An international crew of six will enter a geodesic dome atop Hawaii’s Mauna Loa on Thursday to begin an eight-month experiment on isolation and confinement. The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) Mission V is the fifth such NASA-funded research experiment.
HI-SEAS is intended to help reveal the requirements for individuals and teams during long-term space exploration, such as missions to Mars. As such, crew members are expected to abandon many of their usual creature comforts. During the duration of the experiment they will breathe recycled air, eat space food, and — if they want to leave their 13,570-cubic-foot dome — they’ll have to don a spacesuit.
The eight-month mission will demand interpersonal problem solving and team building, as the crew will live in close quarters with limited privacy, conducting various research studies. A mission control and research team will keep an eye on the crew during the experiment, including monitoring face-to-face interaction between using sociometric badges worn by crew members.
But the mission is about more than just studying human interactions. The crew will perform experiments on life systems management and geological fieldwork atop Mauna Loa to simulated the exploration tasks of astronauts on Mars.
“Since 2012, HI-SEAS has been contributing to NASA’s plans for long-duration space exploration,” Kim Binstead, HI-SEAS principal investigator, said in a statement. “We are an international collaboration of crew, researchers and mission support, and I’m proud of the part we play in helping reduce the barriers to a human journey to Mars.”
The latest HI-SEAS experiment ended in August when a crew of six exited the geodesic dome after a year, which was the second-longest isolation experiment of its kind. A 2010 Russian experiment lasted 520 days.
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.