In a rare news conference, Xu Dazhe, the head of the China National Space Administration, has reiterated the country’s plan to land on Mars by 2020, according to the Associated Press. Originally announced in January of this year, Xu confirms that the project is proceeding with the government’s full support.
The Chinese mission will follow in the footsteps of the U.S. Viking 1, which landed on the red planet more than forty years ago. Xu announced that China will seek international collaborations and consider civilian applications of space technology for things like navigation, remote sensing, and communications.
This is China’s second significant space exploration announcement this week. On Thursday, the state-run Xinhua news agency announced China’s plans to launch a “core module” which will serve as the backbone of the country’s first space station, Tianhe-1. The country plans to construct Tianhe-1 (named after the Chinese word for galaxy) by 2018. With the International Space Station approaching retirement in 2024, Tianhe-1 may serve as the only operational space station.
It’s been thirteen years since China performed it’s first crewed mission, becoming the third nation to accomplish independent human spaceflight in 2003. But space exploration hasn’t always been a smooth venture for China. In 2013, the country’s celebrated Jade Rabbit rover landed on the moon before falling prey to technical troubles.
Mars has also been in the news a bit this week. Elon Musk shared his want to build a city on the planet. NASA solicited proposals for deep space habitats.
And NASA has set its sights on a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s, calling the red planet “a rich destination for scientific discovery and robotic and human exploration…” according to the agency’s website. It wouldn’t be fair to call this a race, but perhaps the ambitions of China and SpaceX will give new significance to NASA’s mission.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.