An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, Microsoft and Epic Systems announced that they are bringing OpenAI's GPT-4 AI language model into health care for use in drafting message responses from health care workers to patients and for use in analyzing medical records while looking for trends. Epic Systems is one of America's largest health care software companies. Its electronic health records (EHR) software (such as MyChart) is reportedly used in over 29 percent of acute hospitals in the United States, and over 305 million patients have an electronic record in Epic worldwide. Tangentially, Epic's history of using predictive algorithms in health care has attracted some criticism in the past.

In Monday's announcement, Microsoft mentions two specific ways Epic will use its Azure OpenAI Service, which provides API access to OpenAI's large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3 and GPT-4. In layperson's terms, it means that companies can hire Microsoft to provide generative AI services for them using Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. The first use of GPT-4 comes in the form of allowing doctors and health care workers to automatically draft message responses to patients. The press release quotes Chero Goswami, chief information officer at UW Health in Wisconsin, as saying, "Integrating generative AI into some of our daily workflows will increase productivity for many of our providers, allowing them to focus on the clinical duties that truly require their attention." The second use will bring natural language queries and "data analysis" to SlicerDicer, which is Epic's data-exploration tool that allows searches across large numbers of patients to identify trends that could be useful for making new discoveries or for financial reasons. According to Microsoft, that will help "clinical leaders explore data in a conversational and intuitive way." Imagine talking to a chatbot similar to ChatGPT and asking it questions about trends in patient medical records, and you might get the picture. Dr. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face, is concerned about GPT-4's ability to make up information that isn't represented in its data set. Another concern is the potential bias in GPT-4 that might discriminate against certain patients based on gender, race, age, or other factors.

"Combined with the well-known problem of automation bias, where even experts will believe things that are incorrect if they're generated automatically by a system, this work will foreseeably generate false information," says Mitchell. "In the clinical setting, this can mean the difference between life and death."

An anonymous reader shares a report: We know from natural events in the past that increasing the amount of iron in these seas can dramatically increase the growth of phytoplankton. When iron-rich ash from volcanic eruptions has fallen on the ocean's surface, it has triggered phytoplankton blooms large enough to see from space. This knowledge led oceanographer John Martin to put forth something called the "iron hypothesis," which suggests that "fertilizing" the ocean with iron could increase the amount of carbon-sucking phytoplankton -- theoretically enough to cool the entire Earth. "Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age," he famously quipped during a lecture in 1988.

In 1993, shortly after Martin's death, his colleagues at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories tested the hypothesis by increasing the concentration of iron over 64 square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. They then observed the area for 10 days and saw the amount of plant biomass double. "All biological indicators confirmed an increased rate of phytoplankton production in response to the addition of iron," they wrote in a paper detailing the experiment. More than a dozen other ocean fertilization experiments have been conducted since then, but even though they do appear to cause a bloom of plankton, it's still not clear whether the approach could actually help combat climate change.

In 2009, researchers from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory tracked the impact of a major ocean fertilization experiment in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica by measuring carbon particles 800 meters below the surface of the water in the area for a year -- and their findings were less than encouraging. "Just adding iron to the ocean hasn't been demonstrated as a good plan for storing atmospheric carbon," said researcher Jim Bishop. "What counts is the carbon that reaches the deep sea, and a lot of the carbon tied up in plankton blooms appears not to sink very fast or very far." While researchers are still trying to figure out why that is, there are a number of theories, including ones centered on the feeding habits of creatures that live off phytoplankton and the presence of iron-binding organic compounds in ocean water.

Dr Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, writing over the weekend: It was medical dogma: cancer tissue is sterile. That's what we had learned and taught in medical school for decades even though bacteria were detected in tumors more than 100 years ago. When studies were reported asserting that bacteria were present in tumor tissue, they were consistently debunked as representing contaminants. Then came new tools that include single-cell sequencing and sophisticated spatial profiling providing high-resolution portraits of tumors. The new dogma is that bacteria have a pervasive (yet variable) presence within and across solid tumors -- the "presence of intratumoral bacteria being designated a hallmark of cancer." Furthermore, where bacteria are more apt to be found within tumor regions, T cell recruitment and function is suppressed. These regions of tumor are micro-niches exhibiting immune evasion.

