The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 goes to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter". Discussing the prize in this video is Ed Copeland, Mark Fromhold and Ioan Notingher from the University of Nottingham.
An animated representation of all the multi-planet systems discovered in the Milky Way galaxy by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope as of Oct. 30, 2018. The systems are shown together at the same scale as our Solar System (dashed lines).
Could the same computer algorithms that teach autonomous cars to drive safely help identify nearby asteroids or discover life in the universe? NASA scientists are trying to figure that out by partnering with pioneers in artificial intelligence (AI) — companies such as Intel, IBM and Google — to apply advanced computer algorithms to problems in space science.
Machine learning is a type of AI. It describes the most widely used algorithms and other tools that allow computers to learn from data in order to make predictions and categorize objects much faster and more accurately than a human being can. Consequently, machine learning is widely used to help technology companies recognize faces in photos or predict what movies people would enjoy. But some scientists see applications far beyond Earth.
Giada Arney, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, hopes machine learning can help her and her colleagues find a needle of life in a haystack of data that will be collected by future telescopes and observatories such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
“These technologies are very important, especially for big data sets and especially in the exoplanet field,” Arney says. “Because the data we’re going to get from future observations is going to be sparse and noisy. It’s going to be really hard to understand. So using these kinds of tools has so much potential to help us.”
To help scientists like Arney build cutting-edge research tools, NASA’s Frontier Development Lab, or FDL, brings together technology and space innovators for eight weeks every summer to brainstorm and develop computer code. The four-year-old program is a partnership between the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center, both based in Silicon Valley where startup-hatching incubators that bring talented people together to accelerate the development of breakthrough technologies are abundant.
In NASA’s version, FDL pairs science and computer engineering early-career doctoral students with experts from the space agency, academia, and some of the world’s biggest technology companies. Partner companies contribute various combinations of hardware, algorithms, super-compute resources, funding, facilities and subject-matter experts. All of the AI techniques developed at FDL will be publicly available, with some already helping identify asteroids, find planets, and predict extreme solar radiation events.
“FDL feels like some really good musicians with different instruments getting together for a jam session in the garage, finding something really cool, and saying, 'Hey we’ve got a band here,’” says Shawn Domagal-Goldman, a NASA Goddard astrobiologist who, together with Arney, mentored an FDL team in 2018. Their team developed a machine learning technique for scientists who aim to study the atmospheres of exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system.
These Goddard scientists hope to one day use advanced machine learning techniques to quickly interpret data revealing the chemistry of exoplanets based on the wavelengths of light emitted or absorbed by molecules in their atmospheres. Since thousands of exoplanets have been discovered so far, making quick decisions about which ones have the most promising chemistry associated with habitability could help winnow down the candidates to only a few that deserve further, and costly, investigation.
Fossilised fragments of a skeleton of the last known toothed bird, hidden within a rock the size of a grapefruit, have helped upend one of the longest-standing assumptions about the origins of modern birds.
Cambridge researchers have found that one of the key skull features that characterises 99% of modern birds – a mobile beak – evolved before the mass extinction event that killed all large dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.
Fossilised fragments of a skeleton, hidden within a rock the size of a grapefruit, have helped upend one of the longest-standing assumptions about the origins of modern birds. Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Natuurhistorisch Museum Maastricht found that one of the key skull features that characterises 99% of modern birds -- a mobile beak -- evolved before the mass extinction event that killed all large dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.
This finding also suggests that the skulls of ostriches, emus and their relatives evolved 'backwards', reverting to a more primitive condition after modern birds arose. Using CT scanning techniques, the Cambridge team identified bones from the palate, or the roof of the mouth, of a new species of large ancient bird, which they named Janavis finalidens. It lived at the very end of the Age of Dinosaurs and was one of the last toothed birds to ever live. The arrangement of its palate bones shows that this 'dino-bird' had a mobile, dexterous beak, almost indistinguishable from that of most modern birds.
For more than a century, it had been assumed that the mechanism enabling a mobile beak evolved after the extinction of the dinosaurs. However, the new discovery, reported in the journal Nature, suggests that our understanding of how the modern bird skull came to be needs to be re-evaluated. Each of the roughly 11,000 species of birds on Earth today is classified into one of two over-arching groups, based on the arrangement of their palate bones. Ostriches, emus and their relatives are classified into the palaeognath, or 'ancient jaw' group, meaning that, like humans, their palate bones are fused together into a solid mass.
All other groups of birds are classified into the neognath, or 'modern jaw' group, meaning that their palate bones are connected by a mobile joint. This makes their beaks much more dexterous, helpful for nest-building, grooming, food-gathering, and defence.
