NASA's Mars Perseverance rover captures new selfie featuring a Martian dust devil
Resembling a small pale puff, the twirling dust devil popped up 3 miles behind the rover during this month's photo shoot. Dust devils, a combination of air and dust, are common on Mars.
Released Wednesday, the selfie is a composite of 59 images taken by the camera on the end of the rover's robotic arm, according to NASA.
This image provided by NASA shows Perseverance taking a selfie on May 10, 2025.
NASA via AP
It took an hour to perform all the arm movements necessary to gather the images, "but it's worth it," said Megan Wu, an imaging scientist from Malin Space Science Systems, which built the camera.
"Having the dust devil in the background makes it a classic," Wu said in a statement.
The picture — which also shows the rover's latest sample borehole on the surface — marks 1,500 sols, or Martian days, for Perseverance. That's equivalent to 1,541 days on Earth.
Perseverance is covered with red dust, the result of drilling into dozens of rocks. Perseverance, which landed on Mars in 2021, is collecting samples for an eventual return to Earth from Jezero Crater, an ancient lakebed and river delta that could hold clues to any past microbial life.
Last month, released images showed a Martian dust devil consuming a smaller one on the surface of the red planet.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Digital Trends
an hour ago
- Digital Trends
Blindsided by brutal AI chess bots? This one thinks like a human
For years, the game of chess has been seen as a litmus test for how far AI can go against the human intellect. When IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer beat reigning Chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, it was deemed a pivotal moment. The Wall Street Journal called it 'one giant leap backward for mankind.' It hasn't been a total route for humanity, however. Just a month ago, Norwegian chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen beat ChatGPT in a chess game without losing a single piece. Interestingly, the AI bots are fighting, too. Earlier this month, ChatGPT (backed by OpenAI's GPT-o3 reasoning model) beat Grok, an AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk-led xAI, in a chess tournament. Recommended Videos But how does an average chess-loving person fare against AI bots at chess? Well, it's frustrating. One of the most recurring themes you will see on chess forums is that bots play 'differently from humans.' Of course, when you're playing against a chess computing bot like Stockfish 16 that can assess over ten million positions per second, not many players stand a chance. On the other hand, some seasoned players say beating chess bots is easier because they follow a pattern, and that one must know how to survive the initial assault to beat them. But at the end of the day, AI bots don't play by conventions. A researcher at Carnegie Mellon University has now come up with a less alien solution – an AI chess bot that plays like a human. Say hello to Allie The bot named Allie is the brainchild of Yiming Zhang, a PhD candidate at the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) in CMU's School of Computer Science. Interestingly, Zhang found himself eager to play chess after watching Netflix's popular series, 'The Queen's Gambit.' But soon after dipping into the world of online chess, he found himself frustrated by chess bots. After playing against them, he realized that these bots play unnaturally. Moreover, the underlying tactics behind a chess engine often make it nearly impossible to beat them, thanks to their training, which involves winning at all costs by doing increasingly complex calculations. That's where Allie differs from your average chess-acing bot. It has been trained on 91 million transcripts of chess games played between humans. As a result, the way it contemplates moves, makes attacking advances, and defends positions feels like an average human player. 'Allie is trained on log sequences of real chess games to model the behaviors of human chess players across the skill spectrum, including non-move behaviors such as pondering times and resignations,' says the research paper. During evaluations, researchers found that Allie actually 'ponders' at critical situations in the game. Go ahead and test your mettle The fact that Allie has been trained to think like a human doesn't mean it's a weak player. Far from it, actually. It can hold its fort against everyone from amateurs to grandmasters. 'Against grandmaster-level (2500 Elo) opponents, Allie with adaptive search exhibits the strength of a fellow grandmaster, all while learning exclusively from humans.' Since being deployed publicly, it has amassed more than 11,500 online chess games on the online platform Lichess, where you can also try your skills against it. So far, it has over 6,500 victories against human players, lost just over 4,000 games, and more than 500 battles have ended in a draw. 'For beginners, it's not interesting or instructive to play against chess bots because the moves they make are often bizarre and incomprehensible to humans,' Zhang explains. Interestingly, Allie is completely free and open-source, which means other researchers can build atop it. Do keep in mind it's only accepting invites for Blitz games. Moreover, if you want to learn how the human-like AI chess bot makes its moves before going against Allie, you can watch it in action versus other human players at Lichess. And if you want to take a peek at the code, head over to the GitHub repository.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
This Diet Helps Lower Dementia Risk, And We May Finally Know Why