Just as that has been determined, there was a new twist this week: engineering bacteria to induce a potent T cell immune response to kill the tumor. This can be viewed as the polar opposite. Instead of bacteria improving a tumor's ability to duck our immune response and spread, this represents clever ways to genetically manipulate bacteria (aka "designer bugs" with the schematic in the linked post) to make it considerably more antigenic, a new route to immunotherapy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Live Science: Scientists have discovered and synthesized an entirely new isotope of the highly radioactive element uranium. But it might last only 40 minutes before decaying into other elements. The new isotope, uranium-241, has 92 protons (as all uranium isotopes do) and 149 neutrons, making it the first new neutron-rich isotope of uranium discovered since 1979. While atoms of a given element always have the same number of protons, different isotopes, or versions, of those elements may hold different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei. To be considered neutron-rich, an isotope must contain more neutrons than is common to that element.

"We measured the masses of 19 different actinide isotopes with a high precision of one part per million level, including the discovery and identification of the new uranium isotope," Toshitaka Niwase(opens in new tab), a researcher at the High-energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Wako Nuclear Science Center (WNSC) in Japan, told Live Science in an email. "This is the first new discovery of a uranium isotope on the neutron-rich side in over 40 years." Niwase is the lead author of a study on the new uranium isotope, which was published March 31 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Niwase and colleagues created the uranium-241 by firing a sample of uranium-238 at platinum-198 nuclei at Japan's RIKEN accelerator. The two isotopes then swapped neutrons and protons — a phenomenon called "multinucleon transfer." The team then measured the mass of the created isotopes by observing the time it took the resulting nuclei to travel a certain distance through a medium. The experiment also generated 18 new isotopes, all of which contained between 143 and 150 neutrons.

A team of scientists led by Slava Turyshev of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology have proposed merging miniature satellite units with a solar energy process that would create a fast, inexpensive, lightweight mode of travel. Phys.Org reports: Solar sailing is a process by which the pressure generated by the sun's radiation is harnessed for propulsion. Recent innovations in this technology were demonstrated in a successful crowdfunded 2019 mission undertaken by the Planetary Society's LightSail-2 project. The researchers explain, "Solar sails obtain thrust by using highly reflective, lightweight materials that reflect sunlight to propel a spacecraft while in space. The continuous photon pressure from the sun provides thrust, eliminating the need for heavy, expendable propellants employed by conventional on-board chemical and electric propulsion systems, which limit mission lifetime and observation locations."

They say that sails are far less expensive than heavy equipment currently used for propulsion, and that the ever-present continuous solar photon pressure from the sun makes thrust available for a broad range of vehicular maneuvers, such as hovering or rapid orbital plane changes. Solar sails and miniaturization "have advanced in the past decade to the point where they may enable inspiring and affordable missions to reach farther and faster, deep into the outer regions of our solar system," the report says.

The researchers refer to the merging of these two technologies as the Sundiver Concept. "Fast, cost-effective and maneuverable sailcraft that may travel outside the ecliptic plane open new opportunities for affordable solar system exploration," the report states, "with great promise for heliophysics, planetary science, and astrophysics." With enhanced maneuverability, the spacecraft can easily deliver small payloads to multiple destinations if required, and can dock with related modular craft. The reliance on the sun and the miniaturization of the carrier, which requires no dedicated launch site, will prove to be significant cost savers, the researchers add: "A substantial reason for the high costs is our [current] reliance on slow and expensive chemical propulsion, operating at the limits of its capabilities, effectively rendering the current solar system exploration paradigm unsustainable. A new approach is needed."

"Two years have passed since the Perseverance rover landed on Mars, carrying with it the Ingenuity helicopter," notes Slashdot reader quonset. "Created from off-the-shelf components, the helicopter was only designed to last about five flights. Instead, two years later, having become the first aircraft to fly and land on another planet, Ingenuity successfully completed its 50th flight."

