It has been six years since the Mars rover Curiosity landed on the red planet, and now, the space vehicle has some news to share. NASA held a press conference to share the latest findings by its rover on June 7, revealing that Curiosity found methane and other organic compounds that serve as the foundations of life.
On Thursday, June 7 scientists from NASA and other research agencies around the world published two stories in the journal Science detailing data collected by the Mars rover. Curiosity has discovered “seasonally fluctuating levels of methane” in the atmosphere on Mars, as well as organic molecules in drilling samples. This is the first time that we’ve gathered concrete evidence of the existence of organic compounds on the red planet.
“Curiosity has shown that Gale crater [on Mars] was habitable around 3.5 billion years ago, with conditions comparable to those on the early Earth, where life evolved around that time,” Inge Loes ten Kate, a professor of Earth sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, wrote in Science.
But that’s not all — Curiosity’s data suggests that methane is now being released on a seasonal cycle, though we don’t quite understand the timing yet.
“There are active processes happening in the Martian subsurface today, which could include heated reactions between water and rocks, possible biological activity, or some other mechanism,” Siebach noted. “That means Mars today is not a ‘dead planet,’ but somewhere underground there are reactions occurring today that release and absorb an atmospheric gas that is almost always related to warm water or life on Earth.”
It’s been quite some time since we heard from Curiosity, which first landed on Mars in August of 2012. Its initial mission was to determine whether our closest planetary neighbor had ever supported life, or might be suitable for life in the future. Curiosity made quite a major discovery a year after landing in 2013, when the rover found that liquid water and the chemical components behind life had once existed on Mars. And along the way it’s starred in some great photos of the final frontier.
More recently, at the beginning of 2018, the Curiosity was thought to have found evidence of bioturbation, which is what occurs when organisms living in sediments leave an imprint on their structure.
Updated on June 8 with news that Curiosity found the building blocks of life on Mars.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
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.