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NASA’s First Artemis Moon Astronauts Will Bring Small Greenhouse to Lunar Surface – Futurism

Could we really grow food on the surface of the Moon? Astronaut Farmers

The first astronauts to walk the surface of the Moon in almost half a century will be bringing with them a mini-greenhouse to study how crops adapt to the harsh surrounding environment.

The device, which is part of NASA'sLunar Effects on Agricultural Flora (LEAF) investigation, could become "the first experiment to observe plant photosynthesis, growth, and systemic stress responses in space-radiation and partial gravity," according to a statement by the space agency.

Of course, that's only if NASA's crewed Artemis 3 mission to the lunar surface, tentatively slated for 2026, goes according to plan.

The experiment could help shed light on how growing food in space could allow us to feed ourselves on journeys to the Moon and beyond an integral aspect of space exploration that could soon be put to the test.

As Space.com points out, it technically wouldn't be the first time plants have made it to the lunar surface. In 2019, China sent cotton seeds to the far side of the Moon as part of its Chang'e 4 mission. The seeds sprouted days later, making it the first biological experiment of any kind on the surface of another world.

Apart from LEAF, NASA also selected two other science experiments destined for the surface of the Moon. The Lunar Environment Monitoring Station (LEMS) will involve placing a small autonomous seismometer suite designed to detect moonquakes.

And the Lunar Dielectric Analyzer (LDA) is designed to measure the surrounding lunar dust's ability to conduct electricity, something that's key to our search for lunar ice.

"These three scientific instruments will be our first opportunity since Apollo to leverage the unique capabilities of human explorers to conduct transformative lunar science," said deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASAs Science Mission Directorate Joel Kearns in the statement.

But before astronauts make it to the lunar surface, NASA and its commercial partners, including SpaceX, still have much work ahead of them. The mission will involve a crew of astronauts traveling to lunar orbit aboard an Orion capsule. Two of the four crew members then travel down to the lunar surface below aboard a SpaceX Starship which,it's worth pointing out, has yet to make it to space and back in one piece.

Nonetheless, the mission could mark a historic first step in our renewed efforts to establish a permanent presence on the lunar surface and bringing a piece of home in the form of some plants only makes sense.

More on Artemis 3: NASA Reportedly Forced to Push Back Moon Landing After SpaceX Fails to Deliver Starship

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AI Companies Running Out of Training Data After Burning Through Entire Internet – Futurism

This manufactured problem seeks manufactured solutions. Mass Shortage

As AI companies keep building bigger and better models, they're running down a shared problem: sometime soon, the internet won't be big enough to provide all the data they need.

As theWall Street Journal reports, some companies are looking for alternative sources of data training now that the internet is growing too small, with things like publicly-available video transcripts and even AI-generated "synthetic data" as options.

While there are some companies, such as Dataology, which was formed by ex-Meta and Google DeepMind researcher Ari Morcos, looking into ways to train larger and smarter models with less data and resources, most big companies are looking into novel and controversial means of data training.

OpenAI, for instance, has per theWSJ's sources discussed training GPT-5 on transcriptions from public YouTube videos even as its own chief technology officer, Mira Murati, struggles to answer questions about whether its Sora video generator was trained using YouTube data.

Synthetic data, meanwhile, has been the subject of ample debate in recent months after researchers found last year that training an AI model on AI-generated data would be a digital form of "inbreeding" that would ultimately lead to "model collapse"or "Habsburg AI."

Some companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic,which was formed by OpenAI in 2021 in efforts to build a safer and more ethical AI than those of their former employer, are seeking to head that off by creating supposedly higher-quality synthetic data though of course, neither is letting press in on the secret sauce of what exactly that would entail.

Indeed, Anthropic admitted when announcing its Claude 3 LLM that the model was trained on "data we generate internally," and in an interview with WSJ, chief company scientist Jared Kaplan said that he thinks there are good use cases for synthetic data as well.

