November 7, 2023: A thread through graphene aerogel, a surprise binary asteroid and a murder mystery. —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | | NASA has proposed a mission to take measurements from Venus's surface, but the agency doesn't yet know how to build semiconductors and other crystalline materials for instruments that could tolerate the planet's conditions. In labs at Stanford University, researcher Debbie G. Senesky constructs electronics designed to survive on Venus. The surface at our planet's closest neighbor has crushing pressure and burns at 475 degrees C, hot enough to melt lead. Lately, Senesky's team is focusing on manufacturing electronics materials on the International Space Station.
Why this matters: Microgravity at the ISS should enable faster growth of larger, more uniform crystals of graphene and other materials. Graphene is highly electrically conductive and stronger than steel. In the form of an aerogel, it's spongy and could prove useful as a building block for sensors, batteries and thermal insulation for future spacecraft to Venus and beyond.
The future: A payload of graphene hydrogel manufactured aboard the ISS this summer is now back in Senesky's lab for analysis (after it is changed into an aerogel). "Our experiment on the ISS is just a beginning," she writes. "Next we'll grow more types of materials that prove challenging or impossible to synthesize [on Earth]." | | | Credit: Graphene aerogel, a promising material for insulation, energy storage, and more, is difficult to make on Earth but might be produced more easily in space. Credit: Spencer Lowell | | | A science journalist recently challenged AI developers to solve Cain's Jawbone, a murder-mystery puzzle book from 1934. The book was purposely published with all its pages out of order; to crack the case, the reader must reorder the pages, and then name the six murderers and their victims. A total of six people had solved the mystery in past years. In the new challenge, none of the AI developers managed to crack the puzzle.
How it worked: The competition challenged developers to use natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to reorder the story's now-digitized pages. In order to refine their models for the competition, the organizers gave participants Agatha Christie's first mystery novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, to use as training data.
The takeaway: The Cain's Jawbone competition revealed that current AI language programs may be capable of impressive feats, writes science journalist Kenna Hughes-Castleberry, but they won't be going toe to toe with Poirot any time soon. The story's stylized language and false clues underscore that these models struggle to analyze content without context. | | | • An organization that oversees the official English-language names of birds in the Americas is phasing out eponyms and focusing new names on the animals. | 3 min read | | | • The science of consciousness–that is, the study of what it's like to be you–has not lived up to expectations, writes Philip Goff, a professor of philosophy at Durham University in the U.K. He argues that science can account for the evolution of consciousness only if researchers reject reductionist approaches, where physics is running the show. Consciousness researchers should "let the philosophers do the philosophy and the scientists study the brain. Each provides a different piece of the puzzle. It is a pincer movement of science and philosophy that will, ultimately, crack the mystery of consciousness," he writes. | 6 min read | | | The blurbs above reminded me of family members who enjoy puzzles, murder mysteries, advances in space exploration and questions of consciousness. I hope you will forgive me for sharing this book title with you: Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness, by my uncle Dan Lloyd, an emeritus professor of philosophy. He describes this 2004 book as "a theory of consciousness presented as noir detective fiction." A bit more convergence. | —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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