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Despite the similarities our world has with Venus, there is still much don’t know about Earth’s “Sister planet” and how it came to be. Thanks to its super-dense and hazy atmosphere, there are still unresolved questions about the planet’s geological history. For example, despite the fact that Venus’ surface is dominated by volcanic features, scientists have remained uncertain whether or not the planet is still volcanically active today.

While the planet is known to have been volcanically active as recent as 2.5 million years ago, no concrete evidence has been found that there are still volcanic eruptions on Venus’ surface. However, new research led by the USRA’s Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) has shown that Venus may still have active volcanoes, making it the only other planet in the Solar System (other than Earth) that is still volcanically active today.

This research, which appeared recently in the journal Science Advances, was led by Dr. Justin Filiberto – a staff scientist with the LPI. He was joined by fellow-LPI researcher Allan H. Treiman, Martha Gilmore of Wesleyan University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and David Trang of the Hawai’i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology.

The last 10 years have seen a lot change in the world of technology — but what will the next decade bring us?

A decade ago the hottest smartphone on the market was the iPhone 3GS — a phone with a miniscule 3.5” display and a far cry from the 6.5” screen available on the iPhone XS today.

Speakers have got bigger too, now coming packed with integrated circuits allowing us to do our shopping from our living rooms just by talking.

Image Source: SpaceX

SpaceX’s first mission of 2020 will deploy Starlink satellites on Monday, January 6 –It will mark the first official launch supported by the new United States Space Force. A Falcon 9 rocket will lift off at 9:20 p.m. EST from Pad 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. SpaceX conducted a static-fire test yesterday to prepare the rocket for the Starlink-2 mission.

Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission previously launched a Starlink mission, the Iridium-8 mission, and the Telstar 18 VANTAGE mission pic.twitter.com/QdailzdG4o— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 4, 2020

We use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to study cosmic string detection in cosmic microwave background (CMB) flat sky maps with Nambu-Goto strings. On noiseless maps we can measure string tensions down to order $10^{-9}$, however when noise is included we are unable to measure string tensions below.

$10^{-7}$. Motivated by this impasse, we derive an information theoretic bound on the detection of the cosmic string tension $Gμ$ from CMB maps. In particular we bound the information entropy of the posterior distribution of.

$Gμ$ in terms of the resolution, noise level and total survey area of the CMB.

Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are teaming up with Big Oil to squeeze more oil and gas out of the ground using machine learning technology.

Sources:
Brian Merchant (Gizmodo) https://gizmodo.com/how-google-microsoft-and-big-tech-are-au…1832790799
Christopher M. Matthews (Wall Street Journal) https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-courts-a-wary-oil-patch-1532424600
Matt Novak (Gizmodo) https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/article-from-1975-the-world-…1732903871
Kasia Tokarska
Daniel Civitarese
Ghassan AlRegib — https://ghassanalregib.info/

Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have been very vocal about their efforts to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. But as The Wall Street Journal and Gizmodo have reported, these same companies are currently teaming up with fossil fuel industry to help them squeeze as much oil and gas out of the ground as possible.

Oil has always been hard to find and hard to extract, and so the industry has teetered precariously on the edge of profitability several times over the course of its history. Over and over again, experts have predicted that we’ll soon run out of accessible, affordable oil — but so far, they’ve been wrong. Just when things look bleakest for black gold, new technology swoops in to keep the industry afloat.