“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. —Eliezer Yudkowsky, research fellow, Machine Intelligence Research Institute”
NASA woke up the Kepler spacecraft and maneuvered it into a stable configuration om October 10 that will allow the mission team to download the latest data with the least amount of fuel consumption. The mission team is still monitoring the health of the spacecraft while working towards downloading data from Campaign 19.
China is building a particle accelerator that will be twice as large and seven times as powerful as CERN’s LHC and astrophysicist, Martin Rees, famous for his contributions to black hole formation to extragalactic radio sources and the evolution of the universe, thinks that there’s a chance the colliders could cause a “catastrophe that engulfs space itself”.
“The discovery of dark energy has greatly changed how we think about the laws of nature,” said Edward Witten, one of the world’s leading theorists at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.
Mercury’s magnetosphere could have implications for the search for life beyond our solar system. Exoplanets found orbiting cool red dwarf stars could host liquid water, and possibly life. But because they orbit their stars more closely than Mercury orbits the sun, they likely face strong stellar winds and radiation levels inimical to life, unless the planet is protected by a magnetosphere like Mercury’s.
“The discovery of a terrestrial planet around a nearby M dwarf during the first TESS observing sector suggests that the prospects for future discoveries are bright. It is worth remembering that 90 percent of the sky has not yet been surveyed by either TESS or Kepler,” NASA reports.