CNN reports that the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) helicopter has now "surpassed all expectations," transitioning into "an aerial scout for the Perseverance rover as it explores an ancient lake and river delta on Mars." Each morning, the Helicopter Base Station on the Perseverance rover searches for Ingenuity's signal around the time the chopper is expected to "wake up," waiting for a sign that its aerial scout is still functioning. But Ingenuity's solar panels, batteries and rotor system are healthy. The chopper is "still doing fantastic," said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We're looking forward to just keep pushing that envelope."

Since the helicopter left the flat floor of Jezero Crater and headed to the river delta in January, its flights have only grown more challenging. Ingenuity has flown over uncharted and rugged terrain with landing spots surrounded by potential hazards. "We are not in Martian Kansas anymore," said Josh Anderson, Ingenuity operations lead at JPL, in a statement. "We're flying over the dried-up remnants of an ancient river that is filled with sand dunes, boulders, and rocks, and surrounded by hills that could have us for lunch. And while we recently upgraded the navigation software onboard to help determine safe airfields, every flight is still a white-knuckler...."

Ingenuity's team is already planning its next set of flights because the chopper has to remain at the right distance to stay in touch with the fast-moving rover, which can drive for hundreds of meters in a single day... The Perseverance rover is moving on from an area that could contain hydrated silica, which might have information about a warmer, wetter Martian past and any potential signs of life from billions of years ago. Up next is Mount Julian, a site that will provide the rover with a panoramic view into Belva Crater.

Ingenuity's journey has demonstrated how useful aircraft can be on space missions, scouting places that rovers can't go or helping plot a safe path to the next destination.

The European Space Agency's Juice probe has blasted off on a landmark mission to Jupiter's moons, rising on a plume of white from its launchpad in Kourou, French Guiana, on the north-eastern shoulder of South America. From a report: The mission, which was delayed for 24 hours after lightning threatened to strike on Thursday, intends to uncover the secrets of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, its enormous polar auroras, and how its mighty magnetic field shapes conditions on the gas giant's nearby moons. It is the moons themselves that are the main attraction. Despite the frigid conditions that prevail, nearly half a billion miles from the sun, Juice will visit three of Jupiter's moons -- Europa, Callisto and Ganymede -- which harbour deep liquid water oceans beneath their icy surfaces.

The discovery of sub-surface saltwater oceans on Jupiter's moons has pushed them high up the list of solar system venues to explore for signs of life and habitability. If hydrothermal vents -- found on ocean floors all over Earth -- exist on the Jovian moons, they may provide enough warmth for life to thrive in the darkness. "I'm so thrilled to see Juice finally on its way," said Prof Andrew Coates, from the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, who helped build two instruments on Juice called Pep and Janus. "This is an excellent mission to look at habitability of Jupiter's moons."

A NASA probe sent to observe Jupiter's swarm of asteroids recently caught the first glimpse of its rocky targets, capturing deep-space images of four of the mysterious Trojans. Gizmodo reports: The Lucy spacecraft used its highest resolution imager, L'LORRI (Lucy LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager), to photograph four Trojan asteroids during a two-day period from March 25 to 27, NASA announced on Thursday. The first asteroids to be seen by Lucy are: Eurybates, Polymele, Leucus, and Orus. Those four are part of two large groups of rocky bodies that lead and follow Jupiter as it orbits the Sun. Lucy is still a long way from reaching its asteroid targets, which are currently about 330 million miles (530 million kilometers) away from the probe. That's more than three times the average distance between Earth and the Sun, according to NASA.

The initial set of images are the first in a series of observations to measure how the Trojan asteroids reflect light when seen from a higher angle than ground-based observations, according to NASA. The images will then help NASA decide on exposure times to use for Lucy's close-up observations of the asteroids.

