Europe's Ariane 6 Rocket Slated to Launch in SpaceX Challenge
The Ariane 6, which had its debut in July 2024 and is the centerpiece of Europe's space ambitions, will be sending an Airbus SE -made satellite into a polar orbit for weather forecasting and climate monitoring. The launch in French Guiana is scheduled at 8:37 p.m. New York time on Tuesday.
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Gizmodo
an hour ago
- Gizmodo
Researchers Made a Social Media Platform Where Every User Was AI. The Bots Ended Up at War
Social platforms like Facebook and X exacerbate the problem of political and social polarization, but they don't create it. A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands put AI chatbots in a simple social media structure to see how they interacted with each other and found that, even without the invisible hand of the algorithm, they tend to organize themselves based on their pre-assigned affiliations and self-sort into echo chambers. The study, a preprint of which was recently published on arXiv, took 500 AI chatbots powered by OpenAI's large language model GPT-4o mini, and prescribed to them specific personas. Then, they were unleashed onto a simple social media platform that had no ads and no algorithms offering content discovery or recommended posts served into a user's feed. Those chatbots were tasked with interacting with each other and the content available on the platform. Over the course of five different experiments, all of which involved the chatbots engaging in 10,000 actions, the bots tended to follow other users who shared their own political beliefs. It also found that users who posted the most partisan content tended to get the most followers and reposts. The findings don't exactly speak well of us, considering the chatbots were intended to replicate how humans interact. Of course, none of this is truly independent from the influence of the algorithm. The bots have been trained on human interaction that has been defined by decades now by how we behave online in an algorithm-dominated world. They are emulating the already poison-brained versions of ourselves, and it's not clear how we come back from that. To combat the self-selecting polarization, the researchers tried a handful of solutions, including offering a chronological feed, devaluing viral content, hiding follower and repost figures, hiding user profiles, and amplifying opposing views. (That last one, the researchers had success with in a previous study, which managed to create high engagement and low toxicity in a simulated social platform.) None of the interventions really made a difference, failing to create more than a 6% shift in the engagement given to partisan accounts. In the simulation that hid user bios, the partisan divide actually got worse, and extreme posts got even more attention. It seems social media as a structure may simply be untenable for humans to navigate without reinforcing our worst instincts and behaviors. Social media is a fun house mirror for humanity; it reflects us, but in the most distorted of ways. It's not clear there are strong enough lenses to correct how we see each other online.
The Verge
an hour ago
- The Verge
UK government suggests deleting files to save water
Can deleting old emails and photos help the UK tackle ongoing drought this year? That's the hope, according to recommendations for the public included in a press release today from the National Drought Group. There are far bigger steps companies and policymakers can take to conserve water of course, but drought has gotten bad enough for officials to urge the average person to consider how their habits might help or hurt the situation. And the proliferation of data centers is raising concerns about how much water it takes to power servers and keep them cool. 'Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife,' Helen Wakeham, Environment Agency Director of Water, said in the press release. 'Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort' The Environment Agency didn't immediately respond to an inquiry from The Verge about how much water it thought deleting files might save, nor how much water data centers that store files or train AI use in the UK's drought-affected areas. A small data center has been estimated to use upwards of 25 million liters of water per year if it relies on old-school cooling methods that allow water to evaporate. To be sure, tech companies have worked for years to find ways to minimize their water use by developing new cooling methods. Microsoft, for example, has tried placing a data center at the bottom of the sea and submerging servers in fluorocarbon-based liquid baths. Generating electricity for energy-hungry data centers also uses up more water since fossil fuel power plants and nuclear reactors also need water for cooling and to turn turbines using steam, an issue that transitioning to more renewable energy can help to address. August ushered in the UK's fourth heatwave of the summer, exacerbating what was already the driest six months leading to July since 1976. Five regions of the UK have officially declared drought, according to the release, while another six areas are in the midst of 'prolonged dry weather.' The National Drought Group says pleas to residents to save water have made a difference. Water demand dropped by 20 percent from a July 11th peak in the Severn Trent area after 'water-saving messaging,' according to the release. Plugging leaks is another major concern. Fixing a leaking toilet can prevent 200 to 400 liters of water from being wasted each day, it from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Justine Calma Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Climate Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Environment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All News Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Science Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Scientists may have found a powerful new space object: 'It doesn't fit comfortably into any known category'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A bewilderingly powerful mystery object found in a nearby galaxy and only visible so far in millimeter radio wavelengths could be a brand new astrophysical object unlike anything astronomers have seen before. The object has been named 'Punctum,' derived from the Latin pūnctum meaning "point" or "dot," by a team of astronomers led by Elena Shablovinskaia of the Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos at the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. Shablovinskaia discovered it using ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. "Outside of the realm of supermassive black holes, Punctum is genuinely powerful,' Shablovinskaia told Astronomers don't know what it is yet — only that it is compact, has a surprisingly structured magnetic field, and, at its heart, is an object radiating intense amounts of energy. "When you put it into context, Punctum is astonishingly bright — 10,000 to 100,000 times more luminous than typical magnetars, around 100 times brighter than microquasars, and 10 to 100 times brighter than nearly every known supernova, with only the Crab Nebula surpassing it among star-related sources in our galaxy," Shablovinskaia said. Punctum is located in the active galaxy NGC 4945, which is a fairly close neighbor of our Milky Way galaxy, located 11 million light-years away. That's just beyond the confines of the Local Group. Yet, despite this proximity, it cannot be seen in optical or X-ray light but rather only millimeter radio wavelengths. This has only deepened the mystery, although the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has yet to take a look at the object in near- and mid-infrared wavelengths. What could Punctum be? Its brightness remained the same over several observations performed in 2023, meaning it is not a flare or some other kind of transitory phenomenon. Millimeter-wave radiation typically comes from cold objects such as young protoplanetary disks and interstellar molecular clouds. However, very energetic phenomena such as quasars and pulsars can also produce radio waves through synchrotron radiation, wherein charged particles moving at close to the speed of light spiral around magnetic field lines and radiate radio waves. What we do know about Punctum is that based on how strongly polarized its millimeter light is, it must possess a highly structured magnetic field. And so, Shablovinskaia believes what we are seeing from Punctum is synchrotron radiation. Objects with strong polarization tend to be compact objects, because larger objects have messy magnetic fields that wash out any polarization. Perhaps that synchrotron radiation is being powered by a magnetar, the team believes, which is a highly magnetic pulsar. However, while a magnetar's ordered magnetic field fits the bill, magnetars (and regular pulsars for that matter) are much fainter at millimeter wavelengths than Punctum is. Supernova remnants such as the Crab Nebula, which is the messy innards blasted into space of a star that exploded in 1054AD, are bright at millimeter wavelengths. The trouble is that supernova remnants are quite large — the Crab Nebula itself is about 11 light-years across — whereas Punctum is clearly a much smaller, compact object. "At the moment, Punctum truly stands apart — it doesn't fit comfortably into any known category," said Shablovinskaia. "And honestly, nothing like this has appeared in any previous millimeter surveys, largely because, until recently, we didn't have anything as sensitive and high-resolution as ALMA." There is the caveat that Punctum could just be an outlier: an extreme version of an otherwise familiar object, such as a magnetar in an unusual environment, or a supernova remnant interacting with dense material. For now, though, these are just guesses lacking supporting evidence. It is quite possible that Punctum is indeed the first of a new kind of astrophysical object that we haven't seen before simply because only ALMA can detect them. In the case of Punctum, it is 100 times fainter than NGC 4945's active nucleus that is being energized by a supermassive black hole feeding on infalling matter. Punctum probably wouldn't have been noticed at all in the ALMA data if it wasn't for its exceptionally strong polarization. Further observations with ALMA will certainly help shed more light on what kind of object Punctum is. The observations that discovered Punctum were actually focused on NGC 4945's bright active core; it was just happenstance that Punctum was noticed in the field of view. Future ALMA observations targeting Punctum instead would be able to go to much lower noise levels without worrying about the galaxy's bright core being over-exposed, and it could also be observed across different frequencies. The greatest help could potentially come from the JWST. If it can see an infrared counterpart, then its greater resolution could help identify what Punctum is. "JWST's sharp resolution and broad spectral range might help reveal whether Punctum's emission is purely synchrotron or involves dust or emission lines," said Shablovinskaia. For now, it's all ifs and buts, and all we can say for sure is that astronomers have a genuine mystery on their hands that has so far left them feeling flummoxed. "In any case," concluded Shablovinskaia, "Punctum is showing us that there is still a lot to discover in the millimeter sky.' A paper describing the discovery of Punctum has been accepted by the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, and a pre-print is available on Solve the daily Crossword
