If there’s extraterrestrial life anywhere in the galaxy, chances are, it could be on LHS 1140b.

Astronomers have found that the exoplanet 48 light years away is spewing helium into space, a strong sign that it harbors a robust atmosphere, they reported in a new study published in the journal Science.

And that’s not all: it’s also a rocky world like our own, and orbits within its star’s habitable zone, the region around a star where a planet can maintain liquid — and possibly life-harboring — water on its surface.

If their findings are borne out, then it’s the first ever Earth-like exoplanet we’ve seen with an atmosphere stable enough to support life — and could vindicate the belief that there’s a whole host of similar planets out there, rather than our own being a rare anomaly in the cosmos.

“When there’s one, there’s more in exoplanets,” Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times. “Hopefully this is the start of something new.”

“At this point, we have absolutely no evidence for life on the planet,” lead author Collin Cherubim, a planetary scientist at Harvard University, added to the newspaper. “But we think all of the really important, essential ingredients are there.”

Spotting exoplanets is rare. While we have catalogued millions of stars, we have only confirmed around 6,000 worlds outside our solar system. Finding ones with an atmosphere is even rarer, since their signals are faint compared to the light of the planet’s star. In many cases, the planets with atmospheres are gas giants, which are unlikely to support life.

A key detail is that LHS 1140b orbits a red dwarf. Planets around red dwarfs are easier to spot because the diminutive stars are fainter, meaning it’s more noticeable when a planet passes in front of them. But since they emit less heat, a potentially habitable planet needs to orbit much closer to to them than we do our Sun. That could be a problem because red dwarfs are believed to be highly volatile. A closely orbiting planet would be in danger of being battered by solar flares and other powerful outbursts, which could strip it of its atmosphere and sterilize developing lifeforms.

The astronomers, however, found that LHS 1140b has a helium-rich atmosphere despite being — or because it’s in — the star’s habitable zone, demonstrating that the volatility of red dwarfs may not be as much as a problem as once thought (though this one appears to be less active than its cousins). They used a theoretical computer model of exoplanet atmosphere evolution that tracked how lighter elements like hydrogen and helium would be ejected by the outbursts of its host star, Science explained. When they applied it to LHS 1140b, which was first discovered in 2017, it predicted that its upper atmosphere would be dominated by helium, a promising sign that it’s capable of supporting life.

“Twenty years ago we wondered whether other terrestrial-type planets even existed,” Robin Wordsworth, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard, said in a statement about the work. “Then we learned they’re common, and found some in the habitable zone.”

“The next question was whether any of them had managed to keep an atmosphere,” he added. “Now we know at least one has.”

More on space: Scientists Say They’ve Identified an Earth-Like Planet Right Next Door

The post Astronomers Thrilled After Discovering Best Spot Yet to Look for Alien Life appeared first on Futurism.

Outer space: it’s cold, it’s dark, it’s mostly empty. And it’s occasionally very sweet.

Astronomers peering into the heart of our galaxy have spotted traces of erythrulose, the same kind of sugar that’s found in raspberries, kiwis, and other fruits, speckled in a giant gas cloud.

The delectable discovery, detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, is the first time sugar, a key ingredient for life, has been detected in interstellar space.

The detection “tells us that these sugars are more common than we previously thought,” study lead author Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, an astrochemist at Spain’s Centre for Astrobiology, told The Guardian. “It opens the possibility for life to develop on other worlds in a similar fashion to what it did on Earth.”

Sugar’s origins on Earth remain a mystery. Ribose and glucose have been found on asteroids, and some scientists believe that, like water, the compound was first brought here by wayward space rocks that crashed into our planet.

But where are these sugars forming in space? One likely culprit is molecular clouds, the dense regions of the gas and dust that make up the universe’s interstellar medium. These clouds can act as a “chemical factory,” the researchers wrote, fusing disparate atoms together to form more complex substances, with more than 340 molecules having been detected in the interstellar medium so far.