A team of researchers in Florida have created a way to mimic nature's ability to reflect light and create beautifully vivid color without absorbing any heat like traditional pigments do. Debashis Chanda, a nanoscience researcher with the University of Central Florida, and his team published their findings in the journal Science Advances. NPR reports: Beyond just the beautiful arrays of color that structure can create, Chanda also found that unlike pigments, structural paint does not absorb any infrared light. Infrared light is the reason black cars get hot on sunny days and asphalt is hot to the touch in summer. Infrared light is absorbed as heat energy into these surfaces -- the darker the color, the more the surface colored with it can absorb. That's why people are advised to wear lighter colors in hotter climates and why many buildings are painted bright whites and beiges. Chanda found that structural color paint does not absorb any heat. It reflects all infrared light back out. This means that in a rapidly warming climate, this paint could help communities keep cool.

Chanda and his team tested the impact this paint had on the temperature of buildings covered in structural paint versus commercial paints and they found that structural paint kept surfaces 20 to 30 degrees cooler. This, Chanda said, is a massive new tool that could be used to fight rising temperatures caused by global warming while still allowing us to have a bright and colorful world. Unlike white and black cars, structural paint's ability to reflect heat isn't determined by how dark the color is. Blue, black or purple structural paints reflect just as much heat as bright whites or beige. This opens the door for more colorful, cooler architecture and design without having to worry about the heat.

It's not just cleaner, Chanda said. Structural paint weighs much less than pigmented paint and doesn't fade over time like traditional pigments. "A raisin's worth of structural paint is enough to cover the front and back of a door," he said. Unlike pigments which rely on layers of pigment to achieve depth of color, structural paint only requires one thin layer of particles to fully cover a surface in color. This means that structural paint could be a boon for aerospace engineers who rely on the lowest weight possible to achieve higher fuel efficiency. The possibilities for structural paint are endless and Chanda hopes that cans of structural paint will soon be available in hardware stores.

The 2019 release of the first image of a black hole was hailed as a significant scientific achievement. But truth be told, it was a bit blurry -- or, as one astrophysicist involved in the effort called it, a "fuzzy orange donut." Scientists on Thursday unveiled a new and improved image of this black hole -- a behemoth at the center of a nearby galaxy -- mining the same data used for the earlier one but improving its resolution by employing image reconstruction algorithms to fill in gaps in the original telescope observations. From a report: Hard to observe by their very nature, black holes are celestial entities exerting gravitational pull so strong no matter or light can escape. The ring of light -- that is, the material being sucked into the voracious object -- seen in the new image is about half the width of how it looked in the previous picture. There is also a larger "brightness depression" at the center - basically the donut hole - caused by light and other matter disappearing into the black hole.

The image remains somewhat blurry due to the limitations of the data underpinning it -- not quite ready for a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, but an advance from the 2019 version. This supermassive black hole resides in a galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, about 54 million light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). This galaxy, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun, is larger and more luminous than our Milky Way. Further reading: The Black Hole Image Data Was Spread Across 5 Petabytes Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives (2019).

A historic mission to Jupiter is about to blast off. The European Space Agency's spacecraft nicknamed Juice -- for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer -- is set to begin an eight-year journey toward the planet and three of its largest moons. From a report: Juice is scheduled to launch Friday morning Eastern Time from a spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, after an earlier attempt was scrubbed because of lightning risk. Once it arrives at Jupiter, Juice will study some of the moons in great detail, mapping their icy surfaces and searching for subsurface oceans that could harbor life.

While the spacecraft can't detect life, the mission should help confirm whether the moons -- Europa, Callisto and Ganymede -- have the conditions necessary to sustain life. The trio, along with the volcanically active moon Io, were discovered by Galileo more than four centuries ago and are among the nearly 100 moons orbiting Jupiter, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. About half an hour after its launch, which will be livestreamed Friday, Juice will separate from its rocket and make contact with mission controllers on Earth. The solar-powered spacecraft will then deploy solar wings that measure roughly 900 square-feet and expand into a cross-like configuration on both sides of the craft. In the following 17 days, Juice is expected to deploy its antennas and instrument-containing booms and begin its cosmic sojourn, which people can follow on the agency's website.

