Tag: environments (page 1 of 3)

5 Ascension Insights Most People Aren’t Talking About: Insight #3

July 15, 2016 / / 0 Comments

By Mercedes Kirkel INSIGHT #3: DON’T ASSUME YOUR PROCESS WILL LOOK LIKE ANYONE ELSE’S   Most, if not all, of the difficult symptoms people experience in the ascension process are signs of purification. As our energy system opens to stronger and higher frequencies, any blocks we have in our energy circuits are getting blasted with […]

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Has Cancer Been Completely Misunderstood?

August 6, 2015 / / 0 Comments

A Failed War On Cancer Sayer Ji, Green Med InfoEver since Richard Nixon officially declared a war on cancer in 1971 through the signing of the National Cancer Act, over a hundred billion dollars of taxpayer money has been spent on research and drug development in an attempt to eradicate the disease, with trillions more spent by the cancer patients themselves, but with disappointing results.Even after four decades of waging full-scale “conventional” (s [...]

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5 Cancer Myths Busted

May 30, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Dr. E. Dahl, Prevent DiseaseCancer statistics are on the rise, and the growing numbers have moved the disease to a priority issue for the global community. AsThe Lancet reports, cancer deaths have increased 46% between 1990 and 2013. On Jan 1, 2016, new international development priorities called Sustainable Development Goals, will focus on decreasing premature deaths from non-communicable diseases by 2025.PreventDisease recently reported 5 cancer facts the cancer industry [...]

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Sea Salt Discovered on Jupiter’s Moon Europa

May 17, 2015 / / 0 Comments

This image shows a view of the trailing hemisphere of Jupiter's ice-covered satellite, Europa, in approximate natural color. Long, dark lines are fractures in the crust, some of which are more than 3,000 kilometers (1,850 miles) long. Image via Galileo spacecraft in 1996.

Europa is thought to have a subsurface ocean. Salt from this hidden sea might be emerging in long fractures visible in the moon’s crust.



Excerpt earthsky.org


Laboratory experiments have lead to new information about the chemical composition of the mysterious dark material in the long, dark fractures on the surface of Europa, a large moon of Jupiter. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) mimicked conditions on Europa’s surface. They now say that the dark material is discolored salt, likely sea salt from below the moon’s icy crust. The journal Geological Research Letters published their study on May 15, 2015.

The scientists say this new insight is important in considering whether this icy moon might be hospitable for extraterrestrial life. The life question is a key one for Europa, since this world is believed to have a liquid ocean beneath its crust. The presence of sea salt on Europa’s surface suggests the ocean is interacting with its rocky seafloor.

Scientists have been intensely curious about Europa since Galileo discovered it in 1610. In recent years, they’ve puzzled over the dark material coating the long, linear fractures on Europa’s observable surface. The material was associated with young terrain on this moon of Jupiter, suggesting that it had erupted from within Europa.
However, the chemical composition of the dark material remained elusive, until now.
Planetary scientist Kevin Hand at JPL led the new study. He said in a statement:
If it’s just salt from the ocean below, that would be a simple and elegant solution for what the dark, mysterious material is.
Europa is immersed radiation from Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field, causing high-powered electrons to slam into the moon’s surface. Hand and his team created a laboratory test that mimicked the conditions of Europa’s temperature, pressure, and radiation exposure. They tested a variety of samples including common salt – sodium chloride – and salt water in a vacuum chamber at Europa’s chilly surface temperature of minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 173 Celsius). They also bombarded the samples with an electron beam to imitate Jupiter’s influence. 

After several hours – a time period corresponding to over a century on Europa, the researchers said – the salt samples were observed to go from white to a yellowish brown, the color similar to the features on the icy moon. Hand said:
This work tells us the chemical signature of radiation-baked sodium chloride is a compelling match to spacecraft data for Europa’s mystery material.
A
A “Europa-in-a-can” laboratory setup at NASA-JPL mimics conditions of temperature, near vacuum and heavy radiation on the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech


A close-up of salt grains discolored by radiation following exposure in a
Close-up of salt grains discolored by radiation following exposure in a “Europa-in-a-can” test setup at JPL. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech


Until now, telescopic observations have only shown glimpses of irradiated salts. No telescope on Earth can observe Europa’s surface with enough resolution to identify them with certainty. Researchers suggest additional spacecraft observation to gather more evidence.
A visit to this icy world would help answer the most tantalizing questions about Europa. Long believed to have a liquid ocean of salt water below its icy surface, this moon continues to display promising conditions for extraterrestrial life. 

