Excerpt from eaglecurrent.com NASA is joining in an effort to have an understanding of the presence of a methane hotspot over the 4 corners area of the United States. How severe is the atmospheric feature?A methane hotspot hovering over t...
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Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comBy Melissa Dahl Late at night, when you've been trying and failing for hours to fall asleep, perhaps the thing to do is to try not trying. According to a 2003 study recently highlighted by University of Hertforts...
pcmag.com
IBM's Watson supercomputer may be saving lives and educating children, but Google's new AI program can master video games without human guidance.
The artificial intelligence system from London-based DeepMind, which Google acquired last year for a reported $400 million, represents a major step toward a future of smart machines.
Computers running the deep Q-network (DQN) algorithm were exposed to 49 retro games on the Atari 2600 and told to play them, without any direction from researchers. Using the same network architecture and tuning parameters, the machines were given only raw screen pixels, available actions, and game score as input.
For each level passed or high score earned, the computer was automatically rewarded with a digital treat.
"Strikingly, DQN was able to work straight 'out of the box' across all these games," DeepMind's Dharshan Kumaran and Demis Hassabis wrote in a blog post. The executives cited classic titles like Breakout, River Raid, Boxing, and Enduro.
The AI crushed even the most expert humans at 29 games, sometimes composing what the creators called "surprisingly far-sighted strategies" that allowed maximum scoring possibilities. It also outperformed previous machine-learning methods in 43 of 49 instances.
VIEW ALL PHOTOS IN GALLERY
"This work offers the first demonstration of a general purpose learning agent that can be trained end-to-end to handle a wide variety of challenging tasks," the researchers said. "This kind of technology should help us build more useful products."
Imagine asking the Google app to complete a complex task—like plan a backpacking trip through Europe, for example.
Google's DeepMind also hopes its technology will give researchers new ways to make sense of large-scale data, opening the door to discoveries in fields like climate science, physics, medicine, and genomics.
"And it may even help scientists better understand the process by which humans learn," Kumaran and Hassabis said, citing physicist Richard Feynman, who famously said, "What I cannot create, I do not understand."
For more, see How DeepMind Can Bring Google Artificial Intelligence to Life in the slideshow above.
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| Planck has mapped the delicate polarisation of the CMB across the entire sky |
Excerpt from bbc.com
Scientists working on Europe's Planck satellite say the first stars lit up the Universe later than previously thought.
Earlier observations of this radiation had suggested the first generation of stars were bursting into life by about 420 million years after the Big Bang.
Planck's data indicates this great ignition was well established by some 560 million years after it all began.
"This difference of 140 million years might not seem that significant in the context of the 13.8-billion-year history of the cosmos, but proportionately it's actually a very big change in our understanding of how certain key events progressed at the earliest epochs," said Prof George Efstathiou, one of the leaders of the Planck Science Collaboration.
Subtle signal
The assessment is based on studies of the "afterglow" of the Big Bang, the ancient light called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which still washes over the Earth today.
Prof George Efstathiou: "We don't need more complicated explanations"
It contains a wealth of information about early conditions in the Universe, and can even be used to work out its age, shape and do an inventory of its contents.
Scientists can also probe it for very subtle "distortions" that tell them about any interactions the CMB has had on its way to us.
Forging elements
One of these would have been imprinted when the infant cosmos underwent a major environmental change known as re-ionisation.
Prof Richard McMahon: "The two sides of the bridge now join"
These hot giants would have burnt brilliant but brief lives, producing the very first heavy elements. But they would also have "fried" the neutral gas around them - ripping electrons off the hydrogen protons.
And it is the passage of the CMB through this maze of electrons and protons that would have resulted in it picking up a subtle polarisation.
Impression: The first stars would have been unwieldy behemoths that burnt brief but brilliant lives The Planck team has now analysed this polarisation in fine detail and determined it to have been generated at 560 million years after the Big Bang.
The American satellite WMAP, which operated in the 2000s, made the previous best estimate for the peak of re-ionisation at 420 million years.
The problem with that number was that it sat at odds with Hubble Space Telescope observations of the early Universe.
Hubble could not find stars and galaxies in sufficient numbers to deliver the scale of environmental change at the time when WMAP suggested it was occurring.