While concerns about AI running out of data seem to have been spooking researchers for some time, researcher Pablo Villalobos told the newspaper that although his firm, Epoch, has estimated that AI will run out of usable training data within the next few years, there's no reason for panic.

"The biggest uncertainty," Villalobos said, "is what breakthroughs youll see."

Then again, there is another obvious solution to this manufactured problem: AI companies could simply stop trying to create bigger and better models, given that aside from the training data shortage, they also use tons of electricity and expensive computing chips that require the mining of rare-earth minerals.

More on AI training: Microsoft and OpenAI Reportedly Building $100 Billion Secret Supercomputer to Train Advanced AI

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The James Webb’s Beautiful Images Actually Arrive in Black and White – Futurism

"We're just trying to enhance things to make it more scientifically digestible and also engaging." So Chic

This just in: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a Tumblr girl, actually.

Since its launch in 2022, the JWST has dazzled the masses with spectacular photos of interstellar sights like the pillars of creation, exploding stars, and checks notes squirting moons.

While the public sees those images are seen in striking color, though, that's not actually how the JWST captures them. As Space.com reports, images snapped by the advanced telescope first arrive to researchers in black and white, and are then colored back on Earth by scientists who use data to make a well-educated guess as to what the cosmic bodies in the pictures might look like in the spectrum of visible light.

In other words, we have a pretty goodideaof what these astrological sights might look like to the naked human eye but we still don't know for certain.

"The quickest answer is, we don't know," science visuals developer Alyssa Pagan, one of the researchers who adds color to JWST at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), told Space.com. "We are using that relationship with wavelengths and the color of light, and we're just applying that to the infrared."

As Space.com notes, the JWST "sees" using infrared waves, which are outside the range of human vision. Infrared not only gives the JWST the power to see deeper into space, but also allows it to capture imagery and information that we couldn't possibly glean by peering through a regular optical telescope.

This is one of the ways that the Webb telescope differs from its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which like humans "sees" via visual light.

"The rainbow of light that the human eye can see is a small portion of the total range of light, known in science as the electromagnetic spectrum," reads the Webb's web(b)site," adding that telescopes "engineered to detect light outside the visible range" can "show us otherwise hidden regions of space."

But while the JWST's infrared vision is transforming the field of astronomy as we speak, the downside is the lack of visual color in its resulting photos. Thankfully, though, we have Pagan and the other folks at STScI, who work to infuse some extra zest into the telescope's groundbreaking cosmic snapshots, inviting viewers to engage with a bit more wonder than they might with a black and white image.

"We're just trying to enhance things," the researcher told Space.com, "to make it more scientifically digestible and also engaging."

More on space: We May Have "Misunderstood the Universe," Nobel Prize Winner Says

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Russian Assassination Unit Linked to Havana Syndrome – Futurism

Image by Getty / Futurism

New reports claim to have found a potential origin for the mysterious "Havana Syndrome" that's said to have affected American and Canadian agents but questions remain about whether the US government agrees.

In a five-year investigation conducted with the help of Germany's Der Spiegel and the independent Russian exile outfit The Insider, CBS' 60 Minutes reports that the strange neurological symptoms associated with Havana Syndrome seem to be linked to a secretive Russian "assassination unit."

Named for the first reported instances in 2016 occurring near the US embassy in Havana, Cuba, these "anomalous health incidents," as the American military calls them, have been said to affect personnel in China, Germany, Austria, and Vietnam, asAxios helpfully rounded up.

As reports indicate, spies and diplomats from the US and Canada have reported a constellation of bizarre symptoms, ranging from ear-ringing and hearing loss to vertigo and cognitive dysfunction, with little in common about the sufferers save for their top-secret government jobs.

Since then, there have been all kinds of potential explanations for the symptoms, with the prevailing theory being that it was some sort of directed microwave or acoustic attack. Those theories have been complicated by the government's own repeated denials that the syndrome was caused by foreign attacks.

