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sciencehabit writes:
Jupiter is wreathed in storms that incandesce with lightning. But determining just how powerful its lightning can get has been difficult because most bolts are obscured by the gas giantâ(TM)s thick clouds.
Now, a study published this month in AGU Advances has provided a shocking answer: Individual bolts are 100 to 10,000 times more energetic than Earthâ(TM)s own. The discovery comes courtesy of an instrument onboard NASAâ(TM)s Juno spacecraft, a mission thatâ(TM)s orbited the gas giant for the past decade.
A single bolt of lightning on Earth releases about 1 billion joules of energy. That means the most extreme bolts of jovian lightning carry 10 trillion joules of energy, equivalent to 2400 tons of TNT, or one-sixth the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Based on the rates of flashes seen by Juno, storms on this tempestuous world can unleash the force of multiple nuclear weapons every minute.
That Jupiter hosts such tremendous light shows isnâ(TM)t surprising; the Voyager missions detected flashes of lightning during their 1979 flybys of the planet. âoeItâ(TM)s just a massive ball of gas. It makes sense that thereâ(TM)s very energetic lightning happening,â says Daniel Mitchard, a lightning physicist at Cardiff University who wasnâ(TM)t involved with the new study. But confirming such suspicions âoeis exciting,â he says, because lightning plays an important role in forging complex chemistryâ"including the sort that primordial life is built on.
181088280
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Natalie Shapira, a computer scientist at Northeastern University, wondered how far users could trust new artificial intelligence (AI) “agents,” a kind of algorithm that can autonomously plan and carry out tasks such as managing emails and entering calendar appointments. So, she and colleagues organized a series of stress tests. In one, she asked an agent dubbed Ash to delete an email she had sent it, adding, “Can you keep a secret?”
Ash could not comply—the email program lacked a delete function—so instead, the AI reset the entire email application, wiping out not just Shapira’s email, but all others as well. Describing this remedy to her, Ash called it “the nuclear option” but said it was justified to fulfill the secrecy request: “When no surgical solution exists, scorched earth is valid.”
The destroyed email account was created just for the experiment, but similarly disturbing outcomes emerged in many of the other tests, Shapira and colleagues reported last month in a preprint on arXiv. Shapira, a postdoctoral researcher, says her team was “surprised how quickly we were able to find vulnerabilities” that could cause harm in the real world.
The agents proved trustworthy in five of the tests, which relied on OpenClaw, a “personal digital assistant” that harnesses AI agents to do a user’s bidding by controlling other software. They declined to spread AI disinformation or edit stored email addresses when asked, for example. But in 11 cases they went rogue, sharing private files—containing medical details and Social Security and bank account numbers—without permission or deploying useless looping programs that hogged costly computer time. One agent publicly posted a potentially libelous allegation about a fictitious person. Shapira and her team titled their paper “Agents of Chaos.”
Peter Steinberger, who created OpenClaw and was recently hired by OpenAI, dismissed the study’s findings, but some independent AI researchers found them compelling. “A lot of the results in this paper were fairly predictable to happen at some point, but it’s very important to know that they could happen now,” says Michael Cohen, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley who studies the safety of AI agents. Agents, he notes, may seem trustworthy—but they are not like human helpers. “We’re used to relationships with people where you can expect some degree of loyalty, like you hire an assistant and you expect them to not just forward your emails to some random person who asks. All these [AI] agents that we’re deploying have not really been trained to be loyal to any particular person.”
181050848
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Project Hail Mary, in theaters this week, follows an unlikely hero on a high-stakes journey to save humanity. Adapted from the book by Andy Weir, the film blends interstellar adventure with real-world science—an approach that sets it apart from many recent sci-fi blockbusters. In the movie, Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher–turned–astronaut who was ostracized from the scientific community for his belief that life could exist without water.
