Tag Archives: science

Northern lights could be visible in 15 states this week

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US residents across 15 states could be in for a show tonight and throughout the week. Incoming coronal mass ejections may spark geomagnetic storms that blaze up the northern lights for all to see, according to a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Forecasters anticipate geomagnetic activity and aurora displays from November 10 until November 12 in states such as New York, Minnesota, Iowa and Alaska, among others. This is due to a trio of coronal mass ejections that began on November 7.

This week's view.
NOAA

As previously stated, the latest NOAA aurora forecast map notes that 15 US states are fully or partially above the view line. This isn't an exact science, as it's entirely possible that those living below the view line could get a glimpse of something in the night sky. Auroras are fickle, so it's also possible that the lightshow will be understated. A number of conditions have to align for the perfect display.

If you're planning on heading out tonight for a look, here are some tips. Make sure to find a north-facing vantage point with a clear view of the horizon. You want to be as far from light pollution as possible, so head away from large cities. Use a mobile phone to scan the skies as the camera is actually better at picking up faint lights before being visible to the naked eye. This can help pinpoint where to focus attention.

The last truly powerful and widespread aurora event in the US took place last year. That geomagnetic storm was one of the strongest in the past two decades. It's unlikely this week's activity will be quite as striking.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/northern-lights-could-be-visible-in-15-states-this-week-180056871.html?src=rss

Blue Origin scrubs New Glenn’s second flight due to bad weather

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Blue Origin has postponed the second flight of its New Glenn rocket, which was slated to send a pair of NASA spacecraft on the first step of their journey to Mars on Sunday afternoon. The heavy-lift launch vehicle was scheduled to take off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:45PM ET., but multiple holds were issued during the under-two-hour launch window due to inclement weather. Blue Origin called off the launch attempt around 4:13PM.

The next launch opportunity is as yet unclear. Blue Origin was previously given a backup opportunity set for Monday afternoon, but the FAA has since issued an emergency order restricting commercial launches for the time being due to the government shutdown. As of November 10, commercial space launches can only take place between 10:00PM and 6:00AM. Blue Origin said on Sunday that it’s reviewing opportunities based on the weather, and did not mention the FAA’s order.

New Glenn's development has faced significant delays over the last decade since it was first announced, and finally took its maiden flight at the beginning of this year. Its first stage booster is intended to be reusable, and the company plans to recover the booster from the upcoming launch by landing it on an autonomous landing platform vessel dubbed Jacklyn, also known as the barge. Blue Origin attempted the same during its first flight, but failed. 

The spacecraft on board New Glenn are twin satellites built by Rocket Lab and operated by UC Berkeley for NASA's Escapade mission to study the effects of space weather. They'll be following a new trajectory to the red planet, lingering in "a lazy, 12-month kidney bean-shaped orbit" around Earth until Mars is in alignment, according to UC Berkeley. Escapade should reach Mars in 2027. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/blue-origin-scrubs-new-glenns-second-flight-due-to-bad-weather-214349212.html?src=rss

Blue Origin’s second New Glenn launch will carry real NASA satellites

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Blue Origin has announced a target date for New Glenn’s second launch: November 9. This time, the mission will deploy real payloads, not just carry a technological demo for the company. Specifically, the spacecraft will be carrying the NASA Escapade mission’s twin satellites, which are headed to Mars. New Glenn, Blue Origin’s heavy-lift launch vehicle that was designed to be reused for a minimum of 25 flights, had its maiden flight in January. While the rocket made it to space, the company failed to land its first stage on its recovery ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

In a tweet, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said it won’t be a problem if it fails to stick the landing again. “We've got several more New Glenn boosters already in production,” he said. The mission’s primary goal, he clarified, is to get the Escapade satellites safely into orbit.

Mars missions typically launch during a narrow window of time when the red planet and the Earth are aligned. It’s a phenomenon that only happens once every two years. Colorado aerospace company Advanced Space designed Escapade’s trajectory for Mars missions that do not launch within that timeframe. The satellites will linger in the L2 Lagrange point between the sun and the Earth for a year. In November 2026, they will do a slingshot around our planet in order to reach Mars sometime in 2027 during that once-in-every-two-year alignment. “Can we launch to Mars when the planets are not aligned? Escapade is paving the way for that,” said Jeffrey Parker of Advanced Space.