Planck's new timing "effectively solves the conflict," commented Prof Richard McMahon from Cambridge University, UK.
"We had two groups of astronomers who were basically working on different sides of the problem. The Planck people came at it from the Big Bang side, while those of us who work on galaxies came at it from the 'now side'.
"It's like a bridge being built over a river. The two sides do now join where previously we had a gap," he told BBC News.
That gap had prompted scientists to invoke complicated scenarios to initiate re-ionisation, including the possibility that there might have been an even earlier population of giant stars or energetic black holes. Such solutions are no longer needed.
No-one knows the exact timing of the very first individual stars. All Planck does is tell us when large numbers of these stars had gathered into galaxies of sufficient strength to alter the cosmic environment.
By definition, this puts the ignition of the "founding stars" well before 560 million years after the Big Bang. Quite how far back in time, though, is uncertain. Perhaps, it was as early as 200 million years. It will be the job of the next generation of observatories like Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, to try to find the answer.
Being built now: The James Webb telescope will conduct a survey of the first galaxies and their stars
- Planck's CMB studies indicate the Big Bang was 13.8bn years ago
- The CMB itself can be thought of as the 'afterglow' of the Big Bang
- It spreads across the cosmos some 380,000 years after the Big Bang
- This is when the conditions cool to make neutral hydrogen atoms
- The period before the first stars is often called the 'Dark Ages'
- When the first stars ignite, they 'fry' the neutral gas around them
- These giants also forge the first heavy elements in big explosions
- 'First Light', or 'Cosmic Renaissance', is a key epoch in history
The new Planck result is contained in a raft of new papers just posted on the Esa website.
These papers accompany the latest data release from the satellite that can now be used by the wider scientific community, not just collaboration members.
Dr Andrew Jaffe: "The simplest models for inflation are ruled out"
It was hoped that Planck might find direct evidence in the CMB's polarisation for inflation - the super-rapid expansion of space thought to have occurred just fractions of a second after the Big Bang. This has not been possible. But all the Planck data - temperature and polarisation information - is consistent with that theory, and the precision measurements mean new, tighter constraints have been put on the likely scale of the inflation signal, which other experiments continue to chase.
What is clear from the Planck investigation is that the simplest models for how the super-rapid expansion might have worked are probably no longer tenable, suggesting some exotic physics will eventually be needed to explain it.
"We're now being pushed into a parameter space we didn't expect to be in," said collaboration scientist Dr Andrew Jaffe from Imperial College, UK. "That's OK. We like interesting physics; that's why we're physicists, so there's no problem with that. It's just we had this naïve expectation that the simplest answer would be right, and sometimes it just isn't."
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Gazing at galaxy clusters like Abell 2218, it's hard to imagine how we fit into the cosmos. Evolution can help with that, says Bill Nye. Photograph by NASA, ESA, and Johan Richard (Caltech, USA) |
Darwin's theory explains so much of the world, from bumblebees to human origins, says the Science Guy.
Excerpt from
By Jane J. Lee
The experience prompted the celebrity science educator to write a "primer" on the theory of evolution called Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation. In his new book, Nye delights in how this fundamental discovery helps to unlock the mysteries of everything from bumblebees to human origins to our place in the universe.
Who do you hope will read this book?
Grown-ups who have an interest in the world around them, people coming of age who have an interest in science, people who still want to know how the world works.
This is the big concern of mine with respect to the organization Answers in Genesis and Ken Ham and all those guys: their relentless, built-in attempts to indoctrinate a generation of science students on a worldview that is obviously wrong.
I worry about these kids—they're part of my society. We can't raise a generation of students who don't understand the fundamental idea in all of life science, any more than you want to raise a generation of kids who don't understand chemistry or physics or arithmetic.
How and when did you first encounter creationism?
About 20 years ago. I was a member of the Northwest Skeptics, which is the Seattle-based skeptics organization. We met people who insisted that the Earth was 6,000 years old. The inanity took my breath away. When you understand anything about astronomy or have just a rudimentary understanding of radioactivity, the Earth is patently not 6,000 years old. It's silly.
It's been said that a good way of convincing people of something is to appeal to their emotions. What do you think?
That's my business! In the book, I purposely spend a lot of time in the first person. The reason is, we find stories compelling. Stories are how we remember things, how we organize things.