As Europa orbits Jupiter, it experiences strong tidal forces similar to Earth and the Moon. These forces from Jupiter and the other Jovian moons cause Europa to flex and stretch, which creates heat, and results in Europa having a warm internal temperature than it would with just the heat from the Sun alone. 

Recent observable geological activity also creates strong evidence that the subsurface ocean interacts directly with Europa’s rocky interior, making geothermal vents, like those in Earth’s oceans, a strong possibility as well. 

These hydrothermal vent ecosystems on Earth thrive with no energy from the sun. Bacteria, shrimp and crustaceans have all been observed in these extreme environments, surviving on what researchers have deemed chemosythesis.

With Europa’s enormous amount of liquid salt water, essential chemical elements and geological activity, this long discovered icy moon appears to be one of the solar systems most promising locations for habitable requirements for life. 

However, until a devoted spacecraft visit’s, nothing beyond hopeful speculation can be proven, the researchers say.

Bottom line: Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory created laboratory conditions that mimicked those on Jupiter’s large moon Europa, to learn the chemical compositions of the material in long, dark fractures in the moon’s surface. They now believe this material is sea salt, which has emerged to Europa’s surface from its liquid ocean below.

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Desperately Seeking Extraterrestrials ~ Fermi’s Paradox Turns 65 ~ Part 1

May 4, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comIntroduction 65 years ago, in 1950, while having lunch with colleagues Edward Teller and Herbert York, Nobel physicist Enrico Fermi suddenly blurted out, "Where is everybody?" His question is now known as Fermi's p...

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13 Things Anyone Who Loves A Highly Sensitive Person Should Know

May 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.com When I was in kindergarten, a boy in my class tossed my favorite book over our elementary school fence. I remember crying profusely, not because I was sad to see it go, but because I was so furious that he was s...

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Guiding Our Search for Life on Other Earths

April 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments


The James Webb Telescope


Excerpt from space.com

 A telescope will soon allow astronomers to probe the atmosphere of Earthlike exoplanets for signs of life. To prepare, astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger and her team are modeling the atmospheric fingerprints for hundreds of potential alien worlds. Here's how:
The James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2018, will usher a new era in our search for life beyond Earth. With its 6.5-meter mirror, the long-awaited successor to Hubble will be large enough to detect potential biosignatures in the atmosphere of Earthlike planets orbiting nearby stars.
And we may soon find a treasure-trove of such worlds. The forthcoming exoplanet hunter TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), set to launch in 2017, will scout the entire sky for planetary systems close to ours. (The current Kepler mission focuses on more distant stars, between 600 and 3,000 light-years from Earth.) 

Astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger




While TESS will allow for the brief detection of new planets, the larger James Webb will follow up on select candidates and provide clues about their atmospheric composition. But the work will be difficult and require a lot of telescope time.
"We're expecting to find thousands of new planets with TESS, so we'll need to select our best targets for follow-up study with the Webb telescope," says Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer at Cornell University and co-investigator on the TESS team.
To prepare, Kaltenegger and her team at Cornell's Institute for Pale Blue Dots are building a database of atmospheric fingerprints for hundreds of potential alien worlds. The models will then be used as "ID cards" to guide the study of exoplanet atmospheres with the Webb and other future large telescopes.
Kaltenegger described her approach in a talk for the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Director Seminar Series last December.
"For the first time in human history, we have the technology to find and characterize other worlds," she says. "And there's a lot to learn."

Detecting life from space  

In its 1990 flyby of Earth, the Galileo spacecraft took a spectrum of sunlight filtered through our planet's atmosphere. In a 1993 paper in the journal Nature, astronomer Carl Sagan analyzed that data and found a large amount of oxygen together with methane — a telltale sign of life on Earth. These observations established a control experiment for the search of extraterrestrial life by modern spacecraft.
"The spectrum of a planet is like a chemical fingerprint," Kaltenegger says. "This gives us the key to explore alien worlds light years away."
Current telescopes have picked up the spectra of giant, Jupiter-like exoplanets. But the telescopes are not large enough to do so for smaller, Earth-like worlds. The James Webb telescope will be our first shot at studying the atmospheres of these potentially habitable worlds.
Some forthcoming ground-based telescopes — including the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), planned for completion in 2020, and the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), scheduled for first light in 2024 — may also be able to contribute to that task. [The Largest Telescopes on Earth: How They Compare]
And with the expected discovery by TESS of thousands of nearby exoplanets, the James Webb and other large telescopes will have plenty of potential targets to study. Another forthcoming planet hunter, the Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO), a planned European Space Agency mission scheduled for launch around 2022-2024, will contribute even more candidates.
However, observation time for follow-up studies will be costly and limited.
"It will take hundreds of hours of observation to see atmospheric signatures with the Webb telescope," Kaltenegger says. "So we'll have to pick our targets carefully."