The journey will be a roundabout one. Juice will complete flybys of Earth, the moon, and Venus over the next six years to adjust its trajectory and gain enough speed to get to Jupiter. Jupiter is, on average, about 444 million miles from Earth, yet Juice will travel nearly 4 billion miles before getting there, according to Mr. Sarri. It will also have to withstand temperatures from close to 500 degrees Fahrenheit around Venus to nearly minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit at Jupiter. If all goes well, Juice is scheduled to arrive at Jupiter by July 2031. Once there, the craft will complete flybys of the three moons before entering Ganymede's orbit to collect further data, which are sent back to Earth using an 8-foot antenna.

An unprecedented analysis of how cancers grow has revealed an "almost infinite" ability of tumors to evolve and survive, say scientists. The BBC reports: The results of tracking lung cancers for nine years left the research team "surprised" and "in awe" at the formidable force they were up against. They have concluded we need more focus on prevention, with a "universal" cure unlikely any time soon. The study -- entitled TracerX -- provides the most in-depth analysis of how cancers evolve and what causes them to spread. More than 400 people -- treated at 13 hospitals in the UK -- had biopsies taken from different parts of their lung cancer as the disease progressed.

The evolutionary analysis has been published across seven separate studies in the journals Nature and Nature Medicine. The research showed:

- Highly aggressive cells in the initial tumor are the ones that ultimately end up spreading around the body
- Tumors showing higher levels of genetic "chaos" were more likely to relapse after surgery to other parts of the body
- Analyzing blood for fragments of tumor DNA meant signs of it returning could be spotted up to 200 days before appearing on a CT scan
- The cellular machinery that reads the instructions in our DNA can become corrupted in cancerous cells making them more aggressive. "I don't think we're going to be able to come up with universal cures," said Prof Charles Swanton, from the Francis Crick Institute and University College London. "If we want to make the biggest impact we need to focus on prevention, early detection and early detection of relapse."

Last week, Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer vaccines for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions by 2030. The new analysis reported on by the BBC casts doubt on that timeline.

"I don't want to sound too depressing about this, but I think -- given the almost infinite possibilities in which a tumor can evolve, and the very large number of cells in a late-stage tumor, which could be several hundred billion cells -- then achieving cures in all patients with late-stage disease is a formidable task," said Swanton.

Researchers have discovered that in the exotic conditions of the early universe, waves of gravity may have shaken space-time so hard that they spontaneously created radiation. Universe Today reports: a team of researchers have discovered that an exotic form of parametric resonance may have even occurred in the extremely early universe. Perhaps the most dramatic event to occur in the entire history of the universe was inflation. This is a hypothetical event that took place when our universe was less than a second old. During inflation our cosmos swelled to dramatic proportions, becoming many orders of magnitude larger than it was before. The end of inflation was a very messy business, as gravitational waves sloshed back and forth throughout the cosmos.

Normally gravitational waves are exceedingly weak. We have to build detectors that are capable of measuring distances less than the width of an atomic nucleus to find gravitational waves passing through the Earth. But researchers have pointed out that in the extremely early universe these gravitational waves may have become very strong. And they may have even created standing wave patterns where the gravitational waves weren't traveling but the waves stood still, almost frozen in place throughout the cosmos. Since gravitational waves are literally waves of gravity, the places where the waves are the strongest represent an exceptional amount of gravitational energy.

The researchers found that this could have major consequences for the electromagnetic field existing in the early universe at that time. The regions of intense gravity may have excited the electromagnetic field enough to release some of its energy in the form of radiation, creating light. This result gives rise to an entirely new phenomenon: the production of light from gravity alone. There's no situation in the present-day universe that could allow this process to happen, but the researchers have shown that the early universe was a far stranger place than we could possibly imagine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Red sand shifts under the boots of the crew members. In the distance, it appears that a rocky mountain range is rising out of the Martian horizon. A thin layer of red dust coats the solar panels and equipment necessary for the year-long mission. This landscape isn't actually 145m miles away. We are in a corner of the Nasa Johnson Space Center in Houston, in a large white warehouse right next to the disc golf course and on the tram route for tourists and school groups. But starting this June, four volunteer test subjects will spend a year locked inside, pretending to live on Mars. Nasa researchers say they're doing everything they can to make it as realistic as possible so they can learn the impact that a year in isolation with limited resources has on human health. "As we move from low Earth orbit, from moon to Mars, we're going to have a lot more resource restrictions than we have on the International Space Station and we're going to be a lot further from Earth or any help from Earth," said Dr Grace Douglas, the principal investigator for the Crew Health Performance Exploration Analog, or Chapea for short.

