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The Visible Sky icstrs Site icstrs’s Blog older » April 8, 2019 Would bringing back extinct animals turn out as badly as it did in ‘Jurassic Park’? (Illustration by Hisham Akira Bharoocha for The Washington Post Magazine) By Jason Nark of the Washington Post April 1 On a frigid January night, a Harvard genetics professor with a billowing white beard stood stage left in a theater on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, an icon of the environmentalist movement in a fleece vest beside him. Both men were staring down a toothy problem: How could they convince their counterparts on the stage, along with the 300 people who’d filed into Hunter College’s Kaye Playhouse for a debate, that the world should bring back velociraptors or, at the very least, an extinct pigeon? Click here for the complete story: 6:59 am 30 Comments April 7, 2019 A Japanese spacecraft just bombed an asteroid The Asteroid Ryugu seen by Hayabusa2 in September 2018. Photo: JAXA by Miriam Kramer of New Scientist Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft successfully sent a bomb down to the surface of Asteroid Ryugu on Thursday, paving the way for scientific studies of the space rock’s interior. Why it matters: If the bomb did explode as expected, creating an artificial crater on the asteroid, scientists will be able to get a sense of what the rock is comprised of beyond just its irradiated surface. If the area is deemed safe, Hayabusa2 will move in to possibly land at or near the site of the artificial crater to collect a sample of the blasted material for eventual return to Earth next year. Details: In order to protect the mothership from the blast, Hayabusa2 flew behind the asteroid after dropping the copper bomb, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), but a secondary camera was deployed in order to check out the moment the experiment — called the Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI) — went off. Background: Hayabusa2 has been studying asteroid Ryugu since last year, after launching to the space rock in 2014. The hardworking space probe already collected one sample of the asteroid in February and made history in 2018 when it sent robotic probes to the surface. The spacecraft is designed to help scientists learn more about the origins of the solar system as asteroids are thought to be bits of debris left behind after the formation of the planets. 7:54 am 17 Comments April 5, 2019 A dead planet is orbiting a dead sun in a distant dead solar system The whoosh of a dying world University of Warwick/Mark Garlick By Yvaine Ye of New Scientist A piece of a planet that survived the cataclysmic explosion of its star has been spotted orbiting the stellar corpse. This gives us a glimpse of what our solar system may look like when the sun dies. Christopher Manser at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK, and his colleagues noticed something unusual when they were observing a white dwarf — the remnant of a star that has consumed all of its fuel — 400 light years away. The team were looking at a dusty ring around the star thought to be formed from planets destroyed when the dying star exploded in a supernova. They detected a fluctuation in the wavelength of the light emitted by the dust. The signal repeated every two hours, suggesting there was a moving stream of gas in the ring, orbiting the white dwarf rapidly. Read more: 10 mysteries of the universe: Is our solar system normal? Although the team is unable to see the source of the gas because it is small and faint, Manser says it is probably a solid object like an asteroid or a piece of a planet. It may have a radius of 400 kilometres, almost as big as that of Ceres , the largest asteroid in our solar system. It is probably producing gas as it sublimes or collides with dust particles as it whirls around the white dwarf. Moreover, the object is very close to the white dwarf because it completes a full orbit every two hours – if it was in the same orbit in our solar system, it would be inside the sun, Manser says. That means it must be very dense and perhaps made of iron or other heavy metals to prevent it from being torn apart by the white dwarf’s gravity, he says. Most rocky planets in our galaxy are also composed of the same elements,” says Ben Zuckerman at the University of California, Los Angeles. So he suggests that planets in our solar system could share the same fate. It is thought that our sun will die in about five billion years , and Mercury, Venus and Earth will almost certainly be engulfed in the explosion, but Mars, which is further from the sun, may survive and continue to orbit the remains. 7:31 am 19 Comments April 4, 2019 Humans must learn to tackle what robots can’t As powerful as artificial intelligence can be, its abilities are extremely narrow: An AI that beats a chess grandmaster can’t recognize a face or drive a car. And a robot that carries out flawless eye surgery can’t do so unless positioned precisely first. Why it matters: It turns out that humans have a similar failing — put them in front of a problem they’ve never solved, and they often come up short. But in the future of work, when automation assumes responsibility for up to half or more of current jobs, such ability will be a huge human advantage — and possibly necessary. What’s happening : U.S. colleges, preparing students for future jobs that might not yet even exist — and to beat the robots — are starting to nudge them out of the familiar rhythm of class and teach them how to tackle unfamiliar problems. "That is the skill of the future," says David Hollander, a professor at NYU. The big picture : One of the greatest anxieties experienced by today’s college and high school students is how to game a very different future whose shape is still all-but imperceptible, but that will involve lots of automation across blue- and white-collar jobs. The good news is that, according to the preliminary consensus, robots will have an extremely difficult time mimicking the very human ability to pivot both physically and mentally when confronted with something surprising. So early preparation for the future revolves around developing, polishing and expanding on this adaptability. Soft skills "are the hardest skills to get," says Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future. "It takes a lot of human contact; it takes a lot of reasoning." Hollander designed and oversees a seminar at NYU that is meant to make this pivoting skill much more advanced. In the "Real World," as he calls the class, Hollander invites companies and government agencies into the classroom to confront students with problems they definitely will never have seen. "You may be from the real estate world and working on a marketing problem. You may be from marketing and solving a human resources challenge. To me it’s all the same thing," Hollander told me. "You are developing the skills of taking on something you have never seen before, and you must do it collaboratively with other human beings." "College prepares students for the first five minutes after graduation. But what about the next 50 years?" I visited the class on Monday. Fifteen students gathered along with their professor — Jonathan Yi, a film director and cinematographer whom Hollander recruited to teach this semester — at the headquarters of FCB International, a fancy advertising agency in Manhattan. Their challenge: To design an anti-vaping ad campaign for the Food & Drug Administration, targeted at teens. The FDA is one of the firm’s clients. "We want crazy ideas, " Jared Shell, an FCB director who was co-teaching with Yi, told the students. For his first pitch, Leon Zhang, a graduate marketing student, suggested an ad showing how much money teens spend on Juul and Juul pods. But Shell and another FCB director said it wouldn’t work because the FDA wants to avoid publicizing that teens are buying these products illegally. "You learn the politics of it," said Maria Rychkova, one of Zhang’s teammates. Zhang and his teammates then honed...