To carry out their saccharine search, the researchers used two radio telescopes in Spain to peer into a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way. Where earlier searches would have struggled to make sense of all the noise coming out of the highly dense region, theirs was — quite literally — laser-focused. Another team recently developed a way to recreate sugar’s light signature in space when vaporized with a laser, Scientific American noted, and this allowed them to narrow their focus.

What they found was unexpected. The cloud was swimming in erythrulose, which is made of four carbon atoms. But there were almost no signs of sugars made from three carbon atoms, SciAm explained, cutting against the prevailing belief that sugars gradually formed by adding one carbon atom at a time. This led the team to suspect that the four-carbon sugar was formed by two other organic molecules that each contain a carbon pair.

It’s a major boon for astrobiology. Sugars like ribose and deoxyribose form the backbone of RNA and DNA. And erythrulose in particular can form ribonucleotides, the building blocks of RNA. In all, they estimated that up to 50 million tons of erythrulose could have rained down on Earth while life was still in its primordial age.

 “To have suffered this kind of rain of organics, I think that seems to have been a key step,” Jiménez-Serra told The Guardian. “That material could have contributed to prebiotic soups where the first biomolecules were synthesized.”

More on space: Scientists Say They’ve Identified an Earth-Like Planet Right Next Door

The post You’ll Never Guess What Tasty Molecule Astronomers Just Detected In Space appeared first on Futurism.

After years of being engaged, it looks like SpaceX and the Pentagon are finally ready to send out save-the-dates.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk’s formerly-just-rockets company is now in talks with the Department of Defense over providing the military access to its data-center capacity for running AI models, tying the knot on their already close relationship.

People familiar with the matter told the newspaper that the arrangement could cost the Pentagon billions of dollars, but stressed the talks are ongoing and could fall apart.

Computing power is a precious commodity during this ever-raging AI boom, and SpaceX has it in spades. Musk has rapidly built data centers in Memphis, Tennessee and a lot of that capacity hasn’t been tapped into, with Bloomberg reporting that his AI startup xAI is only using 11 percent of its total computing power.

Selling this excess compute would help generate the company some much needed revenue, even if it directly benefits its rivals. SpaceX has struggled to be profitable, losing $5 billion last year. And xAI, which was folded into SpaceX before its IPO last month, burned through $6.4 billion over the same period. All the while, Musk has struggled to sell his Grok chatbot to businesses, as its capabilities lag behind leaders like Anthropic and ChatGPT.

The real story, though, is the deepening ties between Musk’s business empire and the Pentagon, which goes way back. SpaceX has worked with the military to deploy a secretive network of spy satellites, for example, and also had a small contract to experiment with building a rocket that could deliver military cargo across the globe.

Those collaborations have gotten way bigger in the past year. In May, it won a $2.29 billion Space Force contract to build a network of satellites that could function as a military internet service, connecting weapon systems across the globe. That same month, it was awarded an even larger $4.16 billion contract to provide the technology to build a system that can track missiles and aircraft from orbit.

To be clear, Musk’s companies are far from the only tech leaders to be getting in bed with the Pentagon. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle all have similar deals for providing cloud computing capacity to the military, as well as for providing their AI models, the WSJ noted.

But it’s a particularly hypocritical road to be going down for Musk. When Musk cut off Starlink satellite access to the Ukrainian forces in 2023, he reasoned that he didn’t want SpaceX to be “explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” Fast forward to this June, when a Pentagon official bragged that the military used Grok to fire 2,000 missiles at Iran during Operation Epic Fury, sparking a war that killed thousands of civilians in the country.

More on SpaceX: SpaceX’s Shares Tank After Starship Fails to Launch

The post SpaceX Eager to Support the Pentagon’s Lethal AI Models appeared first on Futurism.

You might wince at the professional spectacle of two humans beating each other to a pulp. But when it’s two robots? We want maximum carnage.