The two groups were originally classified by Thomas Huxley, the British biologist known as 'Darwin's Bulldog' for his vocal support of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. In 1867, he divided all living birds into either the 'ancient' or 'modern' jaw groups. Huxley's assumption was that the 'ancient' jaw configuration was the original condition for modern birds, with the 'modern' jaw arising later.
"This assumption has been taken as a given ever since," said Dr Daniel Field from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences, the paper's senior author. "The main reason this assumption has lasted is that we haven't had any well-preserved fossil bird palates from the period when modern birds originated."
The fossil, Janavis, was found in a limestone quarry near the Belgian-Dutch border in the 1990s and was first studied in 2002. It dates from 66.7 million years ago, during the last days of the dinosaurs. Since the fossil is encased in rock, scientists at the time could only base their descriptions on what they could see from the outside. They described the bits of bone sticking out from the rock as fragments of skull and shoulder bones, and put the unremarkable-looking fossil back in storage. Nearly 20 years later, the fossil was loaned to Field's group in Cambridge, and Dr Juan Benito, then a PhD student, started giving it another look.
"Since this fossil was first described, we've started using CT scanning on fossils, which enables us to see through the rock and view the entire fossil," said Benito, now a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge, and the paper's lead author. "We had high hopes for this fossil -- it was originally said to have skull material, which isn't often preserved, but we couldn't see anything that looked like it came from a skull in our CT scans, so we gave up and put the fossil aside."
During the early days of Covid-19 lockdown, Benito took the fossil out again. "The earlier descriptions of the fossil just didn't make sense -- there was a bone I was really puzzled by. I couldn't see how what was first described as a shoulder bone could actually be a shoulder bone," he said. "It was my first in-person interaction in months: Juan and I had a socially distanced outdoor meeting, and he passed the mystery fossil bone to me," said Field, who is also the Curator of Ornithology at Cambridge's Museum of Zoology. "I could see it wasn't a shoulder bone, but there was something familiar about it."
"Then we realized we'd seen a similar bone before, in a turkey skull," said Benito. "And because of the research we do at Cambridge, we happen to have things like turkey skulls in our lab, so we brought one out and the two bones were almost identical."
The realization that the bone was a skull bone, and not a shoulder bone, led the researchers to conclude that the unfused 'modern jaw' condition, which turkeys share, evolved before the 'ancient jaw' condition of ostriches and their relatives. For an unknown reason, the fused palates of ostriches and kin must have evolved at some point after modern birds were already established.
Two of the key characteristics we use to differentiate modern birds from their dinosaur ancestors are a toothless beak and a mobile upper jaw. While Janavis finalidens still had teeth, making it a pre-modern bird, its jaw structure is that of the modern, mobile kind. "Using geometric analyses, we were able to show that the shape of the fossil palate bone was extremely similar to those of living chickens and ducks" said Pei-Chen Kuo, a co-author of the study. Added co-author Klara Widrig: "Surprisingly, the bird palate bones that are the least similar to that of Janavis are from ostriches and their kin." Both Kuo and Widrig are PhD students in Field's lab at Cambridge.
"Evolution doesn't happen in a straight line," said Field. "This fossil shows that the mobile beak -- a condition we had always thought post-dated the origin of modern birds, actually evolved before modern birds existed. We've been completely backwards in our assumptions of how the modern bird skull evolved for well over a century." The researchers say that while this discovery does not mean that the entire bird family tree needs to be redrawn, it does rewrite our understanding of a key evolutionary feature of modern birds.
And what happened to Janavis? It, like the large dinosaurs and other toothed birds, did not survive the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period. The researchers say that this may be because of its large size: Janavis weighed around 1.5 kilograms and was the size of a modern vulture. It's likely that smaller animals -- like the 'wonderchicken', identified by Field, Benito, and colleagues in 2020, which comes from the same area and lived alongside Janavis - had an advantage at this point in Earth's history since they had to eat less to survive. This would have been beneficial after the asteroid struck the Earth and disrupted global food chains.
The Pentagon have declassified three videos showing apparent UFOs. The internet is ablaze and those of us looking for evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe are naturally curious about what these videos truly show. I hopped onto a call with Mick West to breakdown these videos.
The talk will illustrate how new Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning methods can help unveiling the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy from large deep galaxy surveys.
Perhaps it's a part of what makes us human, to explore the next frontier, to seek out new worlds... Today, we're excited to share a new planet discovered outside of our Solar System by the Cool Worlds Lab - HD 183579b. Join us to hear about the new strategy we developed to find this object, and why this is a particularly valuable planet discovery.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful telescope in the history of humanity, and one of the most ambitious engineering projects ever attempted. It will witness the birth of stars and galaxies at the edge of time and probe alien skies for signs of life. In this new documentary from Quanta, JWST’s lead scientists and engineers discuss what inspired the telescope, how it was built, the extraordinary challenges it will face upon launch, and its potential discoveries.