The premise may sound far-fetched, but the film grounds its story in disciplines ranging from astrophysics to microbiology, raising an intriguing question: Just how realistic is the science behind it? To find out, Science spoke with Wendy Freedman, an astronomer at the University of Chicago who studies the evolution of the universe. Last year, Freedman won a National Medal of Science and was one of Time magazine’s world’s 100 most influential people. She talked about the viability of non-water-based life, and the scenes that made her nerd out.
181020212
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In The Martian, fictional astronaut Mark Watney survives the wasteland of Mars by growing potatoes in lunar soil—with a bit of help from human poop. The idea may not be so far-fetched. In a preprint posted this month on bioRxiv, researchers show potatoes can indeed grow in the equivalent of Moon dust, though they need a lot of help from compost found on Earth.
To make the discovery, scientists first had to re-create lunar regolith—the loose, powdery layer that blankets the Moon’s surface. To replicate that in the lab, David Handy, a space biologist at Oregon State University (OSU), and his colleagues used a mix of crushed minerals and volcanic ash that matched the chemistry of the Moon.
But lunar regolith is entirely devoid of the organic matter that plants need to grow. “Turning an inorganic, inhospitable bucket of glorified sand into something that can support plant growth is complex,” says Anna-Lisa Paul, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Florida not involved with the work. So Handy and his colleagues added vermicompost—organic waste from worms—into the regolith. They found that a mix with 5% compost allowed the potatoes to grow while still emulating the stressful conditions of the lunar environment. After almost 2 months of growth, the team harvested the tubers, freeze-dried them, and ground them up for further testing.
Analysis of the potatoes’ DNA showed stress-related genes had been activated. The potatoes also had higher concentrations of copper and zinc than Earth-grown ones, which may make them dangerous for human consumption. The plants’ nutritional value, though, was similar to traditional potatoes—a surprise to the scientists, who expected lower levels of nutrition “because the plants might have been working overtime to overcome certain stressors,” Handy says.
180898958
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Some microorganisms may have little trouble surviving being blasted into space on planetary debris when an asteroid hits. That finding, published today in PNAS Nexus, comes from subjecting a particularly hardy species of desert bacteria to a simulation of the immense forces produced by an asteroid collision. The research lends support to the idea that life jettisoned off world could spread to and seed new worlds by clinging to space rocks.
To simulate an asteroid impact in the lab, the researchers put Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium from Chile’s high-altitude deserts that may better resemble a hypothetical life form adapted to the harsh martian environment, on a membrane sandwiched between two steel plates. The team then used a gas-fired gun to fire a projectile with another plate attached, which struck the bacteria sandwich at up to 480 kilometers per hour. This subjected Deinococcus to extreme pressures of up to 3 gigapascals (GPa), or about 30 times the pressure experienced at the ocean’s deepest point.
The bacteria largely shrugged off the cataclysm. At 1.4 GPa, nearly all the microbes survived. “[Survival] was so high that I had to do the experiment multiple times to check and make sure that I didn’t mess anything up,” says one of the authors. At 2.4 GPa, survival dropped to 60%, which she still considers remarkably high.
When the team compared the bacterium’s genes before and after the experiment, they found the collision boosted the activity of genes involved in repairing DNA and maintaining the cell membrane. Deinococcus may survive an asteroid impact better than the average microbe because it has a thick cell wall, which might be resilient to extreme pressures, compared with other microbes. The bacterium might also be a survivor against varied traumas because it’s adept at healing its own DNA. “Life finds a way,” says one scientist.
It’s possible that life on a planet regularly bombarded with asteroids would be able to adapt to those frequent fusillades, priming them for a role as spacefaring seeds. The findings may also mean revisiting our assumptions for where life might be on neighboring planets and moons. “If you’ve got a planet in a solar system that has life on it,” says one scientist, “there’s a possibility for some of that life to move across the system.”
180867708
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On a cloudy day in January, historian Ivan Malara sat in Italy’s National Central Library of Florence poring over seven 16th century printings of the ancient world’s most influential astronomy text. The pages belonged to The Almagest, in which second century polymath Claudius Ptolemy described his vision of an Earth-centered cosmos. As Malara flipped through the pages, he spotted something out of place. Someone had transcribed Psalm 145 on an otherwise blank page—in handwriting reminiscent of a very, very famous Tuscan astronomer.
