More than five years after it landed on the red planet, NASA’s Curiosity Rover is still cruising around and discovering curious things that have scientists here on Earth scratching their heads. While perusing the latest batch of photos taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), something unusual caught the eye of researcher Barry DiGregorio, author of Mars: The Living Planet and The Microbes of Mars.
It could be a ground-breaking discovery, he told the website Inside Outer Space. “They look remarkably similar to Ordovician trace fossils I have studied and photographed here on Earth,” he said. “If not trace fossils, what other geological explanations will NASA come up with?”
The rover has given us some stunning images of the red planet’s landscape, but tiny formations in a Martian rock may be the biggest find yet.
The stick-like features were first spotted in black-and-white photos takes by the rover. They’re quite unusual, so Curiosity is heading back there to take a closer look. “This site was so interesting that we backtracked to get to where the rover was parked for this plan,” wrote Curiosity team member Christopher Edwards in the January 3 Curiosity mission update.
The most likely explanation for the strange images is a natural formation, said Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute. “The Curiosity images really pique our curiosity,” he said. “It’s hard to tell what the wiggly sticks are, and a strictly mineral origin is, of course, the most plausible.”
The tiny tubes could be evidence of bioturbation, which is what occurs when organisms living in sediments leave an imprint on their structure. “A common example of bioturbation is the formation of worm burrows,” Lee explained. “The burrows, once refilled with sediments, fossilized, and then exposed by erosion, can end up looking like wiggly sticks.”
“To claim that we’re seeing bioturbation on Mars — which I did not say — would be an extraordinary claim,” he added.
The structures are very small, about a millimeter in width and five millimeters long. Their angular nature may indicate that they were formed by tiny crystals. Crystal molds, which are often found here on Earth, can form when crystals in rock dissolve. Even a roving laboratory like Curiosity would be hard pressed to make a definitive analysis, noted Ashwin Vasavada, project scientist for Curiousity.
“That’s pretty challenging on Earth to distinguish those two things without being able to put these things into a lab to look for the presence of organics,” he said. “We have a very limited capability overall to understand whether something is biological or not.”
Still, Curiosity does have some tools at its disposal, with Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer analysis planned for the site. The color camera on MAHLI will also be used to collect more detailed images for scientists to study.
“But I have to say, the imagery is really intriguing, and I hope Curiosity spends more time in the area to get to the bottom of this,” Lee said. “This is exciting!”
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.