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This week we learned about the discovery of a cosmic rock as large as a football field that’s been keeping Earth company for at least 100 years, vast ancient cities hidden in the Cambodian jungle and Elon Musk’s desire to prevent an artificial superintelligence from turning him into its pet.
Astronomers Find Moon’s Tiny Buddy
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The asteroid wanders as far as 100 times the distance from here to the moon and then drops as close as 38 times the moon’s distance, or 9 million miles. Image credit: NASA
University of Hawaii astronomers have found a tiny asteroid that circles Earth like a faraway microscopic moon. The team is still in the dark about the size of the rock, called HO3. They believe it could be slightly shorter than the length of an Olympic-size swimming pool but no longer than a soccer field. It wanders as far as 100 times the distance from here to the moon and then drops as close as 38 times the moon’s distance, or 9 million miles. Unlike its killer cousin that wiped out the dinosaurs, it poses no danger to our planet. “Our calculations indicate 2016 HO3 has been a stable quasi-satellite of Earth for almost a century, and it will continue to follow this pattern as Earth’s companion for centuries to come,” said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “The asteroid’s loops around Earth drift a little ahead or behind from year to year, but when they drift too far forward or backward, Earth’s gravity is just strong enough to reverse the drift.”
Wear A Neural Net Or Become An AI Pet
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Elon Musk doesn’t “love the idea of being a house cat.” He says that a neural lace that can enhance the brain may be a solution. Images credit top and above: Getty Images
Elon Musk believes we will need to develop special neural implants called neural nets to prevent artificial “superintelligence” from turning us into pets, or worse, when it emerges. “I don’t love the idea of being a house cat, but what’s the solution?” the Tesla Motors and Space X founder told Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher during a free-ranging interview at Recode’s Code conference this month. “I think one of the solutions that seems maybe the best is to add an AI layer. Just as your cortex works symbiotically with your limbic system, your third digital layer could work symbiotically with you.” He believes that we will be able to deploy “neural lace” through the bloodstream and that the implementation wouldn’t require open brain surgery. Perhaps to hedge his bet, Musk also sponsors OpenAI, a non-profit supporting open AI research. “Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” the company says on its website.
Airborne “Laser Radar” Finds Vast Hidden Cities In Cambodian Jungle
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LIDAR found “previously undocumented cities” built by early Khmer societies and similar to Angkor Wat. Above: Ta Prohm Temple in Angkor Thom Cambodia. Image credit: Getty Images
Archeologists using powerful airborne laser-powered sensing tool called LIDAR – it stands for Light Detection and Ranging – have discovered vast lost cities in the Cambodian jungle. They said the “most extensive archeological LIDAR acquisition ever completed” allowed them to map “previously undocumented cities” built by early Khmer societies and similar to Angkor Wat, the famous ancient temple complex in Cambodia. The findings were reported in the Journal of Archeological Science. The Guardian newspaper reported that the cities are between 900 and 1,400 years old and that some “rival the size” of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. “We have entire cities discovered beneath the forest that no one knew were there – at Preah Khan of Kompong Svay and, it turns out, we uncovered only a part of Mahendraparvata on Phnom Kulen [in the 2012 survey] … this time we got the whole deal and it’s big, the size of Phnom Penh big,” Australian archaeologist Damian Evans told The Guardian. This is just one of many applications for LIDAR. Google uses it for its self-driving cars, and the technology gives eyes to robots moving on their own around factories.
Hold The Asteroid Theory, Mammals Thrived Before Dinosaurs Died Off
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Mammals and dinosaurs coexisted for as long as 20 million years before an asteroid wiped out the large lizards 66 million years ago. Image credit: Getty Images
A pair of researchers from the U.S. and the U.K. studying ancient fossils believe that mammals and dinosaurs coexisted for as long as 20 million years before an asteroid wiped out the large lizards 66 million years ago. “The traditional view is that mammals were suppressed during the ‘age of the dinosaurs’ and underwent a rapid diversification immediately following the extinction of the dinosaurs,” one of the authors, Elis Newham from the University of Southampton, said in a news release. “However, our findings were that therian mammals, the ancestors of most modern mammals, were already diversifying considerably before the extinction event and the event also had a considerably negative impact on mammal diversity.” What made the mammals thrive under the dinosaur’s feet? “We can’t know for sure, but flowering plants might have offered new seeds and fruits for the mammals,” said lead author David Grossnickle, a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. “And, if the plants co-evolved with new insects to pollinate them, the insects could have also been a food source for early mammals.” The research was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society.
Icelandic Power Plant Turns CO2 Emissions Into Stone Within Months
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The study’s co-author Sandra Snaebjornsdottir is holding an experimental drill core laced with solidified carbonate, apparently produced by a new process that turns carbon emissions to stone when pumped underground. Photo credit: Kevin Krajick/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Scientists at the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant in Iceland – the largest such facility in the world – started pumping CO2 escaping from thermal vents back underground and then used a chemical process to turn it into stone within months. “This means that we can pump down large amounts of CO2 and store it in a very safe way over a very short period of time,” said Martin Stute, a hydrologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who co-authored the study. “In the future, we could think of using this for power plants in places where there’s a lot of basalt—and there are many such places.” The research was published in the journal Science.