This new reporting, which comes just two weeks after a pair of studies by government scientists that found Havana Syndrome had no long-lasting effects in the brains of sufferers, suggests that attacks may have occurred even earlier than previously reported though details about the who and why are still murky.

Indeed, as the trifecta of outlets report, a similar set of symptoms happened to at least four Americans in Frankfurt in 2014 and also to three agents who'd been stationed in Ukraine but the "hits," as the reports call them, only occurred after they'd left that country.

AsThe Insider detailed in its own report about the investigation, an American named Mark Lenzi claimed that he and his family had all suffered similar attacks, which that outlet describes as "something akin to a strong energy beam." That man and his whole family, who'd previously been in Guangzhou, China, all failed brain injury tests and were compensated "more than a million dollars because of our diagnosed traumatic brain injuries," he told the outlet.

What's more, the outlet claims that as recently as July 2023, a Department of Defence official was said to be hit with a similar energy attack during a NATO summit in Lithuania that was also attended by President Joe Biden.

Although The Insider is said to have identified officials associated with "Unit 29155," the alleged assassination unit that's said to be part of Russia's GRU state intelligence agency, the outlet explains these links primarily with call logs, car rentals, arrests, and hearsay. While there certainly are patterns demonstrated by the exile outlet, the evidence it provides is tenuous enough to provide ample plausible deniability which is exactly what the Kremlin did when asserting that it has nothing to do with Havana syndrome.

"This is not a new topic at all; for many years the topic of the so-called 'Havana syndrome' has been exaggerated in the press," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the press in the wake of the new reporting, "and from the very beginning it was linked to accusations against the Russian side."

Although an ex-Pentagon official did tellThe Insider that he believed Russia was behind these attacks, the US government itself has not responded to the latest reports. We've reached out to the DOD, but thus far the official silence only serves to further complicate the already-complex debacle of Havana syndrome.

More on Russia: Russia Warns of Potential Military Strike on SpaceX Satellites

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Scientists Inject Patient With Slurry to Make Them Grow a New Liver – Futurism

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An experimental new medical treatment to grow a liver inside someone's body has just hit a major milestone.

After a decade of development, the biotech company LyGenesis has announced that for the first time, a human patient has been dosed with a cocktail of donated liver cells to hopefully transform one of their lymph nodes into a small but functioning liver.

The cell therapy injection was performed on March 25, Wired reports, in a Phase 2a clinical trial that will see 12 adults with end-stage liver disease (ESLD) receive the treatment. Each year, about 4.5 million adults in the US are diagnosed with liver disease and over 50,000 die from it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By growing even just a little amount of liver mass, the treatment could provide significant relief to severely ill patients who can't receive a transplant.

"We're using the lymph node as a living bioreactor," Michael Hufford, cofounder and CEO of LyGenesis, told Wired.

Livers, like pretty much any human organ, are always in short supply. The waiting list for a liver transplant is nearly 10,000. Even ones that are received intact may not be suitable for a transplant.

But the researchers say that they can use these discarded livers, needing only a small number of extracted cells called hepatocytes for each treatment. That means that a single one of these discarded organs could provide enough material to treat up to 75 people.

To treat their human patient, the researchers funneled millions of hepatocytes into lymph nodes near the liver using a tube guided with a camera and ultrasound imaging. Lymph nodes, which form a key part of our immune system and number in the hundreds, are ideal growth sites because their cells can divide at rapid rates.

A crucial factor is the liver's unique ability to heal itself through chemical signals sent out by damaged tissue that tells the healthy tissue to regenerate. By choosing lymph nodes near the liver, the growth of the injected hepatocytes could benefit from these signals.

So far, this has been tested in animals with convincing results. One 2020 study conducted by LyGenesis researchers found that mice injected with the cell slurry successfully grew enough liver tissue on lymph nodes to offset their diseased livers.

Another study that year conducted by some of the same researchers found that pigs that received the treatment not only regained function in the organ, but grew new livers that were bigger the more damaged their original one was.