The physicist sees two major trends in the world today: the first is toward a multicultural, scientific, tolerant society; the other, as evidenced by terrorism, is fundamentalist and monocultural. Whichever one wins out will determine the fate of mankind.
* Plenary talks are recordings as individual videos (8). * Lightning talks are recordings of the 2 separate days (2). * Invited and contributed talks are 6 parallel, x 2 per day, x 4 days (48). * Special sessions (4). You can use the search feature to look for an author by name, keyword in the title of the presentation, etc. These are all listed at the bottom of each video.
The biggest question of our time. Are we alone in this vast universe? Chapter 1 of this video takes the viewer to alien worlds and distant places in time and space, in search of where alien life might be hiding and what our place is within the history of life. After generations of wondering, the truth is finally within our reach. New research and technologies have brought us closer than ever to an answer - only a few decades in the eyes of some NASA scientists.
The search has led to new discoveries that will blow your mind wide open and give a profound new perspective on human life. The deeper we look, the deeper we see into nature's imagination, and the more we learn about ourselves. In upcoming chapters of Life Beyond we will explore making contact with intelligent life, the potential physics of alien biology, how to survive the end of the universe, and more. Follow and support the creation of these videos on Patreon: http://patreon.com/melodysheep
Big thanks to Protocol Labs for their support of this creation: https://protocol.ai/. And to Julius Horsthuis for the far future civilization visuals near the end. Check out his amazing work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMS32...
This video is a follow up on "Timelapse of the Future" with a more optimistic perspective of human life and our place in the history of the universe. We really do live in a privileged moment and we have a remarkable opportunity to shape the future. Finding alien life will contextualize our own existence, and open our eyes to what else nature has dreamt up beyond our ourselves, potentially bestowing huge breakthroughs in science, technology, and philosophy.
Concept, music & visuals by Melodysheep Featuring the voices of Douglas Rain, David Christian, Michelle Thaller, Orson Welles, Andrew Siemion, Dan Werthimer, Avi Loeb, Ellen Stofan, and Lawrence Krauss.
Additional visuals by Julius Horsthuis, Konstantin Kovalenko, NASA, Evolve
No instrumentation specifically designed to measure the topography of a planetary surface has ever been deployed to Jupiter's moon Io, the most volcanically active body in the Solar System. Available mapping techniques that exist to perform such a task in the absence of the relevant instrumentation include stereo and photoclinometry (shape-from-shading) processing of available Voyager and Galileo imagery. These techniques have been successfully applied to the icy moons of the giant planets, but Io is a much more challenging subject due to its complex and changing photometric behavior and the inherent characteristics of the Ionian surface, as well as the inherent nature of Galileo imagery.
This SETI presentation describes current efforts to produce the best quality digital elevation models (DEMs) of Io to date using both techniques, to control these DEMs using Galileo limb profiles (the only true topographic ground data available), and to merge and mosaic the DEMs to form a global topographic map of Io. While this investigation has focused almost entirely on refining current mapping technique, future science objectives that can be addressed by the data in the DEMs will be discussed.
Galaxies congregate in clusters and along filaments, and are missing from large regions referred to as voids. These structures are seen in maps derived from spectroscopic surveys1,2 that reveal networks of structure that are interconnected with no clear boundaries. Extended regions with a high concentration of galaxies are called ‘superclusters’, although this term is not precise. There is, however, another way to analyze the structure. If the distance to each galaxy from Earth is directly measured, then the peculiar velocity can be derived from the subtraction of the mean cosmic expansion, the product of distance times the Hubble constant, from observed velocity. The peculiar velocity is the line-of-sight departure from the cosmic expansion and arises from gravitational perturbations; a map of peculiar velocities can be translated into a map of the distribution of matter3.
Astronomers now report a map of structures made using a catalogue of peculiar velocities. They find locations where peculiar velocity flows diverge, as water does at watershed divides, and trace the surface of divergent points that surrounds us. Within the volume enclosed by this surface, the motions of galaxies are inward after removal of the mean cosmic expansion and long range flows. They were able to define a supercluster to be the volume within such a surface, and called it Laniakea.
Take a tour through some of the most cutting-edge concepts in modern physics. After discussing the connections between symmetries, forces, and conservation laws, this lecture series describes the fundamental building blocks of the natural world and what they tell us about where physics might be heading in the future. Finally, it discusses how physics gives rise to “weirdness at the extremes”, including the emergence of a new “dark sector” populated by modern ghosts.
Only four spacecraft have ever returned photographs from the surface of Venus. Our neighbouring planet doesn’t make it easy, below the clouds blistering heat and crushing pressures quickly destroy most landers. But, in 1975 and 1982, 4 of the Soviet Union’s Venera probes captured our only photos of Venus’ surface. The Venera landers scanned the surface back and forth to create panoramic images of their surroundings. They revealed yellow skies and cracked, desolate landscapes that were both alien and familiar, views of a world that may have once been like Earth before experiencing catastrophic climate change. Here are the only photos we have of the surface of Venus.