Giant Magellan Telescope
Set to see its first light in 2021, The Giant Magellan Telescope will be the world’s largest telescope.

Getting a head start

To guide that process, Kaltenegger and her team are putting together a database of atmospheric fingerprints of potential alien worlds. "The models are tools that can teach us how to observe and help us prioritize targets," she says.
To start, they have modeled the chemical fingerprint of Earth over geological time. Our planet's atmosphere has evolved over time, with different life forms producing and consuming various gases. These models may give astronomers some insight into a planet's evolutionary stage.
Other models take into consideration the effects of a host of factors on the chemical signatures — including water, clouds, atmospheric thickness, geological cycles, brightness of the parent star, and even the presence of different extremophiles.
"It's important to do this wide range of modeling right now," Kaltenegger said, "so we're not too startled if we detect something unexpected. A wide parameter space can allow us to figure out if we might have a combination of these environments."
She added: "It can also help us refine our modeling as fast as possible, and decide if more measurements are needed while the telescope is still in space. It's basically a stepping-stone, so we don't have to wait until we get our first measurements to understand what we are seeing. Still, we'll likely find things we never thought about in the first place."
 

A new research center

The spectral database is one of the main projects undertaken at the Institute for Pale Blue Dots, a new interdisciplinary research center founded in 2014 by Kaltenegger. The official inauguration will be held on May 9, 2015.
"The crux of the institute is the characterization of rocky, Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of nearby stars," Kaltenergger said. "It's a very interdisciplinary effort with people from astronomy, geology, atmospheric modeling, and hopefully biology."
She added: "One of the goal is to better understand what makes a planet a life-friendly habitat, and how we can detect that from light years away. We're on the verge of discovering other pale blue dots. And with Sagan's legacy, Cornell University is a really great home for an institute like that."

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This Alien Color Catalog May Help Us Spot Life on Other Planets

March 16, 2015 / / 0 Comments






Excerpt from smithsonianmag.com


In the hunt for alien life, our first glimpse of extraterrestrials may be in the rainbow of colors seen coming from the surface of an exoplanet.

That's the deceptively simple idea behind a study led by Siddharth Hegde at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. Seen from light-years away, plants on Earth give our planet a distinctive hue in the near-infrared, a phenomenon called red edge. That's because the chlorophyll in plants absorbs most visible light waves but starts to become transparent to wavelengths on the redder end of the spectrum. An extraterrestrial looking at Earth through a telescope could match this reflected color with the presence of oxygen in our atmosphere and conclude there is life here.


exoplanets palette
Eight of the 137 microorganism samples used to measure biosignatures for the catalog of reflection signatures of Earth life forms. In each panel, the top is a regular photograph of the sample and the bottom is a micrograph, a version of the top image zoomed-in 400 times.



Plants, though, have only been around for 500 million years—a relative blip in our planet's 4.6-billion-year history. Microbes dominated the scene for some 2.5 billion years in the past, and some studies suggest they will rule the Earth again for much of its future. So Hegde and his team gathered 137 species of microorganisms that all have different pigments and that reflect light in specific ways. By building up a library of the microbes' reflectance spectra—the types of colors those microscopic critters reflect from a distance—scientists examining the light from habitable exoplanets can have a plethora of possible signals to search for, the team argues this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"No one had looked at the wide range of diverse life on Earth and asked how we could potentially spot such life on other planets, and include life from extreme environments on Earth that could be the 'norm' on other planets," Lisa Kaltenegger, a co-author on the study, says via email. "You can use it to model an Earth that is different and has different widespread biota and look how it would appear to our telescopes."

To make sure they got enough diversity, the researchers looked at temperate-dwelling microbes as well as creatures that live in extreme environments like deserts, mineral springs, hydrothermal vents or volcanically active areas.

While it might seem that alien life could take a huge variety of forms—for instance, something like the silicon-based Horta from Star Trek—it's possible to narrow things down if we restrict the search to life as we know it. First, any life-form that is carbon-based and uses water as a solvent isn't going to like the short wavelengths of light far in the ultraviolet, because this high-energy UV can damage organic molecules. At the other end of the spectrum, any molecule that alien plants (or their analogues) use to photosynthesize won't be picking up light that's too far into the infrared, because there's not enough energy at those longer wavelengths.

