Lifeboat Foundation

They plan to offer internet to airlines ‘as soon as possible.’

A SpaceX representative said on Tuesday that the company is testing its ability to provide inflight broadband access to aircraft, according to a report by Bloomberg. VP Jonathan Hofeller told a crowd at the Airline Passenger Experience Association Expo in Long Beach, California, that it will begin offering its services to airlines “as soon as possible.”

A sky-high opportunity SpaceX will join a crowded field of companies competing to service the in-flight wifi market, which is worth about $3.3 billion per year, according to one estimate. Commercial aircraft have conventionally connected to the internet either through cell towers on the ground or through large satellites in geosynchronous orbit. For example, industry leader ViaSat Inc. operates one satellite over the U.S. and a second satellite that covers most of Canada, the North Atlantic, and parts of Europe. Surprisingly, the company has contracted SpaceX to launch a third satellite next year.

Do you know what the Earth’s atmosphere is made of? You’d probably remember it’s oxygen, and maybe nitrogen. And with a little help from Google you can easily reach a more precise answer: 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 1% Argon gas. However, when it comes to the composition of exo-atmospheres—the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system—the answer is not known. This is a shame, as atmospheres can indicate the nature of planets, and whether they can host life.

As exoplanets are so far away, it has proven extremely difficult to probe their atmospheres. Research suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) may be our best bet to explore them—but only if we can show that these algorithms think in reliable, scientific ways, rather than cheating the system. Now our new paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal, has provided reassuring insight into their mysterious logic.

Astronomers typically exploit the transit method to investigate exoplanets, which involves measuring dips in light from a star as a planet passes in front of it. If an atmosphere is present on the planet, it can absorb a very tiny bit of light, too. By observing this event at different wavelengths—colors of light—the fingerprints of molecules can be seen in the absorbed starlight, forming recognizable patterns in what we call a spectrum. A typical signal produced by the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet only reduces the stellar light by ~0.01% if the star is Sun-like. Earth-sized planets produce 10–100 times lower signals. It’s a bit like spotting the eye color of a cat from an aircraft.

AI doesn’t actually multitask very well because typical algorithms aren’t very versatile. But a new project from Google could change that.

Tesla’s head of AI has released new footage of the automaker’s auto labeling tool for its self-driving effort.

It’s expected to be an important accelerator in improving Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Beta.

Tesla is often said to have a massive lead in self-driving data thanks to having equipped all its cars with sensors early on and collecting real-world data from a fleet that now includes over a million vehicles.

A New York City law requires algorithms used in hiring to be “audited” for bias. It’s the first in the US—and part of a larger push toward regulation.

Light is an electromagnetic wave: It consists of oscillating electric and magnetic fields propagating through space. Every wave is characterized by its frequency, which refers to the number of oscillations per second, measured in Hertz (Hz). Our eyes can detect frequencies between 400 and 750 trillion Hz (or terahertz, THz), which define the visible spectrum. Light sensors in cell phone cameras can detect frequencies down to 300 THz, while detectors used for internet connections through optical fibers are sensitive to around 200 THz.

At lower frequencies, the energy transported by light isn’t enough to trigger photoreceptors in our eyes and in many other sensors, which is a problem given that there is rich information available at frequencies below 100 THz, the mid-and far–infrared spectrum. For example, a body with surface temperature of 20°C emits infrared light up to 10 THz, which can be “seen” with thermal imaging. Also, chemical and biological substances feature distinct absorption bands in the mid-infrared, meaning that we can identify them remotely and non-destructively by infrared spectroscopy, which has myriads of applications.

ONE YEAR AGO Google artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru tweeted, “I was fired” and ignited a controversy over the freedom of employees to question the impact of their company’s technology. Thursday, she launched a new research institute to ask questions about responsible use of artificial intelligence that Gebru says Google and other tech companies won’t.

“Instead of fighting from the inside, I want to show a model for an independent institution with a different set of incentive structures,” says Gebru, who is founder and executive director of Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR). The first part of the name is a reference to her aim to be more inclusive than most AI labs—which skew white, Western, and male —and to recruit people from parts of the world rarely represented in the tech industry.

Gebru was ejected from Google after clashing with bosses over a research paper urging caution with new text-processing technology enthusiastically adopted by Google and other tech companies. Google has said she resigned and was not fired, but acknowledged that it later fired Margaret Mitchell, another researcher who with Gebru co-led a team researching ethical AI. The company placed new checks on the topics its researchers can explore. Google spokesperson Jason Freidenfelds declined to comment but directed WIRED to a recent report on the company’s work on AI governance, which said Google has published more than 500 papers on “responsible innovation” since 2018.

U.S. health officials on Wednesday reported the country’s first case of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, in a person in California.

The Covid-19 case was identified by the California and San Francisco health departments in a person who had traveled to South Africa and returned on Nov. 22, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a release. The individual, who was fully vaccinated with the Moderna shot but had not received a booster, had mild symptoms and has since recovered, federal and local officials said. The person has been isolating since testing positive on Nov. 29. All close contacts have tested negative thus far.

The discovery of Omicron in the United States is not a surprise. Upon characterizing the mutations in the variant, scientists in South Africa last week quickly raised the world’s alarms about the potential threat it posed, but it had already started to circulate silently. Some two dozen countries, from the United Kingdom to Australia to Israel, have already reported cases, many in travelers.

The new Covid variant omicron will likely “overwhelm the whole world” in the coming months, according to Singapore doctor Leong Hoe Nam.