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It’s effectively a new data set that will fuel the second wave of discoveries about Mars’ surface composition.

But while it was doing that work, it was also gathering lower-resolution mapping strips, about 83,000 of them. Now that CRISM is no longer active, the team is building their map from those strips.

Processing this much data into one cohesive map is a complicated task requiring powerful computing resources. It takes time to optimize the maps and account for environmental conditions and discrepancies between the different images.

“For an individual tile, the optimization process might take just five hours in some exceptional cases, but sometimes it will take over a day,” said CRISM team member Katie Hancock, a software developer at APL who spearheaded the development of the optimization code. In a press release from JH/UAPL, Hancock said that it could take a computer cluster a month to build the map of the entire planet.

Continue reading “NASA just built the best map of Mars to date using 51,000 images” | >

Creative thought is surely among our most precious and mysterious capabilities. But can powerful computers rival the human brain? As thinking, remembering and innovating become increasingly interwoven with technological advances, what are we capable of? What do we lose? Join Luciano Floridi, John Donoghue, Gary Small and Rosalind Picard for a thought-provoking program about thinking.

This program is part of The Big Idea Series, made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation.

The World Science Festival gathers great minds in science and the arts to produce live and digital content that allows a broad general audience to engage with scientific discoveries. Our mission is to cultivate a general public informed by science, inspired by its wonder, convinced of its value, and prepared to engage with its implications for the future.

Visit our Website: http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/

Continue reading “Mind and Machine: The Future of Thinking” | >

In the midst of the heated debate about AI sentience, conscious machines and artificial general intelligence, Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, published a blueprint for creating “autonomous machine intelligence.”

LeCun has compiled his ideas in a paper that draws inspiration from progress in machine learning, robotics, neuroscience and cognitive science. He lays out a roadmap for creating AI that can model and understand the world, reason and plan to do tasks on different timescales.

While the paper is not a scholarly document, it provides a very interesting framework for thinking about the different pieces needed to replicate animal and human intelligence. It also shows how the mindset of LeCun, an award-winning pioneer of deep learning, has changed and why he thinks current approaches to AI will not get us to human-level AI.

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Now, as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the monster proton smasher at the European particle laboratory, Cern – gears up to start its third period of data collection on Tuesday, experts are hoping to unpick further secrets of the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

Bortoletto, now head of particle physics at the University of Oxford and part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, said her main memory of the events a decade ago was the moment two weeks before the announcement when the researchers unblinded their analysis of the data and saw unambiguous signs of the boson.

“I still, thinking [about] that moment, get the butterflies in my stomach,” she said. “It was unbelievable. It’s really a unique moment in the life of the scientist.”

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With the first half of 2022 coming to a close, NASA teams are continuing work to resolve the Lucy spacecraft’s solar array issue following its October 2021 launch. Lucy is a first-of-a-kind mission to visit several asteroids in Jupiter’s L4 and L5 Lagrange points. Currently, Lucy is coasting before its first flyby of Earth in October 2022.

Lucy’s sister mission, Psyche, has experienced compatibility issues causing a delay to a No-Earlier-Than (NET) July 2023 launch. Psyche is another first-of-a-kind mission to orbit the main asteroid belt object, 16 Psyche. Both Lucy and Psyche operate under NASA’s Discovery program.

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