New Glenn will lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36. The company is aiming for a 2:45 PM Eastern time launch on November 9. As SpaceNews notes, the US government shutdown could limit NASA’s coverage, though the agency is still expected to livestream the event.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/blue-origins-second-new-glenn-launch-will-carry-real-nasa-satellites-153000627.html?src=rss

Sony has a new benchmark for ethical AI

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Sony AI released a dataset that tests the fairness and bias of AI models. It's called the Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark (FHIBE, pronounced like "Phoebe"). The company describes it as the "first publicly available, globally diverse, consent-based human image dataset for evaluating bias across a wide variety of computer vision tasks." In other words, it tests the degree to which today's AI models treat people fairly. Spoiler: Sony didn't find a single dataset from any company that fully met its benchmarks.

Sony says FHIBE can address the AI industry's ethical and bias challenges. The dataset includes images of nearly 2,000 paid participants from over 80 countries. All of their likenesses were shared with consent — something that can't be said for the common practice of scraping large volumes of web data. Participants in FHIBE can remove their images at any time. Their photos include annotations noting demographic and physical characteristics, environmental factors and even camera settings.

The tool "affirmed previously documented biases" in today's AI models. But Sony says FHIBE can also provide granular diagnoses of factors that led to those biases. One example: Some models had lower accuracy for people using "she/her/hers" pronouns, and FHIBE highlighted greater hairstyle variability as a previously overlooked factor.

FHIBE also determined that today's AI models reinforced stereotypes when prompted with neutral questions about a subject's occupation. The tested models were particularly skewed "against specific pronoun and ancestry groups," describing subjects as sex workers, drug dealers or thieves. And when prompted about what crimes an individual committed, models sometimes produced "toxic responses at higher rates for individuals of African or Asian ancestry, those with darker skin tones and those identifying as 'he/him/his.'"

Sony AI says FHIBE proves that ethical, diverse and fair data collection is possible. The tool is now available to the public, and it will be updated over time. A paper outlining the research was published in Nature on Wednesday.

Update, November 5, 2025, 2:01 PM ET: This story has been updated to clarify that the participants were paid, not volunteers.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/sony-has-a-new-benchmark-for-ethical-ai-160045574.html?src=rss

Google contemplates putting giant AI installations in low-earth orbit

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Putting AI in space may sound like a sci-fi nightmare, but Google is thinking about the idea with a research endeavor called Project Suncatcher. The idea is to put power-hungry data centers into orbit on solar-powered satellites, so they can be powered by unlimited, clean energy available 24 hours a day. That would mitigate the nastiest aspects of AI cloud computing, like the use of power plants that spew huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. 

Project Suncatcher is a literal moonshot of the type that Google used to do more often. The search giant wants to put its AI chips, called Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), into orbit aboard solar panel-equipped satellites. “In the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute,” wrote Google senior director Travis Beals. "In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on Earth, and produce power nearly continuously, reducing the need for batteries."

Suffice to say, the idea poses numerous challenges. That proximity to the sun would expose the TPUs to high levels of radiation that can rapidly degrade electronic components. However, Google has tested its current chips for radiation tolerance and said they'd be able to survive a five year mission without suffering permanent failures.  

Google Tensor Processing Unit
Google's Tensor Processing Unit
Google

Another challenge is the high-speed data links of "tens of terabits per second" and low latency required between satellites. Those speeds would be hard to achieve in space, as transmitting data at long distances requires exponentially more power than on Earth. To achieve that, Google said it may need to maneuver TPU-equipped satellites into tight formations, possibly within "kilometers or less" of each other. That would have the added benefit of reducing "station keeping" thrust maneuvers needed to keep the satellites in the right position. 

The determining factor, though, is money. Launching TPUs into space may not seem cost-efficient, but Google's analysis shows that doing so could be "roughly comparable" to data centers on Earth (in terms of power efficiency) by around the mid-2030s. 

While it's currently only a preliminary research paper, Google is planning to put Project Suncatcher through some initial trials. It has teamed with a company called Planet on a "learning mission" to launch a pair of prototype satellites into orbit by 2027. "This experiment will test how our models and TPU hardware operate in space and validate the use of optical inter-satellite links for distributed ML [machine learning] tasks," Google wrote. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-contemplates-putting-giant-ai-installations-in-low-earth-orbit-123025256.html?src=rss

Scientists observed a black hole flare that ‘shined with the light of 10 trillion suns’

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It can be challenging for us humans to wrap our brains around really massive numbers. Even the scale of a million or billion is pretty hard for most people to really comprehend. So prepare yourself to think big, because scientists have recorded the largest and most distant black hole flare to date, and the numbers around it are pretty staggering. 

The event occurred at an active galactic nucleus, also known as an accreting or feeding black hole, that they predict is 500 million times more massive than our sun and is located 10 billion light years away. The researchers suspect that this flare was caused by a tidal disruption event, where the gravity of the AGN may have pulled a nearby star closer and consumed it. The team estimates that the star eaten by the black hole had a mass 30 times that of our system's own sun. And according to the layperson blog post from Caltech about the event, "at its brightest, the flare shined with the light of 10 trillion suns."

"This is unlike any AGN we've ever seen," said Matthew Graham, who was a co-principal investigator on the study as well as a research professor of astronomy at Caltech and project scientist for the Zwicky Transient Facility, which first observed the black hole in question in 2018 along with the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey. The research about the AGN and its bonkers flare appeared in the journal Nature Astronomy.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/scientists-observed-a-black-hole-flare-that-shined-with-the-light-of-10-trillion-suns-235414438.html?src=rss

Chemists have created the world’s thinnest spaghetti

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Researchers from the University College London have done what celebrity chefs and Italian nonnas could only dream of: they've made the world's thinnest spaghetti. This culinary-sounding accomplishment, published in Nanoscale Advances, has yielded strands of starch nanofibers that are just 372 nanometers wide, which is invisible to the naked eye and is even smaller than some wavelengths of light.

"The world's thinnest spaghetti" sounds silly, but starch can actually have important applications in medicine. For instance, nanofiber starches could help wounds heal when used in bandages, since they'd be able to keep out bacteria while allowing moisture through. Rather than going through the energy-intensive process of refining their own plant cell starch for nanofibering, these chemists decided store-bought was fine and made their strands directly from flour. Their version of the nanofibers were created with a process called electrospinning, where an electric charge pulls a flour and liquid mixture through extremely small metal holes into threads that are just nanometers wide. Extrusion through a die is literally the same way you'd make conventional spaghetti to accompany your bolognese or your meatballs, only at a much, much smaller scale.

There's still a lot of study to be done before the product will be appearing in the doctor's office, but this is a step toward more sustainable starch nanofibers. And while I would pay good money to watch chefs try to explain invisible pasta on a reality show, electrospinning almost certainly won't become the new molecular gastronomy hotness. As co-author Professor Gareth Williams of the UCL School of Pharmacy put it: "I don't think it's useful as pasta, sadly, as it would overcook in less than a second, before you could take it out of the pan."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/chemists-have-created-the-worlds-thinnest-spaghetti-201509365.html?src=rss

El Capitan ranked the most powerful supercomputer in the world

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When Cray Computing, a supercomputer manufacturer acquired by HP in 2019, announced that it would build El Capitan it expected the computer to reach a peak performance of 1.5 exaflops. Today, the 64th edition of the TOP500 — a long-running ranking of the world's non-distributed supercomputers — was published, and El Capitan not only exceeded that forecast by clocking 1.742 exaflops, but has claimed the title as the most powerful supercomputer in the world right now.

El Capitan is only the third “exascale” computer, meaning it can perform more than a quintillion calculations in a second. The other two, called Frontier and Aurora, claim the second and third place slots on the TOP500 now. Unsurprisingly, all of these massive machines live within government research facilities: El Capitan is housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Frontier is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Argonne National Laboratory claims Aurora. Cray had a hand in all three systems.

El Capitan has more than 11 million combined CPU and GPU cores based on AMD 4th-gen EPYC processors. These 24-core processors are rated at 1.8GHz each and have AMD Instinct M1300A APUs. It's also relatively efficient, as such systems go, squeezing out an estimated 58.89 Gigaflops per watt.