The Mediterranean diet and others like it have been extensively linked to reducing the risk of disease, cognitive decline, and premature death. Now a new study provides more evidence that this choice of foods can protect against dementia – as well as giving us some clues as to why. A team from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago wanted to look specifically at the MIND (Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay) diet, which combines elements of the Mediterranean diet with the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet. That's a lot of acronyms, but it essentially means lots of vegetables, whole grains, fish, and poultry, and not so much dairy, red meat, and fried food. Related: The researchers investigated links between this balance of food items and hippocampal sclerosis – a condition linked to dementia and Alzheimer's, where neurons die off in the brain's hippocampus. Analyzing the postmortem brains of 809 people for whom diet information had been logged for several years before their death, the study found that those who stuck closest to the MIND diet were less likely to show signs of hippocampal sclerosis. "These findings suggest that consuming a healthy diet, such as the MIND diet, may decrease the likelihood of hippocampal sclerosis and may support hippocampal health," write the researchers in their published paper. The diet's impact on dementia risk has been well established by prior research. This latest study offers fresh insight into a significant part of the reason why that link is there: the foods in the MIND diet appear to protect the hippocampus in particular. Crucial to remembering, learning, and navigating, damage to the hippocampus is closely tied to dementia. While not everyone with hippocampal sclerosis has dementia, or vice versa, there's a significant overlap between the two conditions. The research accounted for a variety of demographic and genetic factors, but isn't enough to prove direct cause and effect. What it does show, together with earlier studies, is a strong probability that dementia risk is to some extent affected by what we eat. "To our knowledge these are the first findings in human studies to report that the association of diet and dementia is partially mediated by hippocampal sclerosis," nutrition epidemiologist Puja Agarwal told Hannah Millington at Newsweek. It's not clear how hippocampal sclerosis gets started, but scientists are continuing to discover more about it, and its connections to dementia. It's not the first time it's been shown that the health of this part of the brain could be affected by diet. Future studies may endeavor to understand why this link exists. It's possible that the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects of the foods in the MIND diet are helping to guard the brain's neurons from damage in some way. "To further understand the mechanisms linking diet and nutrients with the overall brain health, investigating diet's relationship with other biomarkers of neuroinflammation and oxidative stress in the brain will be critical," write the researchers. The research has been published in JAMA Network Open. Related News A Signal of Future Alzheimer's Could Hide in The Way You Speak Something Inside Your Gut Could Be Like a Natural Ozempic New Vaccine For Two Deadly Cancers Shows Promise in Clinical Trial Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
A Signal of Future Alzheimer's Could Hide in The Way You Speak
We're still not sure exactly what causes Alzheimer's disease, but we know what its effects look like, and we're getting better at detecting the early signs of it – including, perhaps, those in our speech. Scientists from Boston University have developed a new AI ( artificial intelligence) algorithm that analyzes the speech patterns of those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). It can predict a progression from MCI to Alzheimer's within six years with an accuracy of 78.5 percent. Related: The team's study, published in 2024, continues their previous research, where they trained a model – using voice recordings from over 1,000 individuals – to accurately detect cognitive impairment. Their new algorithm was trained on transcribed audio recordings of 166 individuals with MCI, aged 63–97. As the team already knew who had developed Alzheimer's, a machine learning approach could be used to find signs in their transcribed speech that linked the 90 people whose cognitive function would decline into Alzheimer's. Once trained, the algorithm could then be applied in reverse: to try and predict Alzheimer's risk from transcripts of speech samples it had never processed before. Other important factors, including age and self-reported sex, were added to produce a final predictive score. "You can think of the score as the likelihood, the probability, that someone will remain stable or transition to dementia," said computer scientist Ioannis Paschalidis from Boston University, when the results were published in June last year. "We wanted to predict what would happen in the next six years – and we found we can reasonably make that prediction with relatively good confidence and accuracy. It shows the power of AI." Considering there's currently no cure for Alzheimer's, you might wonder what the benefit of detecting it early is – but we do have treatments that can help manage Alzheimer's to some extent, and these can be started earlier. What's more, early detection gives us more opportunity to study the disease and its progression, and from there develop a fully effective treatment. Those known to be likely to develop Alzheimer's can participate in clinical trials ahead of time. There's a lot to like about this approach, if it can be further developed. It's the sort of test that could be done quickly and inexpensively, even at home, and without any specialist equipment. It doesn't need any injections or samples, just a recording, and it could even be run through a smartphone app in the future. "If you can predict what will happen, you have more of an opportunity and time window to intervene with drugs, and at least try to maintain the stability of the condition and prevent the transition to more severe forms of dementia," Paschalidis explained. The recordings used here were rather rough and of low quality. With cleaner recordings and data, the algorithm's accuracy is likely to get even better. That could lead to a better understanding of how Alzheimer's affects us in the very early stages – and why it sometimes develops from MCI, and sometimes doesn't. "We hope, as everyone does, that there will be more and more Alzheimer's treatments made available," said Paschalidis. The research has been published in Alzheimer's & Dementia. An earlier version of this article was published in June 2024. Related News Something Inside Your Gut Could Be Like a Natural Ozempic New Vaccine For Two Deadly Cancers Shows Promise in Clinical Trial Scientists Identify How Young Blood Reverses Aging in Human Skin Cells Solve the daily Crossword