The four crew members will live in a small housing unit that was constructed using a huge 3D printer to simulate how Nasa may create structures on the Martian surface with Martian soil. They'll conduct experiments, grow food and exercise -- and be tested regularly so scientists can learn what a year on Mars could do to the body and mind. "This is really an extreme circumstance," said Dr Suzanne Bell, who leads the Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory at the Nasa Johnson Space Center. "You're asking for individuals to live and work together for over a one-year period. Not only will they have to get along well, but they'll also have to perform well together."

Watching four people spend a year in a 3D-printed box is Nasa's next small step toward landing humans on the surface of Mars. Nasa says it hopes to send humans to the red planet as early as the 2030s. The first mission could be a nine-month trip one-way, and could leave the astronauts on the surface for two and a half years before starting the long trip back home. Preparations for that trek are already well under way with the agency's Artemis program. Artemis is sending astronauts back to the Moon for the first time since 1972, including the first person of color and woman to walk on another celestial body. As part of the Artemis missions, Nasa is also launching Gateway, a space station that will orbit the Moon and serve as a pit stop for Mars-bound missions. Getting to the Moon means getting to Mars, and getting to Mars means testing the physical and behavioral health of a crew in isolation. That's where Chapea comes in.

According to the BBC, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile has traced the distribution of dark matter "on a quarter of the sky and across almost 14 billion years of time." From the report: In the image [here], the colored areas are the portions of the sky studied by the telescope. Orange regions show where there is more mass, or matter, along the line of sight; purple where there is less. Typical features are hundreds of millions of light-years across. The grey/white areas show where contaminating light from dust in our Milky Way galaxy has obscured a deeper view. The distribution of matter agrees very well with scientific predictions.

ACT observations indicate that the "lumpiness" of the Universe and the rate at which it has been expanding after 14 billion years of evolution are just what you'd expect from the standard model of cosmology, which has Einstein's theory of gravity (general relativity) at its foundation. Recent measurements that used an alternative background light, one emitted from stars in galaxies rather than the CMB, had suggested the Universe lacked sufficient lumpiness.

Another tension concerns the rate at which the Universe is expanding - a number called the Hubble constant. When [the European Space Agency's Planck observatory] looked at temperature fluctuations across the CMB, it determined the rate to be about 67 kilometres per second per megaparsec (A megaparsec is 3.26 million light-years). Or put another way - the expansion increases by 67km per second for every 3.26 million light-years we look further out into space. A tension arises because measurements of the expansion in the nearby Universe, made using the recession from us of variable stars, clocks in at about 73km/s per megaparsec. It's a difference that can't easily be explained. ACT, employing its lensing technique to nail down the expansion rate, outputs a number similar to Planck's. "It's very close - about 68km/s per megaparsec," said Dr Mathew Madhavacheril from the the University of Pennsylvania. ACT team-member Prof Blake Sherwin from Cambridge University, UK, added: "We and Planck and several other probes are coming in on the lower side. Obviously, you could have a scenario where both the measurements are right and there's some new physics that explains the discrepancy. But we're using independent techniques, and I think we're now starting to close the loophole where we could all be riding this new physics and one of the measurements has to be wrong."

Papers describing the new results have been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal and posted on the ACT website.

The New York Times added a new daily puzzle game to its library in the form of Digits. GameSpot reports: This collection of math conundrums tasks you with reaching a designated number by using six numbers that you're free to multiply, divide, subtract, or add up to reach the final result, so long as your process doesn't create any fractions or negative numbers.

Currently in beta and only available for this week, there'll be five of these math puzzles to solve every day. These aren't one-and-done puzzles like Wordle, and depending on the path you choose to solve one of these math mysteries, you'll be awarded 1-3 star ratings. If Digits proves to be popular with its readers, the New York Times will then start work on the further development of the game.

