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Here's what astronomers know so far about the 3rd interstellar visitor ever found
On July 1, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) detected what was first believed to be an asteroid. As calculations for its orbit progressed, it was found to be from outside our solar system, only the third interstellar object ever detected.
[One] thing that astronomers discovered early on was that, rather than being an asteroid, the interstellar interloper dubbed 3I/ATLAS was a comet.
"It is doing things that we expect comets to do. It's producing the types of gasses that we see comets produce. It's got a coma and a tail now pointed in the expected direction," said James Wray, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "I would say the short summary is it looks generally like a comet. But in detail, there are some intriguing differences from solar system comets."
CBC Lite
Kaolin tailings are Georgia’s hidden gateway to critical minerals in AI era
In the mid-1990s, a Department of Energy-funded project helped catalyze one of the most transformative breakthroughs in American energy history: the development of a horizontal drilling bit capable of withstanding the extreme conditions of shale formations.
Before this innovation, natural gas trapped in tight shale rock was considered too expensive and technically challenging to extract.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
NASA goes on an ESCAPADE – twin small, low-cost orbiters will examine Mars’ atmosphere
Assistant Professor Christopher Carr co-authored an article published in The Conversation that discusses NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars. Carr characterizes the mission as a “testament to a new era in spaceflight”.
The Conversation
A first of its kind C. elegans study uncovers the diversity and evolution of gene regulation
A team of researchers from the School of Biological Sciences found some answers to the mystery of gene regulation by turning to the trusty roundworm C. elegans, a frequently studied model organism that has contributed to many important discoveries. In their new study published in GENETICS, the researchers used a powerful new approach to compare gene activity across several types of wildly diverse worm strains from all over the world to uncover their regulatory structure.
In this first of its kind study, the researchers crossed each strain of worm with their standard N2 lab strain to make a hybrid offspring. They then used a modern and powerful technique called allele-specific RNA sequencing to determine how the genes were being used in these new strains, and which parent DNA is driving the gene’s activity.
Genes to Genomes
Will we know artificial general intelligence when we see it?
We may never agree on what AGI or “humanlike” AI means, or what suffices to prove it. As AI advances, machines will still make mistakes, and people will point to these and say the AIs aren’t really intelligent. Anna Ivanova, an assistant professor in the School of Psychology at Georgia Tech, was on a panel recently, and the moderator asked about AGI timelines. “We had one person saying that it might never happen,” Ivanova told me, “and one person saying that it already happened.” So the term “AGI” may be convenient shorthand to express an aim—or a fear—but its practical use may be limited. In most cases, it should come with an asterisk, and a benchmark.
IEEE Spectrum