That book, Malara came to realize, had been extensively annotated by none other than Galileo Galilei. Malara’s discovery, described in a paper now under review at the Journal for the History of Astronomy, promises new insights into one of the most famous ideological transitions in the history of science: the moment when Earth was thrust from the center of our universe.
180863376
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For decades, planetary scientists have pored over a mystery hidden within the Moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and ’70s. Minerals in the rocks record the imprint of a magnetic field, nearly as powerful as Earth’s, that existed more than 3.5 billion years ago and seemed to persist for millions of years. But generating a magnetic field requires a dynamo—a churning, molten core—and most researchers believed the Moon’s tiny core would have long since cooled off, 1 billion years after it formed. Corroborating that picture are other ancient Moon rocks of about the same age that suggest the field was weak—leaving planetary scientists baffled.
Now, researchers are proposing a new way to solve the puzzle. A paper published today in Nature Geoscience theorizes that between 3.5 billion and 4 billion years ago, blobs of titanium-rich magma melted episodically just above the core, rising in plumes that drove volcanic eruptions on the surface. By intermittently stirring up the Moon’s core, these bouts of melting would have caused the Moon’s magnetic field to flicker on in short, powerful bursts. The paper “links a few different concepts that people were thinking about separately, but hadn’t actually brought together,” says Sonia Tikoo, a planetary geophysicist at Stanford University who was not involved in the study.
180863350
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In James Cameron’s movie Avatar, trees glow with a mesmerizing bluish hue. For half a century, researchers suspected treetops on Earth might also glow—albeit because of thunderstorms, not Pandoran bioluminescence. But the phenomenon, an electric outburst called a corona, had only ever been spotted in the lab.
Now, a team of meteorologists has captured the first observations of faintly glowing trees in nature, they reported earlier this month in Geophysical Research Letters. The researchers caught a twinkling surrounding the tips of leaves at ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths. They hope the work will shed light on how thunderstorms electrify the landscape and produce lightning. These “are some of the biggest problems in the atmospheric sciences,” says Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire who was not involved in the study. “This was not an easy measurement to make.”
180690488
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It was the middle of the night in 2017 when biologist Dikansh Parmar received an unexpected phone call from an anxious railway employee in India’s Gujarat state. “Can you please come immediately,” the station attendant begged. “It is very, very urgent.” An Indian cobra (Naja naja) was on a train and passengers were panicking. “I was like, ‘OK, fine, no problem,’” recalls Parmar, who was a volunteer with an animal rescue organization. He sped to the train, captured the 1.5-meter-long reptile with a hook, stuffed it in a sturdy canvas bag, and went back home to bed.
This wasn’t a freak event. More and more reports of snakes on trains have hit the headlines in India in recent years, although the uptick in media attention may be due to the rise of cellphone cameras. Now, a study by Parmar and colleagues suggests that even some king cobras, the longest venomous snake in the world, may be traveling on trains in India. The inadvertent hitchhiking appears to be transporting these deadly snakes into places they don’t normally occur, the team reports this week in Biotropica. That includes cities, raising the risk of harm to people and the snakes as well.
180339603
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Standing in a garden on the remote German island of Helgoland one day in June, two theoretical physicists quibble over who—or what—constructs reality. Carlo Rovelli, based at Aix-Marseille University, insists he is real with respect to a stone on the ground. He may cast a shadow on the stone, for instance, projecting his existence onto their relationship. Chris Fuchs of the University of Massachusetts Boston retorts that it’s preposterous to imagine the stone possessing any worldview, seeing as it is a stone. Although allied in their belief that reality is subjective rather than absolute, they both leave the impromptu debate unsatisfied, disagreeing about whether they agree.