When Dr. Makenzie Lystrup was sworn in as the new director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center last week, she didn't take her oath of office on the Bible or the U.S. Constitution, but rather on a tome revered by space enthusiasts everywhere: Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. From a report: The book, published in 1994, is named after an iconic image of Earth, snapped by the Voyager I probe, that depicts the planet as a small speck smothered by the emptiness of space. That photo inspired astronomer Carl Sagan to write: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us." For many, the book serves as a reminder of humanity's place in the universe and the need to preserve our home planet, which makes it similar to holy scripture for a newly appointed NASA director. On Thursday, when Lystrup chose to place her left hand on a copy of Sagan's book while being sworn in by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a photographer captured the moment, and NASA Goddard's social media shared the image. The constitution does not require that government officials be sworn in using a particular text, just that they "shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution." Most U.S. politicians and officials end up using the Bible.

schwit1 shares a report from Inverse: On March 23, sky observers marveled at a gorgeous display of northern and southern lights. It was a reminder that when our Sun gets active, it can spark a phenomenon called "space weather." Aurorae are among the most benign effects of this phenomenon. At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms that can knock out satellites. The folks at Starlink found that out the hard way in February 2022. On January 29 that year, the Sun belched out a class M 1.1 flare and related coronal mass ejection. Material from the Sun traveled out on the solar wind and arrived at Earth a few days later. On February 3, Starlink launched a group of 49 satellites to an altitude only 130 miles above Earth's surface. They didn't last long, and now solar physicists know why.

A group of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America took a closer look at the specifics of that storm. Their analysis identified a mass of plasma that impacted our planet's magnetosphere. The actual event was a halo coronal mass ejection from an active region in the northeast quadrant of the Sun. The material traveled out at around 690 kilometers per second as a shock-driving magnetic cloud. Think of it as a long ropy mass of material writhing its way through space. As it traveled, it expanded and at solar-facing satellites -- including STEREO-A, which took a direct hit from it -- made observations. Eventually, the cloud smacked into Earth's magnetosphere creating a geomagnetic storm.

The atmosphere thickened enough that it affected the newly launched Starlink stations. They started to experience atmospheric drag, which caused them to deorbit and burn up on the way down. It was an expensive lesson in space weather and provided people on Earth with a great view of what happens when satellites fall back to Earth. It was also that could have been avoided if they'd delayed their launch to account for the ongoing threat.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Keeping enough qubits in their ideal state long enough for computations has so far proved a challenge. In a new experiment, scientists were able to keep a qubit in that state for twice as long as normal. Along the way, they demonstrated the practicality of quantum error correction (QEC), a process that keeps quantum information intact for longer by introducing room for redundancy and error removal. The idea of QEC has been around since the mid-90s, but it's now been shown to work in real time. Part of the reason for the experiment's success was the introduction of machine learning AI algorithms to tweak the error correction routine.

"For the first time, we have shown that making the system more redundant and actively detecting and correcting quantum errors provided a gain in the resilience of quantum information," says physicist Michel Devoret, from Yale University in Connecticut. [...] Like many quantum physics experiments, this one was run at ultra-cold temperatures -- a hundred times colder than outer space, in this case. The setup has to be carefully controlled in order to protect the qubit as much as possible. The error-corrected qubit lasted for 1.8 milliseconds -- only a blink as we might experience it, but an impressive span for a qubit operating on the quantum level. Now the research team will be able to refine the process further. "Our experiment shows that quantum error correction is a real practical tool," says Devoret. "It's more than just a proof-of-principle demonstration." In this case the breakthrough was down to several different factors, rather than one change. The QEC code was actually one from 2001, but improvements to it as well as upgrades to the quantum circuit fabrication process made a difference.

"Our experiment validates a cornerstone assumption of quantum computing, and this makes me very excited about the future of this field," says Volodymyr Sivak, a research scientist at Google and formerly at Yale University.

The research has been published in Nature.

"There's an invisible monster on the loose," NASA wrote on Thursday, "barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. " This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy... Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. "We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut...

The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to... Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole... Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole. Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy.