your science briefing for 01.24.2015
Living brains in jars creep closer to reality, using AI to track climate change in vivid detail, a white dwarf fights with a supermassive black hole, and more...
Six years ago, a team of scientists made a stunning discovery. A machine they built could resurrect pig brains four hours after death and keep them alive for as long as a day, when the team pulls the switch. Now, the team is struggling to see whether they can help humans or if this is an ethical and biological bridge they don’t want to cross as not to create actual living, conscious brains in jars… (Popular Mechanics)
More often than not these days, the conversation about AIs veers towards LLMs and image generations, and how much energy they use, contributing to global warming. But they can also help us understand climate change better by comparing detailed historical and modern images to evaluate the extent of glacier retreat and sea level rise. What these models found is predictably grim… (The Conversation)
The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is our best chance to see how these monsters live and eat thanks to its proximity to Earth. And thanks to that proximity, we finally saw the full lifecycle and source of its powerful flares: a stream of charged electrons hurled at nearly the speed of light as they’re trapped by the giant’s tidal pull, and traveling along the magnetic field lines… (Harvard/Smithsonian)
For a very long time, we thought we lived in a pretty normal solar system. But then we learned how to see other planets around other stars, and found out that our system is not as ordinary as we thought. Not only are we missing Hot Jupiters, but we’re weirdly tilted and wonky. A new set of calculations offers a reason why: an object with a mass between two and 50 Jupiters flying through the outer solar system. Yes, the odds that it happened are about 1%, but that’s not exactly zero… (Mashable)
“Do not go gentle into that good night” implored poet Dylan Thomas, and in a galaxy about 270 million light years away, a white dwarf being pulled into the gaping maw of a supermassive black hole apparently took this as inspiration. Its density and heat is keeping it out of the event horizon for now. Unfortunately, it can’t stay out for long as the laws of physics are on the black hole’s side… (Bad Astronomy)