Lifeboat Foundation

Monitoring PHAs is a huge responsibility that requires a worldwide effort, including tracking, alerts, and disaster preparedness. Last year, over 100 participants from 18 countries (including NASA scientists and the NEOWISE mission) conducted an international exercise that simulated an encounter with an asteroid that made a close flyby to Earth. As NASA revealed in a recently-released study, the exercise was a complete success. The lessons learned could help avert real impacts in the near future or significantly limit the devastation one could cause.

The study, which appeared in the May 31 issue of The Planetary Science Journal (titled “Apophis Planetary Defense Campaign”), was conducted by the Planetary Defense Exercise Working Group and led by Vishnu Reddy — an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPI). The working group is made up of more than 100 participants from 18 countries and includes facilities like NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), the ESA NEO Coordination Centre, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI), and many universities and research institutes worldwide.

As Reddy and his colleagues describe in the paper, the planetary defense exercise was the culmination of work that began in 2017, which was designed to test the operational readiness of our global planetary defense capabilities. The exercise was carried out with the support of NASA’s PDCO, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) — the internationally-recognized authority for monitoring the position and motion of small celestial bodies — and the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN). The exercise was named the Apophis Campaign since it coincided with the close approach of the NEO (99942) Apophis, which flew past Earth from December 2020 to March 2021.

There’s a movement afoot to counter the dystopian and apocalyptic narratives of artificial intelligence. Some people in the field are concerned that the frequent talk of AI as an existential risk to humanity is poisoning the public against the technology and are deliberately setting out more hopeful narratives. One such effort is a book that came out last fall called AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future.

The book is cowritten by Kai-Fu Lee, an AI expert who leads the venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures, and Chen Qiufan, a science fiction author known for his novel Waste Tide. It has an interesting format. Each chapter starts with a science fiction story depicting some aspect of AI in society in the year 2041 (such as deepfakes, self-driving cars, and AI-enhanced education), which is followed by an analysis section by Lee that talks about the technology in question and the trends today that may lead to that envisioned future. It’s not a utopian vision, but the stories generally show humanity grappling productively with the issues raised by ever-advancing AI.

IEEE Spectrum spoke to Lee about the book, focusing on the last few chapters, which take on the big issues of job displacement, the need for new economic models, and the search for meaning and happiness in an age of abundance. Lee argues that technologists need to give serious thought to such societal impacts, instead of thinking only about the technology.

WASHINGTON, June 8 (Reuters) — A tiny meteoroid struck the newly deployed James Webb Space Telescope in May, knocking one of its gold-plated mirrors out of alignment but not changing the orbiting observatory’s schedule to become fully operational shortly, NASA said on Wednesday.

The little space rock hit the $10 billion telescope sometime in late May and left a small but noticeable effect in the telescope’s data, NASA said in a statement, adding that it was the fifth and largest hit to the telescope since its December launch. read more

“After initial assessments, the team found the telescope is still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements,” NASA said. “Thorough analysis and measurements are ongoing.”

Discovering and tracking asteroids is critical for planetary defense against killer asteroid impacts. The detailed astronomical data associated with it is also useful for providing new insights for astronomers. Helping with this task is a new algorithm called THOR, which has now proven to be capable of finding asteroids. It has been running on the Asteroid Institute’s cloud-based astrodynamics platform for identifying and tracking asteroids.

Human extinction? It could happen, but it doesn’t have to.

Should we send messages into space in an effort to contact intelligent extra-terrestrial civilizations? Or should be fear them attacking us and transmit nothing? Two conflicting and oft-heard questions, but it turns out we may overlooking something rather important and completely obvious— it’s probably us that are the malicious aliens.

When I read that we’ve got more chance of being struck by a planet-killer asteroid than being invaded by aliens, I was intrigued.

So I got in touch with Alberto Caballero, the author of the though experiment-style paper published this week, to find out more. His paper is an attempt to determine how many malicious extraterrestrial civilizations there could be, and how likely it is that they would invade us.

The asteroid will zoom safely past Earth at 47,200 miles per hour.

The near-Earth asteroid 7,335 (1989 JA) will make a close approach to our planet on May 27, 2022, flying within about 2.5 million miles of Earth.

An international team which includes University of Manchester scientists has for the first time demonstrated that nerve signals are exchanged between clogged up arteries and the brain.

The discovery of the previously unknown electrical circuit is a breakthrough in our understanding of atherosclerosis, a potentially deadly disease where plaques form on the innermost layer of arteries.

The study of mice found that new nerve bundles are formed on the outer layer of where the artery is diseased, so the brain can detect where the damage is and communicate with it.

A new study is revealing that a reversal in the Earth’s magnetic poles 42,000 to 41,000 years ago may have led to environmental crises that resulted in mass extinctions. The period is called the Laschamps excursion and the research used precise carbon dating obtained from ancient tree fossils to study its effects.

The team details how they created a precise radiocarbon record around the time of the “Laschamps geomagnetic reversal about 41,000 years ago from the rings of New Zealand swamp kauri trees.”

“This record reveals a substantial increase in the carbon-14 content of the atmosphere culminating during the period of weakening magnetic field strength preceding the polarity switch.” The team concluded that the “geomagnetic field minimum caused substantial changes in atmospheric ozone concentration that drove synchronous global climate and environmental” with their model investigating the consequences of this event.