James' World 2

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The Beresheet crash-landed on Earth’s Moon in 2019. Part of the ill-fated Israeli lunar lander’s payload was a bunch of tardigrades, or “water bears.” These organisms are under a millimeter long and can survive extreme cold and radiation by expelling nearly all their moisture before entering a nearly death-like state. The Beresheet tardigrades may have survived the crash and could, potentially, be resurrected by being reintroduced to water.

The tardigrades—sometimes called moss piglets—are safely asleep and probably not running amok on the surface of the Moon. But, in general, scientists, governments, and space agencies around the world agree that bringing Earth’s life to extraterrestrial locales, or vice versa, isn’t great.

A new paper builds on the growing body of literature about this cosmic no-no and draws on the burgeoning field of invasion science—the research of how, on Earth, non-native species spread to and alter new locations. The zebra mussel’s spread across North America through its ability to outcompete native species is a classic example.

Right now, when it comes to other celestial bodies, humans are more likely to find or introduce microorganisms rather than filter-feeders (or anything big). “The ecosystem concept is a very general concept. It doesn’t just apply to lakes or forests,” Anthony Ricciardi—a McGill University biologist and one of the authors of the paper—told Ars.

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Europa could harbor complex life, and we’ll have to take care to avoid any cross-contamination.

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Electric vehicles have the potential to substantially reduce carbon emissions, but car companies are running out of materials to make batteries. One crucial component, nickel, is projected to cause supply shortages as early as the end of this year. Scientists recently discovered four new materials that could potentially help—and what may be even more intriguing is how they found these materials: the researchers relied on artificial intelligence to pick out useful chemicals from a list of more than 300 options. And they are not the only humans turning to A.I. for scientific inspiration.

Creating hypotheses has long been a purely human domain. Now, though, scientists are beginning to ask machine learning to produce original insights. They are designing neural networks (a type of machine-learning set up with a structure inspired by the human brain) that suggest new hypotheses based on patterns the networks find in data instead of relying on human assumptions. Many fields may soon turn to the muse of machine learning in an attempt to speed up the scientific process and reduce human biases.

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Machine learning techniques can help researchers develop novel hypotheses. Credit: Getty Images

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After spending 1,909 Martian sols on the Red Planet, NASA’s Curiosity rover was suffering from a slight malfunction.

The robot’s drill stopped working while Curiosity was on Mars’ Vera Rubin ridge at the base of Mount Sharp. The rover had collected a sample of Martian dirt, and the team behind the mission decided to go a different route.

Instead of dropping the sample into one of the cups in the sample carousel, they dropped it into a cup pre-filled with a chemical mixture. The molecules released from the cup were then trapped and analyzed, revealing organic molecules on Mars that no space agency had previously detected.

The scientists detailed their discovery in a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Maëva Millan, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center and lead author of the new study, explains that the initial motivation behind the experiment was to have a reference for future chemistry experiments conducted on Mars samples.

“This experiment was definitely successful,” Millan tells Inverse. “While we haven’t found what we were looking for, biosignatures, we showed that this technique is really promising.”

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The Curiosity rover was recently joined by NASA’s Perseverance rover which landed on Mars on February 18.NASA

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Newton’s third law tells us that for every action, there’s an equal reaction going the opposite way. It’s been reassuring us for 400 years, explaining why we don’t fall through the floor (the floor pushes up on us too), and why paddling a boat makes it glide through water. When a system is in equilibrium, no energy goes in or out and such reciprocity is the rule. Mathematically, these systems are elegantly described with statistical mechanics, the branch of physics that explains how collections of objects behave. This allows researchers to fully model the conditions that give rise to phase transitions in matter, when one state of matter transforms into another, such as when water freezes.

But many systems exist and persist far from equilibrium. Perhaps the most glaring example is life itself. We’re kept out of equilibrium by our metabolism, which converts matter into energy. A human body that settles into equilibrium is a dead body.

In such systems, Newton’s third law becomes moot. Equal and opposite fall apart. “Imagine two particles,” said Vincenzo Vitelli, a condensed matter theorist at the University of Chicago, “where A interacts with B in a different way than how B interacts with A.” Such nonreciprocal relationships show up in systems like neuron networks and particles in fluids and even, on a larger scale, in social groups. Predators eat prey, for example, but prey doesn’t eat its predators.

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By programming a fleet of robots to behave nonreciprocally — blue cars react to red cars differently than red cars react to blue cars — a team of researchers elicited spontaneous phase transitions. Kristen Norman for Quanta Magazine

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