An anonymous reader quotes a report from the European Space Agency: White dots arranged in five clusters against a black background (PNG). This is the simulated extraterrestrial signal transmitted from Mars and deciphered by a father and a daughter on Earth after a year-long decoding effort. On June 7, 2024, media artist Daniela de Paulis received this simple, retro-looking image depicting five amino acids in her inbox. It was the solution to a cosmic puzzle beamed from ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in May 2023, when the European spacecraft played alien as part of the multidisciplinary art project 'A Sign in Space.' After three radio astronomy observatories on Earth intercepted the signal, the challenge was first to extract the message from the raw data of the radio signal, and secondly to decode it. In just 10 days, a community of 5000 citizen scientists gathered online and managed to extract the signal. The second task took longer and required some visionary minds.

US citizens Ken and Keli Chaffin cracked the code following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end. The father and daughter team discovered that the message contained movement, suggesting some sort of cellular formation and life forms. Amino acids and proteins are the building blocks of life. Now that the cryptic signal has been deciphered, the quest for meaning begins. The interpretation of the message, like any art piece, remains open. Daniela crafted the message with a small group of astronomers and computer scientists, with support from ESA, the SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory. The artist and collaborators behind the project are now taking a step back and witnessing how citizen scientists are shaping the challenge on their own.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Associated Press: Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near "human level robustness and accuracy." But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text -- known in the industry as hallucinations -- can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments. Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.

The full extent of the problem is difficult to discern, but researchers and engineers said they frequently have come across Whisper's hallucinations in their work. A University of Michigan researcher conducting a study of public meetings, for example, said he found hallucinations in eight out of every 10 audio transcriptions he inspected, before he started trying to improve the model. A machine learning engineer said he initially discovered hallucinations in about half of the over 100 hours of Whisper transcriptions he analyzed. A third developer said he found hallucinations in nearly every one of the 26,000 transcripts he created with Whisper. The problems persist even in well-recorded, short audio samples. A recent study by computer scientists uncovered 187 hallucinations in more than 13,000 clear audio snippets they examined. That trend would lead to tens of thousands of faulty transcriptions over millions of recordings, researchers said. Further reading: AI Tool Cuts Unexpected Deaths In Hospital By 26%, Canadian Study Finds

NASA's economic impact report highlights that in fiscal year 2023, the agency's initiatives contributed $75.6 billion to the U.S. economy, created over 300,000 jobs, and drove advancements in areas like space exploration, climate research, and technology innovation. The agency's budget for that year was $25.4 billion. Space.com reports: The Moon to Mars program alone created $23.8 billion in economic output and 96,479 jobs, while investments in climate research and technology contributed $7.9 billion and 32,900 jobs. The report also drills down into impacts in each state, with 45 states seeing over $10 million in impact and eight states surpassing the $1 billion mark. [...]

NASA's missions supported 304,803 jobs across America, according to the report -- the third agency-wide study of its kind -- generating an estimated total of $9.5 billion in federal, state, and local taxes. Additionally, NASA's technological innovations and transfers in 2023 led to 40 new patent applications, 69 patents issued, and thousands of software usage agreements. A number of NASA technology spinoffs have become everyday household items. The full NASA economic impact report can be found here.

Ars Technica's Stephen Clark reports: For those who follow NASA's human spaceflight program, a burning question for the last year-and-a-half has been what caused the Orion spacecraft's heat shield to crack and chip away during atmospheric reentry on the unpiloted Artemis I test flight in late 2022. Multiple NASA officials said Monday they now know the answer, but they're not telling. Instead, agency officials want to wait until more reviews are done to determine what this means for Artemis II, the Orion spacecraft's first crew mission around the Moon, officially scheduled for launch in September 2025.

"We have gotten to a root cause," said Lakiesha Hawkins, assistant deputy associate administrator for NASA's Moon to Mars program office, in response to a question from Ars on Monday at the Wernher von Braun Space Exploration Symposium. "We are having conversations within the agency to make sure that we have a good understanding of not only what's going on with the heat shield, but also next steps and how that actually applies to the course that we take for Artemis II," she said. "And we'll be in a position to be able to share where we are with that hopefully before the end of the year."

While the space program is far down the list of most voters' priorities, this means a decision and announcement on what will happen with Artemis II won't come until the post-election lame duck period in the waning weeks of the Biden administration, and likely Bill Nelson's tenure as NASA administrator. This is several months later than NASA officials expected to make a decision. The question here is whether NASA managers decide it is safe enough to fly the Orion heat shield as-is on Artemis II, or if it is too risky with people onboard. Artemis II will be a 10-day mission taking its four-person crew on a path around the far side of the Moon, then back to Earth. This will be the first time people travel to such distances since the Apollo program ended more than 50 years ago.

When SpaceX developed reusable boosters for its Falcon rockets, it helped cut costs of launches.

Now the Wall Street Journal reports that last week's first-time catch of "its huge Starship booster" could "extend SpaceX's cost advantages, especially in launches to low-Earth orbit, where SpaceX and others operate satellites." A fully and rapidly reusable Starship would push down SpaceX's costs by limiting the need to crank out new hardware and cutting downtime between flights, space industry executives say. Bain, the consulting firm, has estimated that Starship would reduce the cost of getting each kilogram to low-Earth orbit by 50 to 80 times... SpaceX's rocket peers are moving toward reusability, but they are behind the progress Musk's company has made.

- The huge booster that will power New Glenn, the orbital rocket Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is developing, is designed to be reusable. That rocket is slated to launch for the first time next month.

- ULA, the rocket operator owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is looking to recover the two engines that help power the first part of its new rocket, Vulcan Centaur. The parent company for Arianespace, whose new vehicle is powered by an expendable booster, has also invested in a startup developing a reusable booster.

- Last year, Rocket Lab USA used an engine that had flown before on a flight of its Electron rocket, and is working on a new vehicle, called Neutron, with a booster it could use again.

- Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly Aerospace, said the reusable vehicle the Texas-based company is developing with Northrop Grumman would give launch customers more flexibility and better pricing. "It really comes down to the affordability and the schedule," Kim said in a recent interview.
"We need reusability for rockets, just like we have reusability for cars, for airplanes, for bicycles, for horses," Musk said in a video SpaceX posted earlier this year...

Communications of the ACM checks in on the quest for room-temperature superconductivity. "Time and time again, physicists have announced breakthroughs that were later found to be irreproducible, in error, or even fraudulent."

But "The issue is once again simmering..." In January 2024, a group of researchers from Europe and South America announced they had achieved a milestone in room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductivity. Using Scotch-taped cleaved pyrolytic graphite with surface wrinkles, which formed line defects, they observed a room-temperature superconducting state. Their paper, published in the journal Advanced Quantum Technologies, has gained considerable attention in the scientific world... Although many in the scientific community remain incredulous, if valid, this development could help solve a key piece of the puzzle: how defects and wrinkles in a material such as scotch-taped cleaved pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) affect electrical properties and behavior within superconductive systems...

"We haven't reached a point where there is a clear path to room temperature superconductivity because researchers are either overly enthusiastic or deceptive," said Elie Track, chief technology officer at HYPRES, Inc., an Elmsford, NY, company that develops and commercializes superconductor integrated circuits (ICs) and systems. "People fail to check measurements and others can't reproduce their results. There is a lot of carelessness and sloppy science surrounding the space because people are so eager to achieve success." The team conducting research into scotch-taped cleaved pyrolytic graphite believe their discovery could tilt the search for practically useful room-temperature superconductivity in a favorable direction. They reported they were able to achieve one-dimensional superconductivity in pyrolytic graphite at temperatures as great as 300 degrees Kelvin (26.85 degrees Celsius), and at ambient pressure. Vinokur and physicist Maria Cristina Diamantini described the development as the first "unambiguous experimental evidence" for a global room temperature zero-resistance state. If true, the team's research could illuminate a path to new superconducting materials....

Others remain skeptical, however. For example Alan Kadin [a technical consultant in the field and a former professor of electrical engineering at the University of Rochester] pointed out that one of the key researchers for the project, Yakov Kopelevich, has been working in the field for two decades and, so far, "The results are not reproducible in other labs...Until someone else independently reproduces these results, I think we can safely ignore them," he argued...

Yet as scientists continue to bang away at the superconducting challenge — including the possibility of using generative AI to explore materials and techniques — optimism is growing that a major breakthrough could occur.

SpaceNews reports: SpaceX's Super Heavy booster came within a second of aborting a "catch" landing attempt on the latest Starship test flight, according to audio posted online, apparently inadvertently, by Elon Musk... In the audio, one person, not identified, described an issue with the Super Heavy landing burn where a "misconfigured" parameter meant that spin pressure, presuming in the Raptor engines in the booster, did not increase as expected. "We were one second away from that tripping and telling the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground next to the tower," that person said. That scenario would "erroneously tell a healthy rocket to not try that catch...."

The people on the audio note that there had been discussions of delaying the Flight 5 launch to provide additional time to check those parameters. "We were scared about the fact that we had 100 aborts that were not super-trivial," one person said... Another issue discussed in the audio... was a cover on a chine, a vertical structure on the booster, that came off as the vehicle went transonic during its descent. A SpaceX official said in the audio that having chine cover come off was something that they were worried about before launch... The person also started to discuss an issue with the engine plume during the landing burn, but the video stops at that point.

The discussions appeared to involve planning for the next Starship test flight, Flight 6. SpaceX is moving ahead with preparations for the flight, moving the next Super Heavy booster to the launch site for testing. "Flight 6 is coming up soon!" Musk posted early Oct. 25.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

"We passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform," says U.C. Berkeley chemistry professor Omar Yaghi, "and it was beautiful.

"It cleaned the air entirely of CO2," Yaghi says in an announcement from the university. "Everything."

SFGate calls it "a discovery that could help potentially mitigate the effects of climate change..." Yaghi's lab has worked on carbon capture since the 1990s and began work on these crystalline structures in 2005. The innovative substance has lots of tiny holes, making it "great for storing gases or liquids, much like a sponge holds water," Yaghi said... While it could take one to two years for the powder to be usable in large-scale applications, Yaghi co-founded Atoco, an Irvine company, to commercialize his research and expand it beyond just carbon capture and storage.
"Capturing carbon from the air just got easier," says the headline on the anouncement from the university, which explains why this technology is crucial: [T]oday's carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases. Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO2 levels, which have reached 426 parts per million, 50% higher than levels before the Industrial Revolution. Without it, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we won't reach humanity's goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degreesC (2.7 degreesF) above preexisting global averages.

A new type of absorbing material developed by chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, could help get the world to negative emissions... According to Yaghi, the new material could be substituted easily into carbon capture systems already deployed or being piloted to remove CO2 from refinery emissions and capture atmospheric CO2 for storage underground. UC Berkeley graduate student Zihui Zhou, the paper's first author, said that a mere 200 grams of the material, a bit less than half a pound, can take up as much CO2 in a year — 20 kilograms (44 pounds) — as a tree.
Their research was published this week in the journal Nature.

And it's also interesting that they're using AI, according to the university's announcement: Yaghi is optimistic that artificial intelligence can help speed up the design of even better COFs and MOFs for carbon capture or other purposes, specifically by identifying the chemical conditions required to synthesize their crystalline structures. He is scientific director of a research center at UC Berkeley, the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP), which employs AI to develop cost-efficient, easily deployable versions of MOFs and COFs to help limit and address the impacts of climate change. "We're very, very excited about blending AI with the chemistry that we've been doing," he said.
Another potential use could be for harvesting water from desert air for drinking water, Yaghi told SFGate. But he seems very focused specifically on carbon capture.

"Another thing is that we need a strong determination among officials and industries to make carbon capture a high priority. Things have to change, but I believe that direct carbon capture from air is very doable."

"After safely splashing down on Earth as part of NASA's SpaceX Crew-8 mission Friday, a NASA astronaut experienced a medical issue," NASA reported Friday.

But today there's an update: After an overnight stay at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola in Florida, the NASA astronaut was released and returned to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston Saturday. The crew member is in good health and will resume normal post-flight reconditioning with other crew members.

As part of NASA's SpaceX Crew-8 mission [SpaceX's eighth crew-rotation mission to the ISS], the astronaut was one of four crewmates who safely splashed down aboard their SpaceX Dragon spacecraft near Pensacola on October 25. The crew members completed a 235-day mission, 232 days of which were spent aboard the International Space Station conducting scientific research.

To protect the crew member's medical privacy, specific details on the individual's condition and identity will not be shared.

Longtime Slashdot reader MattSparkes writes: NASA is working on plans to send another, much larger helicopter to Mars than Ingenuity. The "Chopper" craft would land itself after "screaming into" the planet's atmosphere at speed, before covering several kilometers a day while carrying scientific equipment. It would probably be the most graceful arrival on the red planet of any lander yet.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Boeing is weighing the sale of its space division. "The plans, which are reportedly at an early stage, could involve Boeing offloading the Starliner spacecraft and its projects supporting the International Space Station," reports The Verge. From the report: Boeing is facing a series of predicaments, including a fraud charge over 737 Max plane crashes and Starliner issues that left two astronauts at the ISS for months. Just this week, a Boeing-made satellite for Intelsat stopped working and fell apart suddenly after suffering an "anomaly."

"We're better off doing less and doing it better than doing more and not doing it well," Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said during an earnings call this week. "Clearly, our core of commercial airplanes and defense systems are going to stay with the Boeing Company for the long run. But there's probably some things on the fringe there that we can be more efficient with or that distract us from our main goal here."

However, sources tell the WSJ that Boeing will likely continue to oversee the Space Launch System, which will eventually help bring NASA astronauts back to the Moon. It's also reportedly expected to hang onto its commercial and military satellite businesses.

Former Nvidia engineer Luke Durant, working with the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), recently discovered the largest known prime number: (2^136,279,841)-1 or M136279841 (where the number following the letter M represents the exponent). The achievement was detailed on Mersenne.org. Tom's Hardware reports: This is the largest prime number we've seen so far, with the last one, M82589933, being discovered six years prior. What makes this discovery particularly fascinating is that this is the first GIMPS discovery that used the power of data center GPUs. Mihai Preda was the first one to harness GPU muscle in 2017, says the GIMPS website, when he "wrote the GpuOwl program to test Mersenne numbers for primarilty, making his software available to all GIMPS users." When Luke joined GIMPS in 2023, they built the infrastructure needed to deploy Preda's software across several GPU servers available in the cloud.

While it took a year of testing, Luke's efforts finally bore fruit when an A100 GPU in Dublin, Ireland gave the M136279841 result last October 11. This was then corroborated by an Nvidia H100 located in San Antonio, Texas, which confirmed its primality with the Lucas-Lehmer test.

Climate scientists who were mocked and gaslighted after speaking up about their fears for the future have said acknowledging strong emotions is vital to their work. From a report: The researchers said these feelings should not be suppressed in an attempt to reach supposed objectivity. Seeing climate experts' fears and opinions about the climate crisis as irrelevant suggests science is separate from society and ultimately weakens it, they said.

The researchers said they had been subject to ridicule by some scientists after taking part in a large Guardian survey of experts in May, during which they and many others expressed their feelings of extreme fear about future temperature rises and the world's failure to take sufficient action. They said they had been told they were not qualified to take part in this broad discussion of the climate crisis, were spreading doom and were not impartial.

However, the researchers said that embracing their emotions was necessary to do good science and was a spur to working towards better ways of tackling the climate crisis and the rapidly increasing damage being done to the world. They also said that those dismissing their fears as doom-laden and alarmist were speaking frequently from a position of privilege in western countries, with little direct experience of the effects of the climate crisis.

Four astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Friday after their record ISS mission stretched to eight months due to Boeing capsule malfunctions and hurricane disruptions. The SpaceX Dragon capsule landed off Florida's coast before dawn, carrying NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin.

Technical issues with Boeing's Starliner capsule in September, followed by Hurricane Milton and persistent rough seas, delayed their planned return by two months. The crew launched in March as part of NASA's commercial crew program. Their replacements include Boeing Starliner test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, whose mission expanded from eight days to eight months, alongside two SpaceX-launched astronauts. The new crew will remain aboard the station until February.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Space Agency is in talks with SpaceX about the possibility of Elon Musk's space venture joining an international charter designed to reduce a growing swarm of debris in space, Director General Josef Aschbacher told Reuters. The 22-nation agency is spearheading one of several efforts to roll back the mass of space junk swirling round the planet from past missions that poses a risk to active satellites. Aschbacher said 110 countries or entities have joined ESA's Zero Debris charter, which aims to stop any new orbital garbage being generated by 2030.

Asked whether SpaceX, whose satellites now make up some two thirds of spacecraft active in low Earth orbit, had signed up, Aschbacher said: "Not yet, but we are in discussion with them... This is a charter that keeps evolving and... we will keep raising the topics because they are so fundamental." [...] There are currently 18,897 pieces of trackable space junk in orbit, according to Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks such objects. Space debris and junk are often used interchangeably, but some consider space junk to include inactive payloads and rocket bodies as well as debris, or errant shards of broken satellites. There are no international laws on debris, but countries and space agencies have begun in recent years to devise proposals and national rules for tackling the problem.

schwit1 shares a report from Nature: Which scientific publishers and journals are worst affected by fraudulent or dubious research papers -- and which have done least to clean up their portfolio? A technology start-up founded to help publishers spot potentially problematic papers says that it has some answers, and has shared its early findings with Nature. The science-integrity website Argos, which was launched in September by Scitility, a technology firm headquartered in Sparks, Nevada, gives papers a risk score on the basis of their authors' publication records, and on whether the paper heavily cites already-retracted research. A paper categorized as 'high risk' might have multiple authors whose other studies have been retracted for reasons related to misconduct, for example. Having a high score doesn't prove that a paper is low quality, but suggests that it is worth investigating.

Argos is one of a growing number of research-integrity tools that look for red flags in papers. These include the Papermill Alarm, made by Clear Skies, and Signals, by Research Signals, both London-based firms. Because creators of such software sell their manuscript-screening tools to publishers, they are generally reluctant to name affected journals. But Argos, which is offering free accounts to individuals and fuller access to science-integrity sleuths and journalists, is the first to show public insights. "We wanted to build a piece of technology that was able to see hidden patterns and bring transparency to the industry," says Scitility co-founder Erik de Boer, who is based in Roosendaal, the Netherlands. By early October, Argos had flagged more than 40,000 high-risk and 180,000 medium-risk papers. It has also indexed more than 50,000 retracted papers.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Live Science: Scientists have demonstrated a new humanoid robot that can run at a top speed of just over 8 miles per hour (mph) -- or 3.6 meters per second (m/s) to be exact. This makes it the speediest machine of its kind built so far, albeit these speeds were only achieved with the help of added footwear. STAR1 is a bipedal robot built by the Chinese company Robot Era that's 5 feet 7 inches (171 centimeters) tall and weighs 143 pounds (65 kilograms).

