All posts tagged: Formation

NASA’s Mars Rover Comes Across Formation That Looks Like the Scales of a Massive Cosmic Reptile

NASA’s Mars Rover Comes Across Formation That Looks Like the Scales of a Massive Cosmic Reptile

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Far away on the surface of Mars, NASA’s Curiosity Rover took a side quest this weekend and captured images of a mysterious roadside attraction: a rocky surface that resembles the scales of a cosmically large reptile that has scientists stumped on its origin. Kevin M. Gill, engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, posted the images showing this distinctive polygonal rock surface from the vantage point of the trusty rover that’s been exploring the Red Planet since 2012; the rover was on its way to investigate a small crater when it happened upon the intriguing landscape feature. “We’ve seen polygon-patterned rocks like these before, but they didn’t seem quite this dramatically abundant, stretching across the ground for meters and meters in our Mastcam mosaics,” read a statement from the space agency. “This week we continued to collect lots of images and chemical data that will help us distinguish between different hypotheses for how the honeycomb textures formed.” One intriguing …

Starts With A Bang #128 – Planet formation and proto-protoplanets

Starts With A Bang #128 – Planet formation and proto-protoplanets

Published by Jenni Sidey

Whenever a new star forms, several processes appear to be nearly universal. A cloud of cold molecular gas contracts, fragments, and rapidly collapses in certain places. The densest, coldest clumps of gas contract first, drawing in larger and larger amounts of matter onto them. A large, massive enough clump will heat up and have a random shape: collapsing along the shortest axis first, forming a protostar at the center surrounded by a disk of material. That’s where the story of planet formation begins. Assuming the conditions in the disk are sufficient, clumps will begin to form, and over hundreds of thousands to millions of years, the first protoplanets and then full-fledged planets will arise: a relatively rapid cosmic process, that’s usually all complete within a mere 10 million years: a blink of a cosmic eye in the history of our own 4.5 billion year old Solar System. However, by looking at the youngest stellar and planetary systems, we can uncover many details that are common to planetary systems in general, and in turn, we can …

Goodbye, Llama? Meta launches new proprietary AI model Muse Spark — first since Superintelligence Labs’ formation

Goodbye, Llama? Meta launches new proprietary AI model Muse Spark — first since Superintelligence Labs’ formation

Published by skeptic

Meta has been one of the most interesting companies of the generative AI era — initially gaining a loyal and huge following of users for the release of its mostly open source Llama family of large language models (LLMs) beginning in early 2023 but coming to screeching halt last year after Llama 4 debuted to mixed reviews and ultimately, admissions of gaming benchmarks. That bumpy rollout of Llama 4 apparently spurred Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to totally overhaul Meta’s AI operations in the summer of 2025, forming a new internal division, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) which he recruited 29-year-old former Scale AI co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang to lead as Chief AI Officer. Now, today, Meta is showing us the fruits of that effort: Muse Spark, a new proprietary model that Wang says (posting on rival social network X, used more often by the machine learning community) is “the most powerful model that meta has released,” and has “support for tool-use, visual chain of thought, & multi-agent orchestration.” He also says it will …

Cinema United Confirms Formation of Filmmaker Leadership Council

Cinema United Confirms Formation of Filmmaker Leadership Council

Published by Daniella Wilson

A coalition of filmmakers are uniting to “champion the future of cinema worldwide.” Cinema United confirmed today the formation of a Filmmaker Leadership Council that will provide “meaningful support” for theatrical exhibition. It will be led by blockbuster veteran Jerry Bruckheimer and Oscar winning producer Emma Thomas as chair and vice chair respectively. Rounding out the council will be Oscar winners Ryan Coogler and Brad Bird, and Oscar nominees Jason Reitman and Celine Song. Per the organization, the council will work with Cinema United to “provide vital feedback and recommendations on the most pressing issues facing theatrical exhibition today,” such as consolidation, windows, promotion, marketing, innovation and technology. Cinema United senior consultant Greg Foster is credited with being instrumental in the council formation and he will serve as executive director. “Movies that captivate audiences and take their breath away — that’s why so many of us got into this business in the first place. There is nothing like that feeling of sitting in a dark theatre, the sound washing over you, watching something unfold on …

PPPL’s MRI experiment sheds light on planet and star formation

PPPL’s MRI experiment sheds light on planet and star formation

Published by skeptic

An award-winning team of scientists has been able to recreate cosmic processes in a laboratory setting, confirming a phenomenon that explains the formation of stars and planets. Editor Georgie Purcell spoke to one of the lead researchers, Hantao Ji, to learn more. Imagine being able to see stars and planets forming right in front of you. After decades of work, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University have managed to achieve just that. For over 20 years, the Magnetorotational Instability (MRI) Experiment at PPPL has been researching how swirling matter can form stars, planets, and supermassive black holes. In a recent discovery that has earned them the prestigious John Dawson Award in Plasma Physics, the team has officially confirmed a phenomenon, called MRI,  that explains planet and star formation, as well as matter falling onto neutron stars and black holes. The experiment consists of understanding and recreating the MRI process involving accretion disks of swirling matter in space that wobble in a very specific way. The process …