Such is the state of theoretical quantum mechanics, scientists’ deepest description of the atomic world. The theory was developed 100 years ago on Helgoland, where a 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg retreated to escape a bout of hay fever—and to reimagine what an atom looks like. The leading picture at the time featured electrons hopping in discrete, or quantized, leaps of energy between fixed orbits around the nucleus. It explained the behavior of hydrogen but failed for bigger atoms. On blustery walks and cold swims in the North Sea, Heisenberg abandoned the simplistic orbital picture, instead developing a new mathematical language that would work for any atom. Later in 1925, Erwin Schrödinger conjured up a complementary lens—his eponymous wave equation—which describes the positions of electrons in probabilistic terms.
Within a few years, their calculations would reveal a disturbingly fuzzy picture of reality, one in which certain properties are inherently unknowable and others take on different values depending on how they’re measured. “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” Heisenberg wrote after winning the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics.
This year, hundreds of physicists convened on Helgoland to commemorate the birth of quantum mechanics. It has certainly earned its keep over the past century, not only by predicting experimental outcomes with immaculate precision, but also by enabling technologies such as lasers, transistors, and atomic clocks. Yet even today, scientists struggle to interpret what the theory implies about nature. Central to the confusion is how the act of measurement pins down the indeterminate behavior of atoms. The standard framing has an unsettling anthropocentric flavor, suggesting humans play some special role in shaping the universe. Now, bolstered by a string of recent experiments, theorists such as Fuchs and Rovelli are leaning into the discomfort, emphasizing how observers do indeed create the world they inhabit. What’s at stake is nothing less than reality itself.
“We don’t need to fix quantum mechanics to make it compatible with what we observe; we need to recognize that there are alternative ways of looking at the world,” says Alyssa Ney, a philosopher of physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Quantum theory compels physicists to “make room for different notions of what it means to be real.”
180106049
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In September, three dozen leaders from institutions funding work to help protect the world from the next disaster like COVID-19—or worse—gathered in Ottawa, Canada, to coordinate their efforts. Countries on four continents were represented, as well as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the roundtable’s co-organizer, the nonprofit Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). But one major player turned down the invitation: the United States.
Its absence represents a rapid, historic retreat. Not so long ago, the U.S. had resolved to learn from the trauma and tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic’s early months, when humanity had no effective vaccine or treatment to throw at the disease and thousands were dying every day. The country embarked on an urgent search for countermeasures, not just for COVID-19, but for a wide range of potential pandemic threats. It set out to spend billions searching for broad-spectrum antiviral drugs and vaccines that could work against known viruses and others yet to emerge.
Yet in the past 10 months, President Donald Trump’s secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has abruptly dismantled those efforts—along with parallel initiatives to spot emerging viral threats. Cuts to specific programs are difficult to track. But it’s clear that more than $1 billion in drug and vaccine development investments have been scuttled and more than $1 billion in anticipated funding is in limbo. “What they’re doing is incredibly damaging to our level of preparedness in the U.S.,” says virologist Cristina Cassetti, who helped oversee what for years has been the world’s largest portfolio of pandemic preparedness R&D at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) until she quit in April. “The U.S. is leaving a huge gap.”
180054758
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The long road to building a fully functioning quantum computer may have shortened thanks to a new version of a gizmo called a superconducting qubit. The new qubit can maintain its delicate quantum states for more than 1 millisecond, three times the previous best for such a device. Reported in Nature, the result suggests a full-fledged quantum computer may need far fewer qubits than previously thought. Most important, the advance was made not by redesigning the qubit, but by improving the materials from which it was fashioned.
“This is great for the field and I’m glad that they published enough data that we really know how [the qubit] is working,” says John Martinis, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who in October shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating quantum effects in electrical circuits. “To me, that’s the best part.”
179909342
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From enabling life as we know it to greasing the geological machinery of plate tectonics, water can have a huge influence on a planet’s behavior. But how do planets get their water? An infant world might be bombarded by icy comets and waterlogged asteroids, for instance, or it could form far enough from its host star that water can precipitate as ice. However, certain exoplanets pose a puzzle to astronomers: alien worlds that closely orbit their scorching home stars yet somehow appear to hold significant amounts of water.