By telling a story in the first person, it's hard to dismiss. If I say, "I remember the time I met Ivan the gorilla," it's really difficult for the listener or reader to go, "No, you don't!"
When you say, "I feel," it's really hard for the reader to say, "No, you don't." Yes, I do. I did a lot of that in the book...
A fascination with bees and flight drew a young Bill Nye into the world of science and evolution.
Photograph by Mark W Moffett, National Geographic
One of the most fundamental ideas in explaining life on Earth is the theory of evolution, says Nye.
Photograph by NASA Earth Observatory
Excerpt from
cnet.com
The year gone by brought us more robots, worries about artificial intelligence, and difficult lessons on space travel. The big question: where's it all taking us?
Every year, we capture a little bit more of the future -- and yet the future insists on staying ever out of reach.
Consider space travel. Humans have been traveling beyond the atmosphere for more than 50 years now -- but aside from a few overnights on the moon four decades ago, we have yet to venture beyond low Earth orbit.
Or robots. They help build our cars and clean our kitchen floors, but no one would mistake a Kuka or a Roomba for the replicants in "Blade Runner." Siri, Cortana and Alexa, meanwhile, are bringing some personality to the gadgets in our pockets and our houses. Still, that's a long way from HAL or that lad David from the movie "A.I. Artificial Intelligence."
Self-driving cars? Still in low gear, and carrying some bureaucratic baggage that prevents them from ditching certain technology of yesteryear, like steering wheels.
And even when these sci-fi things arrive, will we embrace them? A Pew study earlier this year found that Americans are decidedly undecided. Among the poll respondents, 48 percent said they would like to take a ride in a driverless car, but 50 percent would not. And only 3 percent said they would like to own one.
"Despite their general optimism about the long-term impact of technological change," Aaron Smith of the Pew Research Center wrote in the report, "Americans express significant reservations about some of these potentially short-term developments" such as US airspace being opened to personal drones, robot caregivers for the elderly or wearable or implantable computing devices that would feed them information.
Let's take a look at how much of the future we grasped in 2014 and what we could gain in 2015.
Space travel: 'Space flight is hard'
In 2014, earthlings scored an unprecedented achievement in space exploration when the European Space Agency landed a spacecraft on a speeding comet, with the potential to learn more about the origins of life. No, Bruce Willis wasn't aboard. Nobody was. But when the 220-pound Philae lander, carried to its destination by the Rosetta orbiter, touched down on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on November 12, some 300 million miles from Earth, the celebration was well-earned.A shadow quickly fell on the jubilation, however. Philae could not stick its first landing, bouncing into a darker corner of the comet where its solar panels would not receive enough sunlight to charge the lander's batteries. After two days and just a handful of initial readings sent home, it shut down. For good? Backers have allowed for a ray of hope as the comet passes closer to the sun in 2015. "I think within the team there is no doubt that [Philae] will wake up," lead lander scientist Jean-Pierre Bibring said in December. "And the question is OK, in what shape? My suspicion is we'll be in good shape."
The trip for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has been much longer: 3 billion miles, all the way to Pluto and the edge of the solar system. Almost nine years after it left Earth, New Horizons in early December came out of hibernation to begin its mission: to explore "a new class of planets we've never seen, in a place we've never been before," said project scientist Hal Weaver. In January, it will begin taking photos and readings of Pluto, and by mid-July, when it swoops closest to Pluto, it will have sent back detailed information about the dwarf planet and its moon, en route to even deeper space.
Also in December, NASA made a first test spaceflight of its Orion capsule on a quick morning jaunt out and back, to just over 3,600 miles above Earth (or approximately 15 times higher than the International Space Station). The distance was trivial compared to those those traveled by Rosetta and New Horizons, and crewed missions won't begin till 2021, but the ambitions are great -- in the 2030s, Orion is expected to carry humans to Mars.
In late March 2015, two humans will head to the ISS to take up residence for a full year, in what would be a record sleepover in orbit. "If a mission to Mars is going to take a three-year round trip," said NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who will be joined in the effort by Russia's Mikhail Kornienko, "we need to know better how our body and our physiology performs over durations longer than what we've previously on the space station investigated, which is six months."
