Month: August 2023

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Discussion about artificial intelligence is everywhere these days—even the Vatican. On Tuesday, Pope Francis issued a communiqué announcing the theme for World Day of Peace 2024 as “Artificial Intelligence and Peace,” emphasizing the potential impact of AI on human life and calling for responsible use, ethical reflection, and vigilance to prevent negative consequences.

It's been a wild year for AI in the public eye, with the rise of ChatGPT and Bing Chat spurring concerns over AI takeover, several prominent but controversial letters and statements warning that AI could potentially threaten human civilization, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman making a world tour with heads of state. Talk of AI regulation has been rampant. The concept of ethical dangers from AI has been high-profile enough that even the Pope feels the need to address it.

In the communiqué, Pope Francis' office called for "an open dialogue on the meaning of these new technologies, endowed with disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects." Echoing common ethical sentiments related to AI, he said society needs to be vigilant about the technology so that "a logic of violence and discrimination does not take root in the production and use of such devices, at the expense of the most fragile and excluded."

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After a yearslong Amazon probe that collected millions of documents and conducted dozens of interviews, the Federal Trade Commission next week will meet with Amazon representatives before likely filing one of the agency's biggest antitrust lawsuits yet, Politico reported.

Known as a "last-rites meeting," these discussions could serve as Amazon's last chance to dodge an FTC lawsuit that Bloomberg has described as "the Big One." No one is sure what aspects of Amazon's business the lawsuit could target, but if the FTC succeeds in court, it could result in a forced breakup or restructuring of Amazon's $1.3 trillion e-commerce operation, The Wall Street Journal reported.

There has been much speculation this year over what the FTC's complaint will cover. The agency has been investigating a wide range of concerning aspects of Amazon's business since 2019, Bloomberg reported. Everything from how Amazon bundles its services to how Amazon treats sellers has drawn FTC scrutiny, as has Amazon's advertising and cloud computing businesses. But the "main allegation," Bloomberg reported in June, "is expected to be that Amazon leverages its power to reward online merchants that use its logistics services and punish those who don’t."

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By now, most of us are aware of the poor state of reliability when it comes to charging electric vehicles in public. In fact, it's safe to say that the superior charging experience within Tesla's walled Supercharger garden has been the prime consideration for other automakers to buy into what's now called the North American Charging Standard, despite little reason to believe that third-party charging networks will be any more reliable simply because they change plugs. Happily, the federal government has enacted new uptime requirements to qualify for the $5 billion set aside for high-speed charging networks as part of the New Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program.

To help it get there, EV charging network ChargePoint has opened a new Network Operations Center to monitor its network of more than 243,000 charging ports in North America and Europe.

It says that once the system is fully implemented, the company plans to get to nearly 100 percent uptime, up from what it says is 96 percent today. ChargePoint says that in the absence of a standard measure of uptime, it uses "the portion of time each individual charging port can dispense energy, as a driver pulling in for a charge would expect, not averaged across a bank of charging stations at a single address."

Enlarge / This view of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was generated using data collected by the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard the agency’s Perseverance Mars rover on Aug. 2, 2023. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)

By the standard of some of its previous flights, the most recent voyage of NASA's intrepid Ingenuity helicopter on Mars was nothing special. Over a period of 24 seconds, the small helicopter rose to an altitude 5 meters above the red planet's dusty surface and then touched back down in the same spot.

During some of its past flights, Ingenuity has flown for nearly three minutes at a time and traversed as far as 700 meters across Martian terrain. In fact, after landing on Mars more than two years ago as part of the Perseverance mission, the helicopter is arguably one of NASA's greatest exploration feats of all time.

Mission success for Ingenuity was completing five relatively short flights. However, since its first test flight in April 2021, the helicopter has exceeded all expectations by flying more than 50 different sorties across Mars and surviving long and dark winters.

Enlarge / An artist's conception of an ice-encrusted rogue planet. (credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

Planets that go rogue orbit no star. They wander the vacuum of space alone, having been kicked out of their star systems by gravitational interactions with other planets and stars. Nobody really knows how many rogue planets could be out there, but that may change in a few years.

Researchers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Osaka University in Japan have used the phenomenon of gravitational microlensing to estimate the number of rogue planets that could be revealed in the heart of the Milky Way. They analyzed data from the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) survey that searched for gravitational microlensing events from 2006 to 2014 to figure out how many more of these events we could expect to find with NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

There are currently only 70 known rogue planets, but there could be hundreds more out there. The researchers now suggest that Roman could discover at least 400 Earth-mass rogues meandering through our galaxy.