The “Dark Ages of the Universe” --will be the focus of a new experiment conducted jointly by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), involving the placement of a new science observatory on the far side of the Moon. "this ancient period will be the focus of explorations by the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment – Night (LuSEE-Night), a robotic radio telescope that will be sent to the distant lunar landscape furthest from Earth, and designed to measure conditions that occurred in our universe shortly after the Big Bang."
The six numbers that define the entire Universe. "In this edited extract from The Little Book of Cosmology, physicist Prof Lyman Page explains how our model of the Universe relies on just six parameters for BBC Science Focus.
A Prebiotic Genetic Alphabet As An Early Darwinian Ancestor For Pre-RNA Evolution, reports Keith Cowing for Astrobiology.com. "RNA-based genetic code is thought to be central to life’s emergence due to its dual ability for information transfer and catalysis. Nonetheless, the genetic code of early life was potentially not restricted to canonical genetic alphabets alone."
Mysterious South Atlantic Anomaly Deepening--Recent Gov't Report. "The anomaly is one of the components monitored by several international government agencies that comprise the World Magnetic Model (WMM), a “spherical harmonic model of the Earth’s main magnetic field and its slow temporal change. ”The model is produced by the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the U.K. Defense Geographic Centre (DGC), based on information developed by the British Geological Survey (BGS) and the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)."
Can science explain UFO sightings? explores Ethan Siegel for Big Think. "Since even before the beginning of the space age, people have reported and even recorded 'eyewitness accounts' of aerial or astronomical phenomena that seem to defy the laws of physics. But are any of these reports convincing or compelling enough to rule out natural or human-caused phenomena, or are they simply cases of people's imaginations running wild? But is there a scientific explanation?"
AI isn’t close to becoming sentient – the real danger lies in how easily we anthropomorphize it--To what extent will our psychological vulnerabilities shape our interactions with emerging technologies? explores Big Think. "
How the brain's 'internal compass' works--New study reveals how the brain makes sense of changing environmental cues, reports McGill University."Neuroscience research has witnessed a technology revolution in the last decade allowing us to ask and answer questions that could only be dreamed of just years ago,” says Mark Brandon, an Associate Professor of psychiatry at McGill University and researcher at the Douglas Research Centre, who co-led the research with Zaki Ajabi, a former student at McGill University and now a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University.
Can Artificial Intelligence help find life on Mars or Icy Worlds? asks the SETIInstitute. " an interdisciplinary study led by SETI Institute Senior Research Scientist Kim Warren-Rhodes, mapped the sparse life hidden away in salt domes, rocks and crystals at Salar de Pajonales at the boundary of the Chilean Atacama Desert and Altiplano. Warren-Rhodes then worked with co-investigators to train a machine learning model to recognize the patterns and rules associated with their distributions so it could learn to predict and find those same distributions in data on which it was not trained.
NASA selects solar physicist Nicola Fox as its new science chief, reports Robert Lea for Space.com--"Fox previously headed up NASA's Heliophysics Division. In her previous role, one of the missions Fox oversaw was the Parker Solar Probe, the NASA spacecraft that orbits the sun closer than any previous craft."