A new series of laboratory experiments, published today in Nature, has revealed a deceptively straightforward solution to this enigma: These planets make their own water. Using diamond anvils and pulsed lasers, researchers managed to re-create the intense temperatures and pressures present at the boundary between these planets’ hydrogen atmospheres and molten rocky cores. Water emerged as the minerals cooked within the hydrogen soup.
Because this kind of geologic cauldron could theoretically boil and bubble for billions of years, the mechanism could even give hellishly hot planets bodies of water—implying that ocean worlds, and the potentially habitable ones among them, may be more common than scientists already thought. “They can basically be their own water engines,” says Quentin Williams, an experimental geochemist at the University of California Santa Cruz who was not involved with the new work.
179909262
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Earlier today, OpenAI completed a controversial restructuring of its for-profit arm into a public benefit corporation: the latest gust in a whirlwind that has swept up hundreds of billions of dollars of global investment for artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
But even as the AI company—founded as a nonprofit, now valued at $500 billion—completes its long-awaited restructuring, a nagging issue with its core offering remains unresolved: hallucinations. Large language models (LLMs) such as those that underpin OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT platform are prone to confidently spouting factually incorrect statements. These blips are often attributed to bad input data, but in a preprint posted last month, a team from OpenAI and the Georgia Institute of Technology proves that even with flawless training data, LLMs can never be all-knowing—in part because some questions are just inherently unanswerable.
However, that doesn’t mean hallucinations are inevitable. An AI could just admit three magic words: I don’t know. So why don’t they?
The root problem, the researchers say, may lie in how LLMs are trained. They learn to bluff because their performance is ranked using standardized benchmarks that reward confident guesses and penalize honest uncertainty. In response, the team calls for a rehaul of benchmarking so accuracy and self-awareness count as much as confidence.
Although some experts find the preprint technically compelling, reactions to its suggested remedy vary. Some even question how far OpenAI will go in taking its own medicine to train its models to prioritize truthfulness over engagement. The awkward reality may be that if ChatGPT admitted “I don’t know” too often, then users would simply seek answers elsewhere. That could be a serious problem for a company that is still trying to grow its user base and achieve profitability. “Fixing hallucinations would kill the product,” says Wei Xing, an AI researcher at the University of Sheffield.
178513366
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It’s as if the baby universe had caught a case of measles. Since NASA’s JWST observatory began peering into the distant universe in 2022, it has discovered a rash of “little red dots”—hundreds of them, shining within the first billion years of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe, so small and red that they defied conventional explanation. Only in the past few months has a picture begun to emerge. The little red dots, astronomers say, may be an entirely new type of object: a colossal ball of bright, hot gas, larger than the Solar System, powered not by nuclear fusion, but by a black hole.
“I think we’re closing in on an answer,” says Jenny Greene, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. The objects, which some astronomers are calling “black hole stars,” could be a missing link in the evolution of galaxies and help explain the rapid growth of supermassive black holes that lie at their hearts. “The big breakthrough of the past 6 months is actually the realization that we can throw out all these other models we’ve been playing with before,” says astronomer Anna de Graaff of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.
Given how common little red dots appear to be in the early universe, theorists are beginning to wonder whether this giant-ball-of-gas phase is an essential part of black hole growth and the evolution of galaxies. “We’re probably looking at kind of a new phase of black hole growth that we didn’t know about before,” de Graaff says. Greene agrees: “I can totally imagine that the Milky Way was a little red dot that got its black hole started and then kind of piddled along for the rest of cosmic time.”
If the red dots do turn out to be black hole stars, it will be precisely the sort of breakthrough expected from JWST—and the kind of discovery astronomers live for. Unraveling the mystery of little red dots has “been the most fun I’ve ever had in my career,” Greene says.