There were more sobering moments, too, in 2014. In October, Virgin Galactic's sleek, experimental SpaceShipTwo, designed to carry deep-pocketed tourists into space, crashed in the Mojave Desert during a test flight, killing one test pilot and injuring the other. Virgin founder Richard Branson had hoped his vessel would make its first commercial flight by the end of this year or in early 2015, and what comes next remains to be seen. Branson, though, expressed optimism: "Space flight is hard -- but worth it," he said in a blog post shortly after the crash, and in a press conference, he vowed "We'll learn from this, and move forward together." Virgin Galactic could begin testing its next spaceship as soon as early 2015.
The crash of SpaceShipTwo came just a few days after the explosion of an Orbital Sciences rocket lofting an unmanned spacecraft with supplies bound for the International Space Station. And in July, Elon Musk's SpaceX had suffered the loss of one of its Falcon 9 rockets during a test flight. Musk intoned, via Twitter, that "rockets are tricky..."
Still, it was on the whole a good year for SpaceX. In May, it unveiled its first manned spacecraft, the Dragon V2, intended for trips to and from the space station, and in September, it won a $2.6 billion contract from NASA to become one of the first private companies (the other being Boeing) to ferry astronauts to the ISS, beginning as early as 2017. Oh, and SpaceX also has plans to launch microsatellites to establish low-cost Internet service around the globe, saying in November to expect an announcement about that in two to three months -- that is, early in 2015.
One more thing to watch for next year: another launch of the super-secret X-37B space place to do whatever it does during its marathon trips into orbit. The third spaceflight of an X-37B -- a robotic vehicle that, at 29 feet in length, looks like a miniature space shuttle -- ended in October after an astonishing 22 months circling the Earth, conducting "on-orbit experiments."
Self-driving cars: Asleep at what wheel?
Spacecraft aren't the only vehicles capable of autonomous travel -- increasingly, cars are, too. Automakers are toiling toward self-driving cars, and Elon Musk -- whose name comes up again and again when we talk about the near horizon for sci-fi tech -- says we're less than a decade away from capturing that aspect of the future. In October, speaking in his guise as founder of Tesla Motors, Musk said: "Like maybe five or six years from now I think we'll be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination." (He also allowed that we should tack on a few years after that before government regulators give that technology their blessing.)
Google has long been working on its own robo-cars, and until this year, that meant taking existing models -- a Prius here, a Lexus there -- and buckling on extraneous gear. Then in May, the tech titan took the wraps off a completely new prototype that it had built from scratch. (In December, it showed off the first fully functional prototype.) It looked rather like a cartoon car, but the real news was that there was no steering wheel, gas pedal or brake pedal -- no need for human controls when software and sensors are there to do the work.
Or not so fast. In August, California's Department of Motor Vehicles declared that Google's test vehicles will need those manual controls after all -- for safety's sake. The company agreed to comply with the state's rules, which went into effect in September, when it began testing the cars on private roads in October.
Regardless of who's making your future robo-car, the vehicle is going to have to be not just smart, but actually thoughtful. It's not enough for the car to know how far it is from nearby cars or what the road conditions are. The machine may well have to make no-win decisions, just as human drivers sometimes do in instantaneous, life-and-death emergencies. "The car is calculating a lot of consequences of its actions," Chris Gerdes, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, said at the Web Summit conference in Dublin, Ireland, in November. "Should it hit the person without a helmet? The larger car or the smaller car?"
Robots: Legging it out
So when do the robots finally become our overlords? Probably not in 2015, but there's sure to be more hand-wringing about both the machines and the artificial intelligence that could -- someday -- make them a match for homo sapiens. At the moment, the threat seems more mundane: when do we lose our jobs to a robot?The inquisitive folks at Pew took that very topic to nearly 1,900 experts, including Vint Cerf, vice president at Google; Web guru Tim Bray; Justin Reich of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society; and Jonathan Grudin, principal researcher at Microsoft. According to the resulting report, published in August, the group was almost evenly split -- 48 percent thought it likely that, by 2025, robots and digital agents will have displaced significant numbers of blue- and white-collar workers, perhaps even to the point of breakdowns in the social order, while 52 percent "have faith that human ingenuity will create new jobs, industries, and ways to make a living, just as it has been doing since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution."