JWST solves a longstanding mystery of giant planet formation

JWST solves a longstanding mystery of giant planet formation

Published by Jenni Sidey

Gas giants are massive worlds made mostly of hydrogen and helium. They lack solid surfaces, and in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn are the best-known examples. Beyond our cosmic neighborhood, astronomers have found gas giants that dwarf Jupiter, blurring the line between planets and brown dwarfs, sometimes called failed stars. How these enormous planets form has been a long-running puzzle in astronomy. Now, new research led by scientists at the University of California San Diego is offering a clearer answer. Using fresh data from the James Webb Space Telescope, the team studied a distant planetary system called HR 8799. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggest that even the biggest gas giants can form in ways similar to Jupiter and Saturn, despite their extreme size. The work was led by Jean-Baptiste Ruffio, a research scientist at UC San Diego, alongside Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Quinn Konopacky. Jerry Xuan, a 51 Pegasi b Fellow at UCLA, played a key role by building detailed atmospheric models that helped decode the telescope data. The …

TikTok Announces Formation Of US Majority-Owned Joint Venture To Prevent Ban

TikTok Announces Formation Of US Majority-Owned Joint Venture To Prevent Ban

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times, TikTok said on Jan. 22 it has formed an American majority-owned joint venture that would oversee data security and the content ecosystem in a bid to maintain its operations in the United States. TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC will operate as an independent entity overseen by a seven-member board of directors that includes TikTok CEO Shou Chew, Silver Lake co-CEO Egon Durban, Oracle executive vice president Kenneth Glueck, among others, according to a statement. “The majority American owned Joint Venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for U.S. users,” TikTok said in the statement. The joint venture will be led by CEO Adam Presser and Chief Security Officer Will Farrell and is backed by three managing investors—tech company Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and United Arab Emirates investment company MGX—each with a 15 percent stake. ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company of TikTok, retains a 19.9 percent stake, according to the statement. The …

Conversational AI can increase false memory formation by injecting slight misinformation in conversations

Conversational AI can increase false memory formation by injecting slight misinformation in conversations

Published by José Betancourt

An experimental study in the United States found that having a conversational AI insert slight misinformation into conversations with users increased false memory occurrence and reduced memories of correct information. The research was published in IUI ’25: Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. Human memory works through three main processes: encoding, storage, and retrieval, i.e., processes during which information is transformed, maintained, and later accessed in the brain (respectively). Encoding depends on attention and meaning, so information that is emotionally salient or well-organized is remembered better. Stored memories are not exact recordings of events; they can change over time. Retrieval of stored memories is a reconstructive process, meaning that memories are rebuilt each time they are recalled rather than simply replayed. In these processes, exploiting the reconstructive nature of memory, false memories can form. False memories are recollections of events or details that feel real but are inaccurate or entirely fabricated. They are formed through suggestion, imagination, repeated questioning, social influence, or confusion between similar experiences. During retrieval, the brain tends …

JWST spots a lemon-shaped exoplanet orbiting a pulsar — rewriting the rules of planet formation

JWST spots a lemon-shaped exoplanet orbiting a pulsar — rewriting the rules of planet formation

Published by Jenni Sidey

Surprised astronomers just discovered a world that blurs the line between planet and stellar remnant, hiding in a system known as a “black widow.” Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, researchers at the University of Chicago, Stanford University and the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington studied a Jupiter-mass companion circling a millisecond pulsar, PSR J2322–2650. What they found was a chemical outlier, with an atmosphere dominated by helium and molecular carbon chains that almost never survive in a typical planet’s air. “This was an absolute surprise,” said study co-author Peter Gao of the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington. “I remember after we got the data down, our collective reaction was ‘What the heck is this?’ It’s extremely different from what we expected.” The results, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, describe PSR J2322–2650b as a world with soot-like clouds and carbon chemistry so extreme that researchers think carbon could condense deep inside and form diamonds. The biggest puzzle is not what Webb saw. It is how this object formed at all. …

Strange lemon-shaped exoplanet defies the rules of planet formation

Strange lemon-shaped exoplanet defies the rules of planet formation

Published by skeptic

An artist’s impression of PSR J2322-2650b NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI) Astronomers have found what appears to be one of the strangest known worlds in the universe. It orbits a type of rapidly spinning neutron star called a pulsar – this in itself is unusual, but it is far from the weirdest thing about the exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b. Michael Zhang at the University of Chicago and his colleagues spotted the odd planet, which is more than 2000 light years away from Earth, via the James Webb Space Telescope, and immediately noticed that something about it was unusual. The spectrum of light they measured coming from it didn’t show the usual water and carbon dioxide we would expect to find on a Jupiter-mass world like this one, but instead molecules of carbon. We have never seen molecular carbon in the atmosphere of any exoplanet before, because any carbon in a planet’s atmosphere is far more likely to bind to other atoms than to itself. “In order to have molecular carbon in the atmosphere, you have …