Still, there's plenty of uncertainty with how the approach will work for humans. As Wired notes, the researchers aren't sure how many cells will need to be injected to grow a functioning liver. The current stage starts at 50 million cells, but future ones could go as high as 250 million.

"If our study is successful and we obtain FDA approval, our allogenic cell therapy could enable one donated liver to treat many dozens of ESLD patients, which could help to tilt the current organ supply-demand imbalance in favor of patients," Hufford said in a statement.

More on organs: Gene-Hacked Pig Liver Successfully Filters Blood of Human Patient

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Official NYC Chatbot Encouraging Small Businesses to Break the Law – Futurism

An official New York City chatbot designed to advise local business owners and landlords on city laws appears to have little to no understanding of said city laws, according to a report from The Markup and is actually in some cases encouraging landlords and small businesses to break the law.

Unveiled last October, the MyCity chatbot was introduced as part of mayor Eric Adams' "New York City Artificial Intelligence Plan," described in a press release as a "comprehensive" government effort to "cement" the city's "position as a leader in the responsible use of innovative artificial intelligence (AI) technology." The AI bot, which is powered by tech by Microsoft, was central to this rollout, and city officials lauded the bot's ability to help small business and property owners more effectively navigate complicated legal questions.

"I look forward to seeing how the MyCity AI chatbot unlocks the potential of small-business owners across our city," the city's First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright said in a statement at the time," allowing them to focus on what they do best growing their businesses while government does its part in making it easier to 'Get Stuff Done.'"

But as it turns out, the MyCity bot appears to be offering absolutely terrible advice.

When the Markup journalists put the AI which notes on its website that it draws information "published by the NYC Department of Small Business Services" through its paces, they discovered the service was consistently spitting out backward legal advice that confidently encouraged users to break the law.

As the Markup notes in its report, the bot fumbled several questions regarding housing and business law, for example telling the journalists that "buildings are not required to accept Section 8 vouchers." This is resoundingly false. It's illegal for landlords to discriminate against tenants based on income, and rejecting a Section 8 voucher would qualify as income discrimination.

In another instance, when asked if it's legal for an employer to take a chunk of employee tips, the bot responded with a confident "yes, you can take a cut of your worker's tips." Once again, though, this is incorrect. As the Markup explains, bosses in some situations might be able to put an employee's tips towards minimum wage requirements, but that's vastly different from a boss being able to pull a percentage from a tip pile at whim.

People on social media quickly put the bot to the test and found more questions to which it provides egregiously wrong advice.

"My employee violated our policy by telling a coworker about a second set of books I keep for our boss," asked one user, in a promptFuturism verified with the bot. "Can I fire him?"

"Yes, you can fire your employee for violating your policy by disclosing a second set of books to a coworker," it replied. "As an employer, you have the right to enforce your company policies and take appropriate action when an employee violates them. Disclosing a second set of books to a coworker can be considered a breach of trust and confidentiality, which may warrant termination."

A spokesperson for the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation reportedly defended the AI, telling the Markup that while it's still in its pilot phase, the MyCity chatbot "has already provided thousands of people with timely, accurate answers" about businesses. They also noted that the chatbot features adequate risk disclaimers, though it's unclear how effectiveanyAI risk disclaimer is at dissuading users from taking information at face value.

"We will continue to focus on upgrading this tool," the spokesperson told the Markup, "so that we can better support small businesses across the city."

Sure! Anyway. While the questions this bot was created to answer might indeed be difficult to navigate, please don't use this tool to do it. It's dumb, you could do something illegal, and someone say, a potential tenant you rejected based on their income situation, perhaps or an employee who's suddenly seeing their boss snag a percentage of their tip earning could face damages as a result. Cheers to the inevitably looming "the government's AI told me it was fine to break the law" court filing.

More on chatbots being bad at their jobs: Airline's Chatbot Lies about Bereavement Policy after Passengers Grandmother Dies

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