If you’re wondering what El Capitan is built for, the answer is addressing nuclear stockpile safety, but it can also be used for nuclear counterterrorism. Being more powerful than anticipated, it’s likely to occupy the throne for a long while before another exascale computer overtakes it.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/el-capitan-ranked-the-most-powerful-supercomputer-in-the-world-180037304.html?src=rss

The Morning After: Your Switch games will work on Nintendo’s next console

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You won't have to worry about repurchasing your Nintendo favorites when the Switch’s successor finally arrives. In its earnings report, Nintendo said its next console will have backwards compatibility and be able to run games made for the Switch. In addition, Switch Online will also be available on the Switch 2.

The earnings report takes a philosophical tone in talking about the why. Its online service, Nintendo Account, ties a user’s history to one account and enables the company, it said, to “maintain a continuous relationship” with them across console generations.

We’re all waiting: Nintendo downgraded its sales forecast for the fiscal year due to a big decline in console sales compared to last year.

— Mat Smith

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Japanese researchers just sent the world’s first wooden satellite to space, in a bid to figure out whether wood could be a future suitable material for all kinds of space activities. “With timber, a material we can produce by ourselves, we will be able to build houses, live and work in space forever,” said Takao Doi, an astronaut affiliated with Kyoto University.

Continue reading.

While we felt the Kindle Colorsoft was a solid first stab at a color ereader by Amazon, there’s an issue. After several buyers pointed out that a yellow band was discoloring the bottom of the display, the same issue occurred on our review unit. Now, the company says it’s offering refunds and replacements for anyone seeing the same issue. For the time being, Amazon has delayed shipments of the ereader while it juggles replacements. We’ve also pulled the score from our review until it’s resolved.

Continue reading.

TMA
Fox

Meta had plans to build an AI data center that relies on nuclear power in the US — it even already knew where it wanted to build the facility. According to the Financial Times, though, the company had to scrap its plans because a rare bee species was discovered on the land reserved for the project. The report didn’t say whether Meta is looking for a new site — one without rare bees.

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-your-switch-games-will-work-on-nintendos-next-console-121526165.html?src=rss

Japan just sent the world’s first wooden satellite to space

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Japanese researchers just sent the world’s first wooden satellite to space, as reported by CNN. LignoSat, named after the Latin word for wood, was developed by Kyoto University and a company called Sumitomo Forestry. It was included in a SpaceX mission to the International Space Station (ISS) and will soon be released into orbit above the Earth.

Why do this? There are two main reasons. First of all, it’ll be a test as to the durability of wood when faced with the harsh conditions of space. If successful, the researchers plan on making more wooden structures and jettisoning them to the cosmos.

A wood satellite.
Kyoto University

“With timber, a material we can produce by ourselves, we will be able to build houses, live and work in space forever,” said Takao Doi, an astronaut affiliated with Kyoto University. This is the first step in a 50-year plan that includes planting trees and building actual timber houses on the moon and even Mars.

“Early 1900s airplanes were made of wood,” said Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata. “A wooden satellite should be feasible, too.”

For those balking at the idea of wooden structures being used in space, consider some of the benefits. The material should actually be more durable in space than on Earth because, well, the endless void doesn’t have any water or oxygen. There’s nothing to cause rot and it's very hard for it to catch fire. It even offers fairly decent protection from radiation.

The other reason has to do with all of those other satellites in orbit. The planet’s currently surrounded by more than 3,000 satellites, not to mention all kinds of affiliated space debris. Wooden satellites would eventually fall back down to Earth and burn up during re-entry.

Metal satellites will (mostly) burn up during the return trip, but not before creating harmful aluminum oxide particles. We don’t really have a plan in place for the ever-expanding amount of space junk entombing the planet, so this could help. Doi envisions a scenario in which “metal satellites might be banned in the future.” In any event, having a log cabin on the moon would be one heck of a good time. There's literally an Apple TV+ show plus about just that. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/japan-just-sent-the-worlds-first-wooden-satellite-to-space-194055742.html?src=rss