Author: The Conversation

NASA’s DART mission – Double Asteroid Redirection Test – was humanity’s first real-world planetary defence mission. In September 2022, the DART spacecraft smashed into the companion “moon” of a small asteroid 11 million kilometres from Earth. One goal was to find out if we can give such things a shove if one were headed our way. By gathering lots of data on approach and after the impact, we would also get a better idea of what we’d be in for if such an asteroid were to hit Earth. Five new studies published in Nature Communications today have used the images sent back from DART and its…

NASA has announced the first detection of possible biosignatures in a rock on the surface of Mars. The rock contains the first Martian organic matter to be detected by the Perseverance rover, as well as curious discoloured spots that could indicate the past activity of microorganisms. Ken Farley, project scientist on the mission, has called this “the most puzzling, complex, and potentially important rock yet investigated by Perseverance”. Perseverance is part of Mars 2020, the first mission since Viking that is explicitly designed to seek life on Mars (officially, to “search for potential evidence of past life using observations regarding habitability…

Hollywood screenwriters went on strike in May 2023. Two months later, actors joined them on the picket line. Those strikes ended later that year with historic deals that included, for the first time, protections regarding the use of artificial intelligence. Now it’s video game actors’ turn. After nearly two years of negotiations with gaming companies, video game performers, who are represented by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists union, announced that they would go on strike due to an impasse over protections from generative AI. The strike began at 12:01 a.m. on July 26, 2024. The Conversation U.S. asked James Dawes,…

Imagine you’re 90 years old, a grandmother of three and your husband is also elderly and ailing. You need help with almost everything, getting out of a chair, going to the bathroom, getting dressed, eating and remembering your medications. Despite advances in life expectancy, ageing has not been kind, and you feel like a burden to your husband and the healthcare professionals who care for you. Now, imagine being offered a robot that could help with many of these things – from walking to the bathroom to keeping track of your doctor’s appointments. This robot’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) learns…

A new system for forecasting weather and predicting future climate uses artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve results comparable with the best existing models while using much less computer power, according to its creators. In a paper published in Nature today, a team of researchers from Google, MIT, Harvard and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts say their model offers enormous “computational savings” and can “enhance the large-scale physical simulations that are essential for understanding and predicting the Earth system”. The NeuralGCM model is the latest in a steady stream of research models that use advances in machine learning to make weather…

Social media is a problem for economists. They don’t know how to value it. It has long been argued that it ought to be in the national accounts as part of gross domestic product. One 2019 study estimated Facebook alone is worth US$40 to US$50 per month for consumers in the United States. But that’s not what we pay. Social media isn’t charged for, and the national accounts measure only the things we pay for, no matter how significant they are in our lives and how many hours per day we spend using them. As the Australian Senate prepares to hold an inquiry into the impact…

Using radar, a NASA spacecraft, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), has confirmed the existence of caves beneath the lunar surface. Here’s why such geological features will be key for establishing a base on the Moon, and what they can tell us about Earth and our Moon’s shared cosmological origins. Lunar orbiting satellites first spotted pits on the Moon’s surface decades ago. Many of these were thought to be openings that connected to substantial underground tunnels that form through volcanic processes, but only now has this been confirmed through the analysis of radar data. Some of the tunnels thought to exist on the Moon are…

Humans are interacting more than ever with artificial intelligence (AI) – from the development of the first “social robots” (a robot with a physical body programmed to interact and engage with humans) like Kismet in the 1990s to smart speakers such as Amazon’s Alexa. But this technology is changing how humans relate with it – and with each other. Our new research looked at how humans experience interacting with AI social robots or digital avatars – AI virtual chatbots designed to look and interact like a human on a device. These are designed to increase human interaction with them. Social robots such as ElliQ and Pepper are popular in…

When considering human settlements on the Moon, Mars and further afield, much attention is given to the travel times, food and radiation risk. We’ll undoubtedly face a harsh environment in deep space and some thinkers have been pointing to genome editing as a way to ensure that humans can tolerate the severe conditions as they venture further into the solar system. In January, I was fortunate to attend a much-anticipated debate between astronomer royal Lord Martin Rees and Mars exploration advocate Dr Robert Zubrin. The event at the British Interplanetary Society took on the topic of whether the exploration of Mars should be human or…

NASA’s missions are some of the most technologically advanced and critically important endeavours. From the Mars Rover explorations to the Artemis missions to the Moon, the space agency’s projects push the boundaries of science and technology. However, these missions are also prime targets for cyber-attacks. In a bold move to counter the escalating threat of these attacks, US congressmen Maxwell Alejandro Frost and Don Beyer have proposed the Spacecraft Cybersecurity Act. If passed, the legislation would mandate the US space agency NASA to overhaul the way it procures and builds its spacecraft. It would have to incorporate rigorous cybersecurity measures from…