NASA has been searching for spiders on Mars since they were first spotted a few years ago. It was a daunting task. The team behind the Mars Reconnaissance Obiter had too many images to analyze without a little help. So they asked citizen scientists to offer a hand.
Martian spiders aren’t creatures, they’re features that are carved into the landscape by seasonal slabs of dry ice. When winter falls upon the Red Planet’s south pole, some of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere condenses and forms polar ice caps. As spring returns, these caps thaw from the bottom up, the solid ice evaporates directly into a gas, and the process cuts “araneiform” (spider-like) channels into the landscape.
This geological process can’t be found on Earth so observing these features is of particular interest to scientists. Through the Planet Four: Terrains platform they asked volunteers to scan and classify images from the orbiter’s Context Camera (CTX) and High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) to identify some of these unique formations. A year later, nearly 8,500 registered volunteers have helped scientists target specific regions for further imaging.
“It’s heartwarming to see so many citizens of planet Earth donate their time to help study Mars,” HiRISE Deputy Principal Investigator Candice Hansen said in a press release. “Thanks to the discovery power of so many people, we’re using HiRISE to take images of places we might not have studied without this assistance.”
The volunteers’s observations have helped identify 20 new regions for HiRISE’s seasonal monitoring of Mars.
But the hunt for spiders and other unique formations has just begun. With a fresh batch of CTX images recently added to the Planet Four: Terrain database, NASA welcomes any keen-eyed citizen scientists to join in the exploration and help unlock the geological secrets of the red planet.
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.