In addition, far-infrared light is hard to see through an Earth-like atmosphere because the gases block a lot of these waves, and whatever heat the planet emits will drown out any signal from surface life. That means the researchers restricted their library to the reflected colors we can see when looking at wavelengths in the visible part of the spectrum, the longest wavelength UV and short-wave infrared.

The library won't be much use if we can't see the planets' surfaces in the first place, and that's where the next generation of telescopes comes in, Kaltenegger says. The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018, should be able to see the spectra of relatively small exoplanet atmospheres and help scientists work out their chemical compositions, but it won't be able to see any reflected spectra from material at the surface. Luckily, there are other planned telescopes that should be able to do the job. The European Extremely Large Telescope, a 40-meter instrument in Chile, will be complete by 2022. And NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, which is funded and in its design stages, should be up and running by the mid-2020s.

Another issue is whether natural geologic or chemical processes could look like life and create a false signal. So far the pigments from life-forms look a lot different from those reflected by minerals, but the team hasn't examined all the possibilities either, says Kaltenegger. They hope to do more testing in the future as they build up the digital library, which is now online and free for anyone to explore at biosignatures.astro.cornell.edu.

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Scientists: Enceladus may have warm water ocean with ingredients for life

March 15, 2015 / / 0 Comments


Enceladus ocean
This artist's impression of the interior of Saturn's moon Enceladus shows that interactions between hot water and rock occur at the floor of the subsurface ocean -- the type of environment that might be friendly to life, scientists say. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)



Excerpt from latimes.com

Scientists say they’ve discovered evidence of a watery ocean with warm spots hiding beneath the surface of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. The findings, described in the journal Nature, are the first signs of hydrothermal activity on another world outside of Earth – and raise the chances that Enceladus has the potential to host microbial life.

Scientists have wondered about what lies within Enceladus at least since NASA’s Cassini spacecraft caught the moon spewing salty water vapor out from cracks in its frozen surface. Last year, a study of its gravitational field hinted at a 10-kilometer-thick regional ocean around the south pole lying under an ice crust some 30 to 40 kilometers deep.

Another hint also emerged about a decade ago, when Cassini discovered tiny dust particles escaping Saturn’s system that were nanometer-sized and rich in silicon.

“It’s a peculiar thing to find particles enriched with silicon,” said lead author Hsiang-Wen Hsu, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In Saturn’s moons and among its rings, water ice dominates, so these odd particles clearly stood out.

The scientists traced these particles’ origin to Saturn’s E-ring, which lies between the orbits of the moons Mimas and Titan and whose icy particles are known to come from Enceladus. So Hsu and colleagues studied the grains to understand what was going on inside the gas giant’s frigid satellite.   
Rather than coming in a range of sizes, these particles were all uniformly tiny – just a few nanometers across. Studying the spectra of these grains, the scientists found that they were made of silicon dioxide, or silica. That’s not common in space, but it’s easily found on Earth because it’s a product of water interacting with rock. 

Knowing how silica interacts in given conditions such as temperature, salinity and alkalinity, the scientists could work backward to determine what kind of environment creates these unusual particles.

A scientist could do the same thing with a cup of warm coffee, Hsu said.

“You put in the sugar and as the coffee gets cold, if you know the relation of the solubility of sugar as a function of temperature, you will know how hot your coffee was,” Hsu said. “And applying this to Enceladus’s ocean, we can derive a minimum [temperature] required to form these particles.”

The scientists then ran experiments in the lab to determine how such silica particles came to be. With the particles’ particular makeup and size distribution, they could only have formed under very specific circumstances, the study authors found, determining that the silica particles must have formed in water that had less than 4% salinity and that was slightly alkaline (with a pH of about 8.5 to 10.5) and at temperatures of at least 90 degrees Celsius (roughly 190 degrees Fahrenheit).

The heat was likely being generated in part by tidal forces as Saturn’s gravity kneads its icy moon. (The tidal forces are also probably what open the cracks in its surface that vent the water vapor into space.)
Somewhere inside the icy body, there was hydrothermal activity – salty warm water interacting with rocks. It’s the kind of environment that, on Earth, is very friendly to life.  

“It’s kind of obvious, the connection between hydrothermal interactions and finding life,” Hsu said. “These hydrothermal activities will provide the basic activities to sustain life: the water, the energy source and of course the nutrients that water can leach from the rocks.”

