neural networks (ANNs) fixed while updating others. This framework could help to improve the performance of machine learning algorithms, while also reducing the amount of data required to adequately train them.
RNNs essentially leverage recurrent connections between their different processing units to process sequential data and make accurate predictions. While RNNs have been found to perform well on numerous tasks, optimizing their performance by identifying parameters that are most relevant to the task they will be tackling can be challenging and time-consuming.
Jason Kim and Dani S. Bassett, two researchers at University of Pennsylvania, recently introduced an alternative approach to design and program RNN-based reservoir computers, which is inspired by how programming languages work on computer hardware. This approach, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, can identify the appropriate parameters for a given network, programming its computations to optimize its performance on target problems.
Using new palm-sized devices, RIKEN researchers may have finally harnessed the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum to effectively ‘X-ray’ things without using harmful ionizing radiation.
Countless technologies—from smartphones and TVs to infrared instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) is an orbiting infrared observatory that will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers longer wavelengths of light, with greatly improved sensitivity, allowing it to see inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today as well as looking further back in time to observe the first galaxies that formed in the early universe.
How do you make space images more accessible? Turn celestial data into sonic compositions that don’t have to be seen to be enjoyed.
A team of Brown brain and computer scientists developed a new approach to understanding computer vision, which can be used to help create better, safer and more robust artificial intelligence systems.