Thankfully, the inaugural Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend (URKL) competition in Shenzhen, China, has delivered on providing the most brutal-but-bloodless spectacle you can lay eyes on.

In a video of a cage match between two mechanical humanoids, one of the clanker combatants literally knocks its opponent’s block off by delivering a flying kick to the face.

The robot continues to fight with its head dangling from between its shoulders and throws a few punches, but not for long.

After being knocked to the ground again, it flails uncontrollably while trying to get to its feet. The violent jerking severs the cable connecting the hanging head, and the robot collapses onto the ground. The other robot, victorious, dances over its unmoving body.

Insane new humanoid battle tournament in Shenzhen
byu/Fit-Case1093 insingularity

According to the state-run tabloid Global Times, the URKL competition featured 32 teams from around the world who all used the T800 humanoid robot from EngineAI, a Chinese robotics company.

The point of the competition, according to EngineAI CEO Zhao Tongyang, was twofold: create a global commercial robot fighting brand and promote research and industrialization.

“Let the event feed back into technology, and let technology drive the industry,” Tongyang told Global Times.

You can’t accuse Tongyang of not putting his money where his mouth is. In a video that went viral last December, he donned a suit of armor and let himself take blows from one of his T800 robots. One kick was so powerful that it slammed him to the ground.

It’s hard to tell how much of a splash the event made in the country, but it must’ve been a wild spectacle to witness in person. Legendary martial arts movie star and filmmaker Donnie Yen was in attendance and sounded blown away by what he saw.

“Honestly, I used to see robot fighting only in science fiction movies,” Yen said at the event’s opening, per Global Times. “But today, for the first time, I got to watch real robots fighting up close.”

“The weight of the machines, the precision of their movements — it was incredible,” he added.

Martial arts is one of Chinese robot companies’ favorite ways to show off their capabilities. China stunned the world earlier this year with a televised martial arts display performed by a group of Unitree G1 robots that shared the stage with human actors.

More on robots: Startup Upset After Journalist Points Out How Creepy Its Humanoid Robots’ Hands Are

The post Brutal Humanoid Robot Cage Match Stops Abruptly When One of the Robot’s Heads Pops Off appeared first on Futurism.

On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had linked the outbreak of cyclosporiasis, an infection notorious for inducing explosive diarrhea, to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms that was supplied to Taco Bell. 

Per the reporting, Taco Bell said it was voluntarily pulling the lettuce from select states where it received the contaminated produce: Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. An announcement from the CDC warned the public not to eat food items with shredded lettuce from Taco Bell, but hasn’t identified Taylor Farms as the source.

But while Taco Bell may have served the tainted lettuce, it would be remiss to lay all of the blame on the fast food chain (although one aggrieved customer is already suing it after contracting the illness).

The contamination occurred at the farms or facilities where the food was processed, from a single supplier in Mexico, Food and Drug Administration officials said. The supplier, Taylor Farms, has been involved in previous outbreaks, including another outbreak of cyclosporiasis in a salad mix in 2013.

Taco Bell, to its credit, also immediately pulled its ingredients from some of its locations last week as soon as it learned about the situation, according to local reports.

And then there’s the broader political context that many experts are drawing attention to: how the Trump administration has slashed funding to the CDC and paralyzed the nation’s food safety bodies.

Last February, shortly after Trump took office, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) dissolved its National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which provided scientific guidance on food safety policy. Ryan Cooper at The Prospect notes that the committee was working on advice for foodborne illness outbreaks before being terminated. The FDA also shut down its National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection.

Not spared during the wave of cuts that wreaked the federal government, the USDA lost over 20,000 workers last year, with 913 of them coming from its Food Safety Inspection Service.

Last year, the CDC — which has lost some 3,000 employees under Trump — scaled back its food surveillance program called FoodNet that monitored eight common foodborne pathogens, changing it so that surveillance of the cyclospora parasite that causes cyclosporiasis was optional.