Enceladus, Hsu said, is now likely the “second-top object for astrobiology interest” – the first being Jupiter’s icy moon and fellow water-world, Europa.
This activity is in all likelihood going on right now, Hsu said – over time, these tiny grains should glom together into larger and larger particles, and because they haven’t yet, they must have been recently expelled from Enceladus, within the last few months or few years at most.

Gabriel Tobie of the University of Nantes in France, who was not involved in the research, compared the conditions that created these silica particles to a hydrothermal field in the Atlantic Ocean known as Lost City.

“Because it is relatively cold, Lost City has been posited as a potential analogue of hydrothermal systems in active icy moons. The current findings confirm this,” Tobie wrote in a commentary on the paper. “What is more, alkaline hydrothermal vents might have been the birthplace of the first living organisms on the early Earth, and so the discovery of similar environments on Enceladus opens fresh perspectives on the search for life elsewhere in the Solar System.”

However, Hsu pointed out, it’s not enough to have the right conditions for life – they have to have been around for long enough that life would have a fighting chance to emerge.

“The other factor that is also very important is the time.… For Enceladus, we don’t know how long this activity has been or how stable it is,” Hsu said. “And so that’s a big uncertainty here.”

One way to get at this question? Send another mission to Enceladus, Tobie said.

“Cassini will fly through the moon’s plume again later this year,” he wrote, “but only future missions that can undertake improved in situ investigations, and possibly even return samples to Earth, will be able to confirm Enceladus’ astrobiological potential and fully reveal the secrets of its hot springs. ”

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Scientists Believe Oxygen Free Methane Based Aliens Might Exist on Icy Saturn Moon Titan

February 28, 2015 / / 0 Comments





Excerpt from viralglobalnews.com

A group of scientists at Cornell University believe that Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, may be a haven of life. However, it would not be in the form that human beings know. Methane based life forms might live on Titan, the scientists have said, after they created a model of an oxygen free life form which would be able to thrive in the icy, unforgiving conditions that Saturn’s moon offers.
They studied the various forms of cell membranes that exist on Earth, which are made up of lipid bi-layer structures. The Cornell scientists said such membranes would not be able to exist in environments where liquid water could not be present, according to Design and Trend.
Titan has plenty of lakes filled with methane, so that means it might not be habitable in the way that scientists had formerly described habitability. However, Dr. James Stevenson and his team thinks that contrarily structured membranes could offer the foundation for life to exist on Saturn’s moon. The model they created used organic nitrogen mixtures, so that the new structure could easily function on Titan in the richness of the methane that exists in liquid form there.

 Titan

Dr. Stevenson said it was Isaac Asimov, the celebrated sci-fi writer, who first gave the rudimentary inspiration for the idea in the paper he penned, which was called the Not as We Know It essay. It was written about non-water-based life forms. Because Saturn’s moon is the only known celestial form in the solar system to have naturally occurring fluids on its surface, except for the Earth, the group of scientists believe it to be a possible perfect foundation for life forms to develop.
Dr. Paulette Clancy, who has helped lead the group, constructed an “azotosome.” It is comparable in name origin to liposome which comes from the Greek words lipos and soma. An azotosome comes from the French word for nitrogen. Therefore, the word is describing a nitrogen body.
Instead of trying to find alien life within the area that surrounds the Sun where water exists in liquid form, the group decided to try and imagine a new kind of cell, grounded on methane instead of water. Clancy and the team were dumbfounded to find that this new projected model presented an alike stability to the cell membranes already here on Earth.
Dr. Clancy seemed very anxious to carry on the group’s work and find out how such compounds would truly work in the methane atmosphere. Dr. Jonathan Lunine, who is a top expert in Titan and also one of the co-authors of the study, thinks that it might be possible in the future to in fact test these theories by actually examing organic material from Saturn’s moon. In the years to come, Dr. Lunine stated that probes might be sent to Titan to gather the needed material by floating down on the methane seas of the moon of Saturn.
The group discovered a compound they named acrylonitrile azotosome, which appeared to show good stability. It had a strong barricade to decomposition, and a suppleness that was similar to phospholipid membranes that exist on Earth. Acrylonitrile is a poisonous, colorless, liquid organic compound that is used in the production of acrylic fibers and thermoplastics and it is present in Titan’s atmosphere as well.
They have written up about their discovery and what they believe to be possible. The scientists’ paper was printed up in the journal Science Advances on Friday.

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Is playing ‘Space Invaders’ a milestone in artificial intelligence?

