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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Astronomer Says Unidentified Object Could Be Alien Spacecraft: ‘We've Never Seen Such a Thing'
The plot of the movie Independence Day could soon become reality—as early as this November. According to Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, a 20-kilometer-wide unidentified space object exhibits some alien-like attributes. Even further, a paper co-authored by Loeb last month concluded that if the object were an alien vessel with 'malign' intentions, then the consequences could be 'dire for humanity.' Loeb and his colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have written two papers about the object, which was first detected by a NASA-funded telescope in Chile on July 1. On Thursday morning, Loeb joined CNN This Morning to discuss what NASA has labelled 3I/ATLAS. The agency has identified the object as an 'interstellar comet' on its website and said that it 'poses no threat to Earth,' but Loeb cautioned against dismissing some of the object's extraordinary characteristics. 'The brightness of the object implies a diameter of 20 kilometers. There's not enough rocky material in interstellar space to deliver such a giant object,' Loeb said. 'It takes 10,000 years for that much mass to arrive to the inner part of the solar system.' Another factor that the scientist pointed to that distinguishes 3I/Atlas from other interstellar objects (of which only two others have ever been detected) is its trajectory through the solar system. 'The trajectory of this object is very finely tuned. It lies in the plane of the orbits of the planets around the sun, to within five degrees. The chances of that to happen is one in 500.' He went on to say that the chances of the object's path past Jupiter, Mars, and Venus being random were in the range of one in 20,000. Most remarkably, Loeb said that the glow emanating from the object is not befitting that of a comet. 'Usually, for comets you see a trailing tail behind the object. Here, the glow from behind the Hubble Space Telescope image is actually in front of the object.' 'We've never seen such a thing!' Loeb said. The Harvard astronomer isn't the only one who thinks the object is worth keeping an eye on. Last week, Republican Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna wrote NASA Administrator Sean Duffy to suggest that he investigate the nature of 3I/ATLAS using the agency's Juno spacecraft. Juno is currently orbiting Jupiter, the planet that 3I/ATLAS will come closest to. Loeb calculated in a paper published last week that adding extra fuel to the spacecraft would allow Juno to execute a 'fly-by' and study the nature of the object more closely than any Earth-bound telescope. It's unclear if Luna's request will go anywhere, but Loeb suggested on CNN that such a maneuver would help collect data that can help answer the million-dollar question: Are there other life forms out there? 'Why should we assume that we are the only one in our cosmic neighborhood?' he asked, as he advocated for further study of the object. 'We should just check by looking at data.' Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
A man asked ChatGPT how to remove sodium chloride from his diet. It landed him in the hospital
A 60-year-old man landed in the hospital after asking ChatGPT how to remove sodium chloride from his diet. As humans interact more with artificial intelligence, there continues to be stories of how a conversation with a chatbot could be dangerous, sometimes even deadly. While part of the focus has been on mental health and concerns that chatbots are not equipped to handle these types of struggles, there are also implications for people's physical health. People often hear that you shouldn't Google your symptoms, as medical advice should be given by a health professional, who knows your medical history and can actually examine you. According to a new case report published in the American College of Physicians Journals on Tuesday, you should also be careful when considering asking a chatbot health questions. The report looked at a man who developed bromism after asking ChatGPT for advice on his diet. Bromism, or Bromide toxicity, was well-known in the early 1990s but is less common now. At the time, bromide salts were found in many over-the-counter medications to treat insomnia, hysteria and anxiety. Ingesting too much bromide can cause neuropsychiatric and dermatologic symptoms. The man in this case report had no past psychiatric or medical history, but during the first 24 hours of his hospitalization, he expressed increased paranoia and auditory and visual hallucinations. 'He was noted to be very thirsty but paranoid about water he was offered,' the case report read. The man was treated with fluids and electrolytes and became medically stable, allowing him to be admitted to the hospital's inpatient psychiatry unit. As his condition improved, he was able to share some symptoms he had noticed, including newly appeared facial acne and cherry angiomas, which further suggested he was experiencing bromism. He also said he had been swapping sodium chloride, or table salt, for sodium bromide for three months after reading about the negative health effects of table salt. 'Inspired by his history of studying nutrition in college, he decided to conduct a personal experiment to eliminate chloride from his diet,' the case report read. He had replaced table salt with 'sodium bromide obtained from the internet after consultation with ChatGPT, in which he had read that chloride can be swapped with bromide, though likely for other purposes, such as cleaning.' The man spent three weeks in the hospital before he was well enough to be discharged. 'It is important to consider that ChatGPT and other AI systems can generate scientific inaccuracies, lack the ability to critically discuss results, and ultimately fuel the spread of misinformation,' the authors of the report warned. Open AI, the developer of ChatGPT, admits in its Terms of Use the chatbot's output 'may not always be accurate.' 'You should not rely on Output from our Services as a sole source of truth or factual information, or as a substitute for professional advice,' the Terms of Use say. The company's Service Terms also explicitly state: 'Our Services are not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of any health condition.'
E&E News
an hour ago
- E&E News
Ropeless fishing gear for catching crabs shows positive results
Ropeless fishing gear is proving effective at avoiding whale entanglements without sacrificing yields for commercial fishermen harvesting Dungeness crabs, according to research findings released by the State of California, nonprofit groups and and industry partners. In a third consecutive year of state-sponsored trials where Northern California fishermen used what is often called 'pop-up gear,' researchers found that 12 boats landed more than 217,000 pounds of Dungeness crab with an estimated value of about $1.4 million, or 18,100 pounds per vessel. Each boat made an average 12 fishing trips along a roughly 130-mile coastal region otherwise closed to Dungeness crab fishing due to risk of whale entanglements, according to researchers. 'The results of this spring's pop-up gear testing are nothing less than wildly successful. Even with a vast increase in the amount of gear each fisherman was allowed to use, not a single string of fishing gear was lost,' said Geoff Shester, a senior scientist and campaign director with Oceana California, in a news release. Advertisement Pop-up gear relies on acoustic signals from fishing vessels to trigger the release of ocean-bottom buoys tethered to crab pots rather than use 'vertical ropes' associated with traditional fishing methods. Vertical lines are known to entangle whales that swim through areas with high concentrations of fishing boats. A line or lines can become wrapped around a whale's tail and fins, break from its buoy and eventually become embedded in whale's flesh, leading to sickness and death.