Physics / Computer Science 219A at Caltech: Quantum Computation Lecture 1: Introduction Lecturer: John Preskill Slides for this lecture: http://www.theory.caltech.edu/~preskill/ph219/Ph-CS-219A-Slides-2020/Ph-CS-219A-Lecture-1-Introduction.pdf
Course website: http://theory.caltech.edu/~preskill/ph219/ph219_2020-21.html Lectures were recorded in Fall 2020. Slides for each lecture are available at the course website.
The past month has been an exciting one for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope — from launch in tropical French Guiana, to the two-week unfolding of this intricately-packed telescope, the observatory has gone through a huge transformation in space. What’s next for Webb as it cools down over the next five months and looks to #UnfoldTheUniverse? Join mission experts and submit your questions on social media using #UnfoldTheUniverse.
Meet the experts: Dr. Amber Straughn is Deputy Project Scientist for Webb Science Communications at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. She has been working on this mission for over 13 years and is most looking forward to the unexpected discoveries we’ll make with the telescope; the things that may completely surprise us. In her spare time, she loves hiking, yoga, flying, live music, and doing what she can to make her corner of the world a better place.
Miss Scarlin Hernandez is Webb Flight Systems Engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland. With the Webb mission, she is most looking forward to learning more about the origin of life and discovering things we didn’t know were out there. In her free time, she enjoys meditating, empowering others, listening to music and spending time with family and friends.
Miss Tahira Allen is Communication Strategist for the NASA Headquarters digital media team in Washington. Completion of Webb’s major deployments in space was one of the most exciting moments for her during this mission. In her own words: "Talk about human ingenuity at its finest!” In Tahira's spare time she enjoys cooking, exercising, spending time with family and friends, mentoring University of Georgia students, and learning about world history.
Synthetic media, better known as deepfakes, could be a goldmine for filmmakers. But the technology has already terrorized women who have had their faces inserted into pornography. And it could potentially disrupt society. Bill Whitaker from 60 Minutes reports.
Generally speaking, Deepfakes (a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake"[1]) are synthetic media[2] in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. While the act of faking content is not new, deepfakes leverage powerful techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence to manipulate or generate visual and audio content with a high potential to deceive.[3] The main machine learning methods used to create deepfakes are based on deep learning and involve training generative neural network architectures, such as autoencoders[3] or generative adversarial networks (GANs).[4][5]
List of science and scientific videos provided by Dnatube.com
DnaTube is a non-profit video site which is aiming to be a visual scientific resource for its visitors making scientific concepts easily understandable.
How's it all gonna end? This experience takes us on a journey to the end of time, trillions upon trillions of years into the future, to discover what the fate of our planet and our universe may ultimately be. The journey starts in 2019 and the viewer travels exponentially through time, witnessing the future of Earth, the death of the sun, possible future civilizations, the end of all stars, proton decay, zombie galaxies, exploding black holes, the effects of dark energy, alternate universes, the final fate of the cosmos - to name just a few.
This is a picture of the future as painted by modern science of today - a picture that will surely evolve over time as we dig deeper for more clues to how our story will unfold. Much of the science is very recent - and new puzzle pieces are still waiting to be found.
To the maker of this video, this overhead view of time gives a profound perspective - that we are living inside the hot flash of the Big Bang, the perfect moment to soak in the sights and sounds of a universe in its glory days, before it all fades away. Although the end will eventually come, we have a practical infinity of time to play with if we play our cards right. The future may look bleak, but we have enormous potential as a species.
Featuring the voices of David Attenborough, Craig Childs, Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michelle Thaller, Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, Mike Rowe, Phil Plait, Janna Levin, Stephen Hawking, Sean Carroll, Alex Filippenko, and Martin Rees.
Life as we know it requires three ingredients: energy, organic molecules, and liquid water. Astrobiology, our search for life beyond Earth, is a search for planets, dwarf planets, and moons that harbor substantial liquid water. We call these places “ocean worlds.”
We’re learning that ocean worlds could be ubiquitous in the galaxy. Just in our solar system, we have found evidence of oceans on Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus; Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto; Neptune’s moon Triton; and on Pluto. We also believe that Venus and Mars may have had oceans billions of years ago. Could they have supported life?
NASA’s research on oceans also includes our own planet and helps us to better understand the role of Earth’s ocean in our planet’s climate system. As we learn more about our own oceans, we will better understand worlds beyond Earth. Greg Bacon (STScI)
This video is public domain and along with other supporting visualizations can be downloaded from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio at: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13693
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