February 25, 2015 / / 0 Comments





Excerpt from latimes.com

Computers have beaten humans at chess and "Jeopardy!," and now they can master old Atari games such as "Space Invaders" or "Breakout" without knowing anything about their rules or strategies.

Playing Atari 2600 games from the 1980s may seem a bit "Back to the Future," but researchers with Google's DeepMind project say they have taken a small but crucial step toward a general learning machine that can mimic the way human brains learn from new experience.

Unlike the Watson and Deep Blue computers that beat "Jeopardy!" and chess champions with intensive programming specific to those games, the Deep-Q Network built its winning strategies from keystrokes up, through trial and error and constant reprocessing of feedback to find winning strategies.

Image result for space invaders

“The ultimate goal is to build smart, general-purpose [learning] machines. We’re many decades off from doing that," said artificial intelligence researcher Demis Hassabis, coauthor of the study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature. "But I do think this is the first significant rung of the ladder that we’re on." 
The Deep-Q Network computer, developed by the London-based Google DeepMind, played 49 old-school Atari games, scoring "at or better than human level," on 29 of them, according to the study.
The algorithm approach, based loosely on the architecture of human neural networks, could eventually be applied to any complex and multidimensional task requiring a series of decisions, according to the researchers. 

The algorithms employed in this type of machine learning depart strongly from approaches that rely on a computer's ability to weigh stunning amounts of inputs and outcomes and choose programmed models to "explain" the data. Those approaches, known as supervised learning, required artful tailoring of algorithms around specific problems, such as a chess game.

The computer instead relies on random exploration of keystrokes bolstered by human-like reinforcement learning, where a reward essentially takes the place of such supervision.
“In supervised learning, there’s a teacher that says what the right answer was," said study coauthor David Silver. "In reinforcement learning, there is no teacher. No one says what the right action was, and the system needs to discover by trial and error what the correct action or sequence of actions was that led to the best possible desired outcome.”

The computer "learned" over the course of several weeks of training, in hundreds of trials, based only on the video pixels of the game -- the equivalent of a human looking at screens and manipulating a cursor without reading any instructions, according to the study.

Over the course of that training, the computer built up progressively more abstract representations of the data in ways similar to human neural networks, according to the study.
There was nothing about the learning algorithms, however, that was specific to Atari, or to video games for that matter, the researchers said.
The computer eventually figured out such insider gaming strategies as carving a tunnel through the bricks in "Breakout" to reach the back of the wall. And it found a few tricks that were unknown to the programmers, such as keeping a submarine hovering just below the surface of the ocean in "Seaquest."

The computer's limits, however, became evident in the games at which it failed, sometimes spectacularly. It was miserable at "Montezuma's Revenge," and performed nearly as poorly at "Ms. Pac-Man." That's because those games also require more sophisticated exploration, planning and complex route-finding, said coauthor Volodymyr Mnih.

And though the computer may be able to match the video-gaming proficiency of a 1980s teenager, its overall "intelligence" hardly reaches that of a pre-verbal toddler. It cannot build conceptual or abstract knowledge, doesn't find novel solutions and can get stuck trying to exploit its accumulated knowledge rather than abandoning it and resort to random exploration, as humans do. 

“It’s mastering and understanding the construction of these games, but we wouldn’t say yet that it’s building conceptual knowledge, or abstract knowledge," said Hassabis.

The researchers chose the Atari 2600 platform in part because it offered an engineering sweet spot -- not too easy and not too hard. They plan to move into the 1990s, toward 3-D games involving complex environments, such as the "Grand Theft Auto" franchise. That milestone could come within five years, said Hassabis.

“With a few tweaks, it should be able to drive a real car,” Hassabis said.

DeepMind was formed in 2010 by Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, and received funding from Tesla Motors' Elon Musk and Facebook investor Peter Thiel, among others. It was purchased by Google last year, for a reported $650 million. 

Hassabis, a chess prodigy and game designer, met Legg, an algorithm specialist, while studying at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College, London. Suleyman, an entrepreneur who dropped out of Oxford University, is a partner in Reos, a conflict-resolution consulting group.

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Every Black Hole Contains a New Universe

February 11, 2015 / / 0 Comments


At the center of spiral galaxy M81 is a supermassive black hole about 70 million times more massive than our sun.



Excerpt from insidescience.org
A physicist presents a solution to present-day cosmic mysteries.