Still, for all of the startling skills that robots have acquired so far, they're often not all there yet. Here's some of what we saw from the robot world in 2014:
Teamwork: Researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne in May showed off their "Roombots," cog-like robotic balls that can join forces to, say, help a table move across a room or change its height.
A sense of balance: We don't know if Boston Dynamics' humanoid Atlas is ready to trim bonsai trees, but it has learned this much from "The Karate Kid" (the original from the 1980s) -- it can stand on cinder blocks and hold its balance in a crane stance while moving its arms up and down.
Catlike jumps: MIT's cheetah-bot gets higher marks for locomotion. Fed a new algorithm, it can run across a lawn and bound like a cat. And quietly, too. "Our robot can be silent and as efficient as animals. The only things you hear are the feet hitting the ground," MIT's Sangbae Kim, a professor of mechanical engineering, told MIT News. "This is kind of a new paradigm where we're controlling force in a highly dynamic situation. Any legged robot should be able to do this in the future."
Sign language: Toshiba's humanoid Aiko Chihira communicated in Japanese sign language at the CEATEC show in October. Her rudimentary skills, limited for the moment to simple messages such as signed greetings, are expected to blossom by 2020 into areas such as speech synthesis and speech recognition.
Dance skills: Robotic pole dancers? Tobit Software brought a pair, controllable by an Android smartphone, to the Cebit trade show in Germany in March. More lifelike was the animatronic sculpture at a gallery in New York that same month -- but what was up with that witch mask?
Emotional ambition: Eventually, we'll all have humanoid companions -- at least, that's always been one school of thought on our robotic future. One early candidate for that honor could be Pepper, from Softbank and Aldebaran Robotics, which say the 4-foot-tall Pepper is the first robot to read emotions. This emo-bot is expected to go on sale in Japan in February.
Ray guns: Ship shape
Damn the photon torpedoes, and full speed ahead. That could be the motto for the US Navy, which in 2014 deployed a prototype laser weapon -- just one -- aboard a vessel in the Persian Gulf. Through some three months of testing, the device "locked on and destroyed the targets we designated with near-instantaneous lethality," Rear Adm. Matthew L. Klunder, chief of naval research, said in a statement. Those targets were rather modest -- small objects mounted aboard a speeding small boat, a diminutive Scan Eagle unmanned aerial vehicle, and so on -- but the point was made: the laser weapon, operated by a controller like those used for video games, held up well, even in adverse conditions.Artificial intelligence: Danger, Will Robinson?
What happens when robots and other smart machines can not only do, but also think? Will they appreciate us for all our quirky human high and low points, and learn to live with us? Or do they take a hard look at a species that's run its course and either turn us into natural resources, "Matrix"-style, or rain down destruction?
Musk himself more than once in 2014 invoked the likes of the "Terminator" movies and the "scary outcomes" that make them such thrilling popcorn fare. Except that he sees a potentially scary reality evolving. In an interview with CNBC in June, he spoke of his investment in AI-minded companies like Vicarious and Deep Mind, saying: "I like to just keep an eye on what's going on with artificial intelligence. I think there is potentially a dangerous outcome."
He has put his anxieties into some particularly colorful phrases. In August, for instance, Musk tweeted that AI is "potentially more dangerous than nukes." And in October, he said this at a symposium at MIT: "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. ... You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like... yeah, he's sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn't work out."
Musk has a kindred spirit in Stephen Hawking. The physicist allowed in May that AI could be the "biggest event in human history," and not necessarily in a good way. A month later, he was telling John Oliver, on HBO's "Last Week Tonight," that "artificial intelligence could be a real danger in the not too distant future." How so? "It could design improvements to itself and outsmart us all."
But Google's Eric Schmidt, is having none of that pessimism. At a summit on innovation in December, the executive chairman of the far-thinking tech titan -- which in October teamed up with Oxford University to speed up research on artificial intelligence -- said that while our worries may be natural, "they're also misguided."
Excerpt from
independent.co.uk
It is one of the world’s last frontiers and has seen fewer human visitors than the moon. And that – for the time being at least – is how it shall stay.
