Drop everything and take a seat. We humans may have a new home. Or at the very least, a prerequisite for a new home.
Scientists have discovered what is believed to be a lake located underneath the south polar ice cap of Mars, measuring about 12.5 miles across. While researchers previously found signs that water once flowed across the planet’s surface, this is the first time that a persistent, existing body of water has been discovered.
The lake, located a mile beneath the planet’s surface, is likely still in a liquid form only because it is extremely salty and under a lot of pressure. But still, water is water, and this finding has the capacity to fundamentally change what we know about the Red Planet and, of course, whether or not we will one day be able to inhabit it.
Roberto Orosei at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Bologna led the research team who drew the groundbreaking conclusions, and the paper detailing their work was today published in the journal Science. The team leveraged data from the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding, or MARSIS, which is located on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter. The scientists examined data between 2012 and 2015 in the area near the planet’s south pole. While this region “does not exhibit any peculiar characteristics,” as the paper notes, it has long been thought that the polar ice caps may contain liquid deposits.
And now, this hypothesis has been proven correct.
“It’s probably not a very large lake,” Orosei told the BBC. While it’s unclear how deep the lake is, the team estimates a minimum of three feet. “This really qualifies this as a body of water. A lake, not some kind of meltwater filling some space between rock and ice, as happens in certain glaciers on Earth,” Orosei added.
To be fair, this doesn’t actually imply anything concerning the existence of life on Mars quite yet. As Dr. Manish Patel from the Open University told the BBC, “We have long since known that the surface of Mars is inhospitable to life as we know it, so the search for life on Mars is now in the subsurface. This is where we get sufficient protection from harmful radiation, and the pressure and temperature rise to more favorable levels. Most importantly, this allows liquid water, essential for life.”
Ultimately, while scientists are not any closer to finding actual life on Mars, it does give them a sense of where to look. As Patel explained, “It is like a treasure map – except in this case, there will be lots of ‘X’s marking the spots.”
Scientists are careful to warn, however, that there still is not definitive evidence that this body of water is, in fact, liquid water.
“Getting there and acquiring the final evidence that this is indeed a lake will not be an easy task,” Orosei admitted. “It will require flying a robot there which is capable of drilling through 1.5km of ice. This will certainly require some technological developments that at the moment are not available.”
But here’s hoping that they will be soon.
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.