By: 
Nikodem Poplawski, Inside Science Minds Guest Columnist


(ISM) -- Our universe may exist inside a black hole. This may sound strange, but it could actually be the best explanation of how the universe began, and what we observe today. It's a theory that has been explored over the past few decades by a small group of physicists including myself. 
Successful as it is, there are notable unsolved questions with the standard big bang theory, which suggests that the universe began as a seemingly impossible "singularity," an infinitely small point containing an infinitely high concentration of matter, expanding in size to what we observe today. The theory of inflation, a super-fast expansion of space proposed in recent decades, fills in many important details, such as why slight lumps in the concentration of matter in the early universe coalesced into large celestial bodies such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies.
But these theories leave major questions unresolved. For example: What started the big bang? What caused inflation to end? What is the source of the mysterious dark energy that is apparently causing the universe to speed up its expansion?
The idea that our universe is entirely contained within a black hole provides answers to these problems and many more. It eliminates the notion of physically impossible singularities in our universe. And it draws upon two central theories in physics.
Nikodem Poplawski displays a "tornado in a tube." The top bottle symbolizes a black hole, the connected necks represent a wormhole and the lower bottle symbolizes the growing universe on the just-formed other side of the wormhole. Credit: Indiana University
In this picture, spins in particles interact with spacetime and endow it with a property called "torsion." To understand torsion, imagine spacetime not as a two-dimensional canvas, but as a flexible, one-dimensional rod. Bending the rod corresponds to curving spacetime, and twisting the rod corresponds to spacetime torsion. If a rod is thin, you can bend it, but it's hard to see if it's twisted or not.

The first is general relativity, the modern theory of gravity. It describes the universe at the largest scales. Any event in the universe occurs as a point in space and time, or spacetime. A massive object such as the Sun distorts or "curves" spacetime, like a bowling ball sitting on a canvas. The Sun's gravitational dent alters the motion of Earth and the other planets orbiting it. The sun's pull of the planets appears to us as the force of gravity.

The second is quantum mechanics, which describes the universe at the smallest scales, such as the level of the atom. However, quantum mechanics and general relativity are currently separate theories; physicists have been striving to combine the two successfully into a single theory of "quantum gravity" to adequately describe important phenomena, including the behavior of subatomic particles in black holes.
A 1960s adaptation of general relativity, called the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory of gravity, takes into account effects from quantum mechanics. It not only provides a step towards quantum gravity but also leads to an alternative picture of the universe. This variation of general relativity incorporates an important quantum property known as spin. Particles such as atoms and electrons possess spin, or the internal angular momentum that is analogous to a skater spinning on ice.

Spacetime torsion would only be significant, let alone noticeable, in the early universe or in black holes. In these extreme environments, spacetime torsion would manifest itself as a repulsive force that counters the attractive gravitational force coming from spacetime curvature. As in the standard version of general relativity, very massive stars end up collapsing into black holes: regions of space from which nothing, not even light, can escape.
Here is how torsion would play out in the beginning moments of our universe. Initially, the gravitational attraction from curved space would overcome torsion's repulsive forces, serving to collapse matter into smaller regions of space. But eventually torsion would become very strong and prevent matter from compressing into a point of infinite density; matter would reach a state of extremely large but finite density. As energy can be converted into mass, the immensely high gravitational energy in this extremely dense state would cause an intense production of particles, greatly increasing the mass inside the black hole.
The increasing numbers of particles with spin would result in higher levels of spacetime torsion. The repulsive torsion would stop the collapse and would create a "big bounce" like a compressed beach ball that snaps outward. The rapid recoil after such a big bounce could be what has led to our expanding universe. The result of this recoil matches observations of the universe's shape, geometry, and distribution of mass.
In turn, the torsion mechanism suggests an astonishing scenario: every black hole would produce a new, baby universe inside. If that is true, then the first matter in our universe came from somewhere else. So our own universe could be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe. Just as we cannot see what is going on inside black holes in the cosmos, any observers in the parent universe could not see what is going on in ours.
The motion of matter through the black hole's boundary, called an "event horizon," would only happen in one direction, providing a direction of time that we perceive as moving forward. The arrow of time in our universe would therefore be inherited, through torsion, from the parent universe.
Torsion could also explain the observed imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe. Because of torsion, matter would decay into familiar electrons and quarks, and antimatter would decay into "dark matter," a mysterious invisible form of matter that appears to account for a majority of matter in the universe.
Finally, torsion could be the source of "dark energy," a mysterious form of energy that permeates all of space and increases the rate of expansion of the universe. Geometry with torsion naturally produces a "cosmological constant," a sort of added-on outward force which is the simplest way to explain dark energy. Thus, the observed accelerating expansion of the universe may end up being the strongest evidence for torsion.
Torsion therefore provides a theoretical foundation for a scenario in which the interior of every black hole becomes a new universe. It also appears as a remedy to several major problems of current theory of gravity and cosmology. Physicists still need to combine the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory fully with quantum mechanics into a quantum theory of gravity. While resolving some major questions, it raises new ones of its own. For example, what do we know about the parent universe and the black hole inside which our own universe resides? How many layers of parent universes would we have? How can we test that our universe lives in a black hole?
The last question can potentially be investigated: since all stars and thus black holes rotate, our universe would have inherited the parent black hole’s axis of rotation as a "preferred direction." There is some recently reported evidence from surveys of over 15,000 galaxies that in one hemisphere of the universe more spiral galaxies are "left-handed", or rotating clockwise, while in the other hemisphere more are "right-handed", or rotating counterclockwise. In any case, I believe that including torsion in geometry of spacetime is a right step towards a successful theory of cosmology.