Sir Richard Branson has shelved plans for a submarine to take tourists to the bottom of Pacific’s Mariana Trench, after technical problems hobbled the grand ambitions of his much-trumpeted Virgin Oceanic project.The news is a second blow to Branson’s adventurer dreams in a matter of months, after a Virgin Galactic space rocket crashed on a test flight in California’s Mojave Desert, killing a pilot.
Virgin Oceanic’s DeepFlight Challenger was launched in 2011 with the entrepreneur’s familiar fanfare. Under the plans, wealthy passengers or “aquanauts” up would pay up to $500,000 (£318,126) for a five-dive package labelled as “the last great challenge for humans”.
As well as exploring the Mariana Trench – a 36,000ft-deep abyss is deeper than Mount Everest is tall, with access so risky and complicated that it has had just three human visitors since its formation nine million years ago – the submarine was due to dive the Puerto Rico trench 28,000ft below the surface of the Atlantic, the Molloy Deep in the Arctic, South Sandwich Trench in the Southern Ocean and Diamantina trench in the Indian Ocean.
But yesterday the Sunday Telegraph reported that Deepflight, the company contracted to build the submarine, could not support the project because their vehicle could only be safely used for one dive.
The underwater mission appears to have stalled indefinitely. The Virgin Oceanic website – which had promised “five dives, five oceans, two years, one epic adventure” – no longer exists, reportedly taken down earlier this year.
csmonitor.com
By Bryan Cronan, Staff Writer
It's been two weeks since the fatal crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. As authorities continue to investigate what caused the crash, Virgin Galactic says the accident will not hinder the company's plans to send tourists to space.
Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides told a crowd Thursday that the company will continue pursuing its mission to take tourists to space. He made the comments while speaking in Culver City, Calif., to a panel organized by the Rand Corporation.
“We have a new spaceship that’s going to be ready in a few months,” Mr. Whitesides said, according to The Los Angeles Times. “So we’re going to make sure we get that one as safe as we can and keep going.”
On Oct. 31, a SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight, killing one pilot and injuring another. The debris from the flight was strewn across 35 miles of the Mojave Desert. Whitesides said that was "a tragic day."
Virgin Galactic is the brainchild of British billionaire Richard Branson. He is planning to take tourists to space for $250,000 a piece. After the crash, there have been growing concerns about the companies safety practices. Twenty of the 700 people who have already paid for the trip have asked for a refund after the crash.
On Nov. 7, Peter Siebold, the pilot who survived the crash, told the National Transportation Safety Board what happened shortly before the crash. He said the ship began to break apart 50,000 feet in the air, according to Engadget. He unbuckled from his seat and a parachute automatically deployed. An investigation by the NTSB found that the SpaceShipTwo's feather re-entry system was a possible cause of the crash. The other pilot, Michael Alsbury, unlocked the system earlier than intended. The NTSB said it could be another year before the final conclusion about what caused the crash is known.
The SpaceShipTwo had only conducted a few dozen test flights. And the fatal flight was only the fourth time that the rocket engines fired. The ship was also using new fuel, which engineers thought would give the engines more thrust.
“There’s so many exciting things happening now in the world of space," he said. "There’s risk but there’s great reward. ... So I think being unafraid to try new things is important as we move forward.”
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| The Virgin Galactic Two Spaceship |
news.com.au
THE pilot who miraculously survived the Virgin spaceship disaster has revealed how he was blasted from the wreckage of the disintegrating rocket ship and plummeted nearly ten miles back to Earth.
Having suffered serious injuries, the experienced test pilot only regained consciousness halfway into his fall but was composed enough to give a thumbs-up to colleagues in a passing aircraft to show he was alive.
Peter Siebold spoke for the first time about the tragedy that killed his close friend, copilot Mike Alsbury, revealing he blacked out as the craft broke up around him at 50,000ft but was saved by his emergency parachute.
Siebold, 43, a married father of two, said: “I must have lost consciousness at first. I can’t remember anything about what happened but I must have come to during the fall. I remember waving to the chase plane and giving them the thumbs-up to tell them I was OK. I know it’s a miracle I survived.”
Perished ... Mike Alsbury was a close friend and colleague of Peter Siebold. Source: AP
Survivor ... Peter Siebold can’t remember much of what happened that day. Source: AP
Explosion ... These three images show the space craft’s demise. Source: AP
Then disaster occurred. Preliminary investigations suggest that the rocket ship’s folding wings — designed to slow it down and achieve safe speeds during landing — deployed early, causing the ship to break up due to the tremendous turbulence around the craft.
