(Credit: OnInnovation) If you hadn’t heard, Elon Musk is worried about the machines. Though that may seem a quixotic stance for the head of multiple tech companies to take, it seems that his proximity to the bleeding edge of technological development has given him the heebie-jeebies when it comes to artificial intelligence. He’s shared his fears of AI running amok before, likening it to “summoning the demon,” and Musk doubled down on his stance at a meeting of ...read more

CHRX 73 B is a 12-Jupiter-mass planet circling a red dwarf star like the stars under investigation by the Red Dots campaign. (Credit: NASA, ESA and G. Bacon [STScI]) The Pale Red Dot team is coasting off the success of their discovery last year of a planet in the Proxima Centauri system system by casting its net even wider as the Red Dots campaign. Whereas Pale Red Dot focused just on Proxima Centauri, Red Dots is looking toward Barnard’s Star and Ross 154 as well. These three ...read more

Disney’s planned attractions for a Star Wars theme park include requiring visitors to help pilot the Millennium Falcon through danger and fight off TIE Fighters. Credit: Disney Disney tech is getting ready to grant the wish of any Star Wars fan who ever wished to stand inside the cavernous space of a Star Destroyer hanger or help fly the Millennium Falcon during a space battle. The entertainment giant has promised a “revolutionary new vacation experience” ...read more

Say hello to JAXA’s Int-Ball. (Credit: JAXA) An adorable documentarian has joined the International Space Station crew. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) recently shipped its spherical camera drone to the ISS—thank you, SpaceX—to serve as another set of eyes and ears for ground control. It’s called the JEM Internal Ball Camera, but everyone’s referring to the little feller as “Int-Ball.” Last week, JAXA released the first images of ...read more

I like to believe she’s thinking “What?! Dog domestication might go back 40,000 years to a single event?” — per a new Nature Communications study — but I know she’s just wondering how long she has to sit still looking Mordorable before she gets another piece of cheese. (Credit William Zuback/Discover) Dogs are our first friends — they’re the only animal domesticated while we were still a bunch of motley hunter-gatherers. But pinpointing ...read more

While mission scientists were at it, they also produced a spectacular flyover of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon New Horizons flyover of Pluto. (Source: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Paul Schenk and John Blackwell, Lunar and Planetary Institute) The still images of Pluto sent home to Earth by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in July of 2015 were remarkable enough. The incredible distance to Pluto — 4.67 billion miles! — meant that until then, the dwarf planet was long shro ...read more

The GOES-16 weather satellite acquired the imagery used in this animation showing Hurricane Fernanda swirling in the eastern Pacific Ocean for 24 hours, starting on Saturday, July 15. (Note: The animation repeats several times.) As of Saturday, Fernanda was a powerful Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds close to 130 miles per hour. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA SLIDER. Please note that The GOES-16 data are preliminary and non-operational.) As of Monday afternoon, winds of about 125 miles ...read more

Last month, a neuroscience paper appeared that triggered a maelstrom of media hype: The Human Brain Can Create Structures in Up to 11 Dimensions The human brain sees the world as an 11-dimensional multiverse Scientists find mysterious shapes and structures in the brain with up to ELEVEN dimensions The paper, published in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, comes from the lab of Henry Markram, one of the world’s most powerful neuroscientists. As well as being head of the Blue Brain ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) The first exoplanet was spotted in 1988. Since then more than 3,000 planets have been found outside our solar system, and it’s thought that around 20 percent of Sun-like stars have an Earth-like planet in their habitable zones. We don’t yet know if any of these host life – and we don’t know how life begins. But even if life does begin, would it survive? Earth has undergone at least five mass extinctions in its history. It’s long been thought ...read more

A common triplefin, one of the fish species that may dominate temperate habitats in the near, acidic future. Photo c/o Wikimedia Scientists predict that in the next twenty years, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere will rise from the roughly 404 ppm it is now to over 450 ppm—and as a result, ecosystems worldwide will change. Many impacts will be particularly felt in our planet’s oceans. As atmospheric CO2 levels rise, more of the gas dissolves in ...read more