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Aliens Even More Likely Now To Be Out There ~ Average star has two potentially Earth-like worlds

February 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments



Concept art depicting the lights of an ET civilisation on an exoplanet. Credit: David A Aguilar (CfA)

Excerpt from theregister.co.uk



Boffins in Australia have applied a hundreds-of-years-old astronomical rule to data from the Kepler planet-hunting space telescope. They've come to the conclusion that the average star in our galaxy has not one but two Earth-size planets in its "goldilocks" zone where liquid water - and thus, life along Earthly lines - could exist.

“The ingredients for life are plentiful, and we now know that habitable environments are plentiful,” says Professor Charley Lineweaver, a down-under astrophysicist.

Lineweaver and PhD student Tim Bovaird worked this out by reviewing the data on exoplanets discovered by the famed Kepler planet-hunter space scope. Kepler naturally tends to find exoplanets which orbit close to their parent suns, as it detects them by the changes in light they make by passing in front of the star. As a result, most Kepler exoplanets are too hot for liquid water to be present on their surfaces, which makes them comparatively boring.
Good planets in the "goldilocks" zone which is neither too hot nor too cold are much harder to detect with Kepler, which is a shame as these are the planets which might be home to alien life - or alternatively, home one day to transplanted Earth life including human colonists, once we've cracked that pesky interstellar travel problem.

However there exists a thing called the Titius-Bode relation - aka Bode's Law - which can be used, once you know where some inner planets are, to predict where ones further out will be found.

Assuming Bode's Law works for other suns as it does here, and inputting the positions of known inner exoplanets found by Kepler, Lineweaver and Bovaird found that on average a star in our galaxy has two planets in its potentially-habitable zone.

That doesn't mean there are habitable or inhabited planets at every star, of course. Even here in our solar system, apparently lifeless (and not very habitable) Mars is in the habitable zone.

Even so, there are an awful lot of planets in the galaxy, so some at least ought to have life on them, and in some cases this life ought to have achieved a detectable civilisation. Prof Lineweaver admits that the total lack of any sign of this is a bit of a puzzler.

"The universe is not teeming with aliens with human-like intelligence that can build radio telescopes and space ships," admits the prof. "Otherwise we would have seen or heard from them.
“It could be that there is some other bottleneck for the emergence of life that we haven’t worked out yet. Or intelligent civilisations evolve, but then self-destruct.”

Of course, humans - some approximations of which have been around for some hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps - have only had civilisation of any kind in any location for a few thousand of those years. Our civilisation has only risen to levels where it could be detectable across interstellar distances very recently.

There may be many planets out there inhabited by intelligent aliens who either have no civilisation at all, or only primitive civilisation. There may be quite a few who have reached or passed the stage of emitting noticeable amounts of radio or other telltale signs, but those emissions either will not reach us for hundreds of thousands of years - or went past long ago.

It would seem reasonable to suspect that there are multitudes of worlds out there where life exists in plenty but has never become intelligent, as Earth life was for millions of years before early humans began using tools really quite recently.

But the numbers are still such that the apparent absence of star-travelling aliens could make you worry about the viability of technological civilisation if, like Professor Lineweaver, you learn your astrophysics out of textbooks and lectures (and publish your research, as we see here, in hefty boffinry journals like the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society).

But if movies, speculofictive novels and TV have taught us anything here on the Reg alien life desk, it is that in fact the galaxy is swarming with star-travelling aliens (and/or humans taken secretly from planet Earth for mysterious purposes in the past, or perhaps humans from somewhere else etc). The reason we don't know about them is that they don't want us to.

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