Dan Jernigan, a former director of CDC’s Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told the Washington Post that the decision was made because funding for food safety had not been maintained over the past few years. That the US is now on track to have more cyclospora cases this year than any previous year in history is likely no coincidence.

Other incidents show how the administration has taken a recklessly laissez faire approach to public health. The US’s worst measles outbreak this century occurred after Trump had hollowed out the CDC — and after health secretary RFK had spent years heavily promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric. The CDC also reportedly fired its ship inspectors last year, a decision that came under scrutiny during a deadly hantavirus outbreak on a Dutch cruise ship. Some experts estimate that hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of children have died as the result of Trump dismantling USAID, which funded emergency food assistance programs and HIV response across the globe.

Jernigan left the agency last August in protest of Trump ousting its then director Susan Monarez and the policies of health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. But he said that the Trump cuts would have little impact on the ongoing outbreak, adding that FoodNet wasn’t designed for real-time outbreak detection or response.

As the WaPo reporting notes, federal and state health authorities have insisted that the cyclosporiasis investigation hasn’t been impeded because the parasite is still reportable to a separate national database. Still, Jernigan said that scaling back FoodNet wasn’t inconsequential.

“Routine outbreak investigators are the firefighters responding to a specific blaze. FoodNet is the citywide system that tracks how often fires occur and whether the overall risk is rising,” he told WaPo. “Removing cyclosporiasis from FoodNet does not take the firefighters away from the current outbreak, but it does remove part of the system that tells us how large the problem is and whether it is getting worse over time.”

Cyclosporiasis is a particularly tough illness to track.  Symptoms can take weeks to present, making it difficult for health officials to trace back where sufferers were infected. A recent Wired piece drew attention to how many people may be wrongly misdiagnosing themselves as news of the diarrhea dilemma spread across social media.

Linda Yancey, an infectious disease specialist at Memorial Hermann Health System in Texas, warned that large outbreaks like this could become more common.

“Unfortunately with so many budget cuts, every federal agency is hurting for personnel and resources,” she told Time Magazine earlier this month. “We could be at greater risk of foodborne infections because the FDA is so understaffed and underfunded right now.”

So far, Michigan, the epicenter of the outbreak, has alone tallied over 4,300 cases of infection, while nationwide there could be 7,000 cases, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has only confirmed 1,600 of them.

More on parasites: If You’ve Been Having Explosive Diarrhea, You May Want to Read This

The post Let’s Be Real, The Explosive Diarrhea Outbreak Is Trump’s Fault, Not Taco Bell’s appeared first on Futurism.

SpaceX bears are smelling blood in the water. As its stock languishes below its IPO price  — at press time, $131 — short sellers are going all in against the company, hoping to make a killing off of CEO Elon Musk’s faltering pull on investors.

As CNBC reports citing data from S3 Partners, 185 million SpaceX shares are now sold short, which is nearly 29 percent of its publicly tradable shares, when it was around only five to seven percent three weeks ago.

It’s one of the highest levels of short selling for a company in its first month of being publicly traded, Ihor Dusaniwsky, a managing director at S3, told Bloomberg.

“The recent price weakness has spurred short selling as well as the anticipation of lockups expiring soon,” he added, referring to the additional SpaceX shares that will soon be tradeable and will play a large role in how the stock performs.

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share and seemed to set the tone when its price rose to $150 on its opening day and powered past $200 in the days that followed. Those blockbuster gains were short-lived, however. Its price has steadily declined over the past month, losing a third of its value since its peak.

Investors have questioned Musk’s vision for the company — which includes an ambitious pivot to building orbital AI data centers — while its path to profitability remains unclear. Last year, the company lost nearly $5 billion.

Musk’s decision to combine SpaceX with his AI startup xAI before the IPO has also exposed the rocket company to xAI’s numerous controversies, such as its chatbot Grok being used to generate millions of nonconsensual sexualized images of real people. Before, the public fascination around spaceflight had helped shield SpaceX against anti-Musk sentiment.