Alsbury was trapped in the cockpit but Siebold was thrown clear of the wreckage or somehow unbuckled his seatbelt. He then plunged towards Earth at speeds topping 193km/h. Witnesses reported seeing Siebold descending with part of the base of his seat still attached. It is likely that his oxygen mask, attached to a portable tank, remained in place. But at that altitude, the sudden decompression and extreme G-forces would have caused him to black out in seconds.
His emergency parachute deployed t about 20,000ft. It is not known if he pulled the cord or if it unfurled automatically. Both pilots were wearing parachutes calibrated to open automatically at a certain height in the event they became unconscious during an emergency.
Incredible ... Siebold has no idea how he managed to exit the space ship, given it has no ejection seat. Source: AFP
The body of Alsbury, 39, was found still strapped into his seat on a desert road by construction workers. His parachute did not deploy. His wife Michelle said she had “lost the love of my life”.
Mike, second from right, was a friend and neighbour of Siebold. Source: Supplied
Big sky dreaming ... Sir Richard Branson vowed to become an astronaut by the end of the year. Source: AP
The investigation into this month’s crash is now likely to delay any commercial flight for at least another year. But Branson has vowed to press ahead with the project, while acknowledging the risks taken by his test pilots. Last night, Mr Whitesides paid tribute to Siebold, saying: “It will be regarded as one of the most amazing test flight survival stories of all time.”
Additional reporting by Peter Sheridan
Excerpt from universetoday.com
by Tim Reyes
Do we exist in a space and time shared by many worlds? And are all these infinite worlds interacting? A new theory of everything is making the case.
They share the same space and time, and interact with each other.
These worlds behave as Newton first envisioned, except that the slightest interactions of the infinite number create nuances and deviations from the Newtonian mechanics. What could be deterministic is swayed by many worlds to become the unpredictable.
This is the new theory about parallel universes explained by Australian and American theorists in a paper published in the journal Physics Review X. Called the “Many Interacting Worlds” theory (MIW), the paper explains that rather than standing apart, an infinite number of universes share the same space and time as ours.
They show that their theory can explain quantum mechanical effects while leaving open the choice of theory to explain the universe at large scales. This is a fascinating new variant of Multiverse Theory that, in a sense, creates not just a doppelganger of everyone but an infinite number of them all overlaying each other in the same space and time.
Rather than island universes as proposed by other multiverse theories, Many Interacting Worlds (MIW) proposes many all lying within one space and time.
The “Many Interacting Worlds” theory, presented by Michael Hall and Howard Wiseman from Griffith University in Australia, and Dirk-André Deckert from the University of California, Davis, differs from previous multiverse theories in that the worlds — as they refer to universes — coincide with each other, and are not just parallel.
The theorists explain that while the interactions are subtle, the interaction of an infinite number of worlds can explain quantum phenomena such as barrier tunneling in solid state electronics, can be used to calculate quantum ground states, and, as they state, “at least qualitatively” reproduce the results of the double-slit experiment.
Schrödinger, in explaining his wave function and the interaction of two particles (EPR paradox) coined the term “entanglement”. In effect, the MIW theory is an entanglement of an infinite number of worlds but not in terms of a wave function. The theorists state that they were compelled to develop MIW theory to eliminate the need for a wave function to explain the Universe. It is quite likely that Einstein would have seen MIW as very appealing considering his unwillingness to accept the principles laid down by the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Theory.
While MIW theory can reproduce some of the most distinctive quantum phenomena, the theorists emphasize that MIW is in an early phase of development. They state that the theory is not yet as mature as long-standing unification theories. In their paper, they use Newtonian physics to keep their proofs simple. Presenting this new “many worlds” theory indicates they had achieved a level of confidence in its integrity such that other theorists can use it as a starter kit – peer review but also expand upon it to explain more worldly phenomena.
Two of the perpetrators of the century-long problem of unifying General Relativity Theory and Quantum Physics – Albert Einstein, Erwin Schroedinger.
