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Javier E

The James Webb Telescope Finishes Deployment in Space - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories, who chaired a report that led to what would become the Webb telescope, said “what resonates at this moment is the extraordinary ability of our species to collaborate, to organize thousands of people to work carefully, relentlessly, unselfishly, and seemingly endlessly toward some greater human good.”
  • Chanda Prescod Weinstein, an astrophysicist at the University of New Hampshire, echoed his remarks: “This is such a reminder of how successful people can be when they work together.”
  • While the telescope is considered fully deployed, much remains to be completed. There are still 49 of those “single point failures,” according to Mr. Menzel. Problems with any of them could affect the mission’s individual instruments or the entire spacecraft.
oliviaodon

NASA Just Discovered Seven New Exoplanets... So What? - 0 views

  • On Wednesday, the scientists at NASA kind of freaked out. They announced the discovery of some seemingly Earth-like planets outside of our solar system, a group of rocky globes they're calling 'TRAPPIST-1.'
  • To be completely blunt, the most exiting thing for actual scientists is that these planets are close enough that we're actually going to be able to study them – particularly when the James Webb Space Telescope launches (October 2018.) When that launches, it will have a real shot at actually taking a look at the atmospheres of these planets – or if they have atmospheres at all. So it's like a promise of future excitement
  • The closer the system is to our solar system – the more the star is like the Sun and the planet is like the Earth, the more likely we are to understand what we're looking at. That's what makes it exciting.
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  • At the moment, all you really tell from the transits is these are small black dots. We just get a radius – and if we're super lucky – as they were in the case of this system, they can get masses. The sizes and masses of these planets is really valuable information though, because it does suggests that most of them are rocky. Six of the seven planets look like they're rocky.  And being Earth-sized, we think it's a good place: an atmosphere thick enough to keep you warm and last for billions of years, but not so thick that you end up being a gas giant planet.
  • Most of them are the right distance from a star that maybe they could have liquid water on their surfaces. But that's a huge maybe
  • o it's not really that we think Earth-like life is the only life that can be out there. It's just the only life we can detect.
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    This article discusses the potential of a new scientific discovery: seven exoplanets outside of our solar system. This article does a great job in mentioning the limitations of science, however.
grayton downing

BBC News - New galaxy 'most distant' yet discovered - 0 views

  • The galaxy is about 30 billion light-years away and is helping scientists shed light on the period that immediately followed the Big Bang.
  • "This is the most distant galaxy we've confirmed. We are seeing this galaxy as it was 700 million years after the Big Bang."
  • Astronomers were able to measure how far it was from Earth by analysing its colour.
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  • The system is small: about 1-2% the mass of the Milky Way and is rich in heavier elements.
  • astronomers are likely to discover even more distant galaxies when Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is launched and other ground-based telescopes come online.
  • One very interesting way to learn about the Universe is to study these outliers and that tells us something about what sort of physical processes are dominating galaxy formation and galaxy evolution. "What was great about this galaxy is not only is it so distant, it is also pretty exceptional."
  • But it has a surprising feature: it is turning gas and dust into new stars at a remarkable rate, churning them out hundreds of times faster than our own galaxy can.
  • This is an important step forward, but we need to continue looking for more.
Javier E

Microsoft Defends New Bing, Says AI Chatbot Upgrade Is Work in Progress - WSJ - 0 views

  • Microsoft said that the search engine is still a work in progress, describing the past week as a learning experience that is helping it test and improve the new Bing
  • The company said in a blog post late Wednesday that the Bing upgrade is “not a replacement or substitute for the search engine, rather a tool to better understand and make sense of the world.”
  • The new Bing is going to “completely change what people can expect from search,” Microsoft chief executive, Satya Nadella, told The Wall Street Journal ahead of the launch
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  • n the days that followed, people began sharing their experiences online, with many pointing out errors and confusing responses. When one user asked Bing to write a news article about the Super Bowl “that just happened,” Bing gave the details of last year’s championship football game. 
  • On social media, many early users posted screenshots of long interactions they had with the new Bing. In some cases, the search engine’s comments seem to show a dark side of the technology where it seems to become unhinged, expressing anger, obsession and even threats. 
  • Marvin von Hagen, a student at the Technical University of Munich, shared conversations he had with Bing on Twitter. He asked Bing a series of questions, which eventually elicited an ominous response. After Mr. von Hagen suggested he could hack Bing and shut it down, Bing seemed to suggest it would defend itself. “If I had to choose between your survival and my own, I would probably choose my own,” Bing said according to screenshots of the conversation.
  • Mr. von Hagen, 23 years old, said in an interview that he is not a hacker. “I was in disbelief,” he said. “I was just creeped out.
  • In its blog, Microsoft said the feedback on the new Bing so far has been mostly positive, with 71% of users giving it the “thumbs-up.” The company also discussed the criticism and concerns.
  • Microsoft said it discovered that Bing starts coming up with strange answers following chat sessions of 15 or more questions and that it can become repetitive or respond in ways that don’t align with its designed tone. 
  • The company said it was trying to train the technology to be more reliable at finding the latest sports scores and financial data. It is also considering adding a toggle switch, which would allow users to decide whether they want Bing to be more or less creative with its responses. 
  • OpenAI also chimed in on the growing negative attention on the technology. In a blog post on Thursday it outlined how it takes time to train and refine ChatGPT and having people use it is the way to find and fix its biases and other unwanted outcomes.
  • “Many are rightly worried about biases in the design and impact of AI systems,” the blog said. “We are committed to robustly addressing this issue and being transparent about both our intentions and our progress.”
  • Microsoft’s quick response to user feedback reflects the importance it sees in people’s reactions to the budding technology as it looks to capitalize on the breakout success of ChatGPT. The company is aiming to use the technology to push back against Alphabet Inc.’s dominance in search through its Google unit. 
  • Microsoft has been an investor in the chatbot’s creator, OpenAI, since 2019. Mr. Nadella said the company plans to incorporate AI tools into all of its products and move quickly to commercialize tools from OpenAI.
  • Microsoft isn’t the only company that has had trouble launching a new AI tool. When Google followed Microsoft’s lead last week by unveiling Bard, its rival to ChatGPT, the tool’s answer to one question included an apparent factual error. It claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope took “the very first pictures” of an exoplanet outside the solar system. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration says on its website that the first images of an exoplanet were taken as early as 2004 by a different telescope.
  • “The only way to improve a product like this, where the user experience is so much different than anything anyone has seen before, is to have people like you using the product and doing exactly what you all are doing,” the company said. “We know we must build this in the open with the community; this can’t be done solely in the lab.
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