Off the back of this waning enthusiasm, short sellers have seen their paper profits surge to $3.88 billion, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

But the next few months could be a key turning point for the stock’s performance — or further sink its hopes. Only a small percentage of SpaceX’s shares were made available when the company went public as a measure to prevent insiders from quickly cashing out and crashing the stock price. But around half of its shares will be unlocked from now until December, dwarfing what’s currently available.

If investors dump those unlocked shares, it could send SpaceX’s stock tumbling. Experts have warned that this period of gradually unlocking stocks could be considerably volatile— which isn’t exactly reassuring, given the company’s recent performance.

More on SpaceX: SpaceX Investors Are Lamenting All the Money They’ve Lost

The post Short Sellers Are Having a Field Day Betting Against SpaceX as Shares Continue to Slip appeared first on Futurism.

Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, is in turmoil behind the scenes. 

The company is constantly playing catch-up with rivals Anthropic, with Musk personally obsessed with having his chatbot Grok match Anthropic’s Claude, Bloomberg reports. And its merger with SpaceX, followed by the latter going public in a historic IPO, led to dozens of employees leaving the company, throwing daily operations into chaos.

To get the house in order, Musk promoted Michael Nicolls to lead xAI (which was recently renamed SpaceXAI). But his work was cut out for him. As part of Musk’s plan to rebuild the company, xAI was seeking to slash up to 30 percent of its workforce in March, and that led to employees being fired without anyone informing them, according to Bloomberg.

Its efforts to hire new talent were equally fraught. Promising candidates would get interviewed and not hear back, because the understaffed human resources department couldn’t finish the necessary paperwork, according to the reporting.

Another challenge was Musk’s obsession with Claude. Reportedly, every time the Anthropic chatbot got an update, Musk demanded that Grok should match it. Numerous projects referenced Claude and some Slack channels were even named after it. Keeping up with Claude had become the startup’s explicit mission.

“Our near-term goals are to match the performance of Claude,” Nicolls wrote in a memo to staffers after becoming xAI president, per Bloomberg.

Some began to doubt Musk’s leadership, believing that the centibillionaire, whose success was built on making cars and engineering rockets, was out of his depth. One of his most ambitious projects, Macrohard, aimed to create a powerful AI agent system capable of emulating an entire software company — something that experts are skeptical is even possible. Soon, some employees complained that creating large language models was much different from creating hardware, per Bloomberg, believing Musk didn’t understand AI.

Other controversies further sowed chaos and dampened morale. At the beginning of the year, Grok sparked outrage for being used to generate millions of conconsensual nudes of real people, including children, disturbing some employees, according to Bloomberg. xAI also told employees that it would pay them to feed their tax returns to train Grok, but never did.

xAI cofounders soon gave a clear vote of no confidence in the company’s direction. In February, some began leaving as Musk prepared to merge xAI with SpaceX ahead of its IPO, and soon after the merger was completed, all eleven of xAI’s cofounders had fled the company.

As the IPO date loomed ever closer, xAI company found itself in such a precarious position that it sold some of its glut of computing power to Anthropic — an ironic development given Musk’s desperate attempts to have xAI emulate its AI chatbot, Claude.

The largest AI companies, including Anthropic, have all struggled to find or build the computing capacity necessary to train and run their powerful systems. xAI is the rare exception, with its model using just 11 percent of its vast array of computing power in April, according to Bloomberg. It also agreed to sell computing power to Google and another AI startup called Reflection.

These agreements secured a multibillion dollar revenue stream, but directly benefited xAI’s biggest rivals — and in a way, waved a big white flag. xAI was practically admitting it wasn’t on the same level as the industry’s top dogs, and was contenting itself with selling hardware, and not building the best AI model.

More on xAI: Grok’s Foul-Mouthed AI “Translation” Feature Puts Unspeakably Ghoulish Words Into Users’ Mouths

The post Elon Musk’s AI Startup Is a Complete Disaster Behind the Scenes appeared first on Futurism.