Such was the case for Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. For example, the bending of the path of light by gravity and astronomer Eddington’s observing starlight bending around Sun during a total Solar Eclipse. Such new predictions and confirmation would begin to stand MIW theory apart from the many other theories of everything.
Multiverse theories have gained notoriety in recent years through the books and media presentations of Dr. Michio Kaku of the City College of New York and Dr. Brian Greene of Columbia University, New York City. Dr. Green presented a series of episodes delving into the nature of the Universe on PBS called “The Fabric of the Universe” and “The Elegant Universe”. The presentations were based on his books such as “The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.”
Hugh Everett’s reinterpretation of Dr. Richard Feynman’s cosmological theory, that the world is a weighted sum of alternative histories, states that when particles interact, reality bifurcates into a set of parallel streams, each being a different possible outcome. In contrast to Feynmann’s theory and Everett’s interpretation, the parallel worlds of MIW do not bifurcate but simply exist in the same space and time. MIW’s parallel worlds are not a consequence of “quantum behavior” but are rather the drivers of it.
Professor Howard Wiseman, Director of Griffith University’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics and coauthor of the paper on the “Many Interacting World” theory. (Photo Credit: Griffith University)
So what is next for the Many Interacting Worlds theory? Time will tell. Theorists and experimentalists shall begin to evaluate its assertions and its solutions to explain known behavior in our Universe. With new predictions, the new challenger to Unified Field Theory (the theory of everything) will be harder to ignore or file away with the wide array of theories of the last 100 years. Einstein’s theories began to reveal that our world exudes behavior that defies our sensibility but he could not accept the assertions of Quantum Theory. Einstein’s retort to Bohr was “God does not throw dice.” The MIW theory of Hall, Deckert, and Wiseman might be what Einstein was seeking until the end of his life. In titling this review of their theory as “The World is not Enough,” I would also add that their many interacting worlds is like a martini shaken but not stirred.
References: Quantum Phenomena Modeled by Interactions between Many Classical Worlds
Space adventure for the people, albeit very wealthy people, pioneer Richard Branson is not about to back down from his space tourism program. Photo AAPRichard Branson, putting his money where his mouth is, or at least the welfare of his family and hi...
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Meteorite is ‘hard drive’ from space ~ Researchers decode ancient recordings from asteroid ~ BBC
Like the data recorded on the surface of a computer hard drive, the magnetic signals written in the space rock reveal how Earth's own metallic core and magnetic field may one day die.
The work appears in Nature journal.
Using a giant X-ray microscope, called a synchrotron, the team was able to read the signals that formed more than four-and-a-half billion years ago, soon after the birth of the Solar System.
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Dr James Bryson University of CambridgeThe new picture of metallic core solidification in the asteroid provide clues about the magnetic field and iron-rich core of Earth.
Core values "Ideas about how the Earth's core evolved through [our planet's] history are really changing at the moment," lead researcher Dr Richard Harrison, from the University of Cambridge, told BBC News.
"We believe that Earth's magnetic field is linked to core solidification. Earth's solid inner core may have started to form at very interesting time in terms of the evolution of life on Earth.
"By studying an asteroid we get to see this in fast forward. We can see the start of core solidification in the magnetic records as well as its end, and start to think about how these processes work on Earth."
Tiny particles, smaller than one thousandth the width of a human hair, trapped within the metal have retained the magnetic signature of the parent asteroid from its birth in the early Solar System.
"We're taking ancient magnetic field measurements in nano-scale materials to the highest ever resolution in order to piece together the magnetic history of asteroids - it's like a cosmic archaeological mission," said Dr James Bryson, the paper's lead author.
"Since asteroids are much smaller than Earth, they cooled much more quickly, so these processes occur on a shorter timescales, enabling us to study the whole process of core solidification."
Prof Wyn William, from the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study, commented: "To be able to get a time stamp on these recordings, to get a cooling rate and the time of solidification, is fantastic. It's a very nice piece of work."
The key to the long-lived stability of the recording is the atomic-scale structure of the iron-nickel particles that grew slowly in the asteroid core and survived in the meteorites.
Making a final comment on the results, Dr Harrison said: "In our meteorites we've been able to capture both the beginning and end of core freezing, which will help us understand how these processes affected the Earth in the past and provide a possible glimpse of what might happen in the future."