Powered by high-torque motors and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, the footwear-donning STAR1 navigated different types of terrain, including grassland and gravel, while jogging on paved roads and earth, and sustained its top speed for 34 minutes. A top speed of 8 mph means it beat Unitree's H1 robot -- which set the previous speed record for a bipedal robot at 7.4 mph (3.3 m/s) in March 2024. Although STAR1 had the help of footwear, H1 was not technically jogging or running as its feet did not both leave the ground at once during transit. You can watch STAR1 racing through the Gobi Desert here.

Hong Kong officials discovered the city's first dinosaur fossils on an uninhabited island in a local geopark, they said Wednesday. Initial examinations indicate the remains belong to a large Cretaceous-era dinosaur from 66-145 million years ago, with species identification pending further study. Associated Press adds: Experts speculate that the dinosaur was likely buried by sand and gravel after its death before it was later washed to the surface by a large flood, and subsequently buried again at the discovery site, it said.

Theoretical Physicist Jacques Treiner, from the University of Paris Cite, explains why you should run in the rain: ... Let p represent the number of drops per unit volume, and let a denote their vertical velocity. We'll denote Sh as the horizontal surface area of the individual (e.g., the head and shoulders) and Sv as the vertical surface area (e.g., the body). When you're standing still, the rain only falls on the horizontal surface, Sh. This is the amount of water you'll receive on these areas. Even if the rain falls vertically, from the perspective of a walker moving at speed v, it appears to fall obliquely, with the angle of the drops' trajectory depending on your speed. During a time period T, a raindrop travels a distance of aT. Therefore, all raindrops within a shorter distance will reach the surface: these are the drops inside a cylinder with a base of Sh and a height of aT, which gives:
p.Sh.a.T.

As we have seen, as we move forward, the drops appear to be animated by an oblique velocity that results from the composition of velocity a and velocity v. The number of drops reaching Sh remains unchanged, since velocity v is horizontal and therefore parallel to Sh. However, the number of drops reaching surface Sv -- which was previously zero when the walker was stationary -- has now increased. This is equal to the number of drops contained within a horizontal cylinder with a base area of Sv and a length of v.T. This length represents the horizontal distance the drops travel during this time interval. In total, the walker receives a number of drops given by the expression:
p.(Sh.a + Sv.v). T

Now we need to take into account the time interval during which the walker is exposed to the rain. If you're covering a distance d at constant speed v, the time you spend walking is d/v. Plugging this into the equation, the total amount of water you encounter is:
p.(Sh.a + Sv.v). d/v = p.(Sh.a/v + Sv). d This equation proves that the faster you move, the less water hits your head and shoulders, but the amount of water hitting the vertical part of your body remains constant. To stay drier, it's best to move quickly and lean forward. However, you'll have to increase your speed to offset the exposed surface area caused by leaning.

NASA has revealed a full-scale prototype for six telescopes designed to detect gravitational waves. Phys.Org reports: The LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) mission is led by ESA (European Space Agency) in partnership with NASA to detect gravitational waves by using lasers to measure precise distances -- down to picometers, or trillionths of a meter -- between a trio of spacecraft distributed in a vast configuration larger than the sun. Each side of the triangular array will measure nearly 1.6 million miles, or 2.5 million kilometers.

The Engineering Development Unit Telescope, which was manufactured and assembled by L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York, arrived at Goddard in May. The primary mirror is coated in gold to better reflect the infrared lasers and to reduce heat loss from a surface exposed to cold space, since the telescope will operate best when close to room temperature.

The prototype is made entirely from an amber-colored glass-ceramic called Zerodur, manufactured by Schott in Mainz, Germany. The material is widely used for telescope mirrors and other applications requiring high precision because its shape changes very little over a wide range of temperatures. The LISA mission is slated to launch in the mid-2030s.