Category Astronomy/Space

The future of space-based UV/optical/IR astronomy requires ever larger telescopes. The highest priority astrophysics targets, including Earth-like exoplanets, first generation stars, and early galaxies, are all extremely faint, which presents an ongoing challenge for current missions and is the opportunity space for next generation telescopes: larger telescopes are the primary way to address this issue.

With mission costs depending strongly on aperture diameter, scaling current space telescope technologies to aperture sizes beyond 10 m does not appear economically viable. Without a breakthrough in scalable technologies for large telescopes, future advances in astrophysics may slow down or even completely stall...

NASA recently asked the scientific community to help come up with innovative ideas for ways to carry out its Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. This was in response to a report by an independent board that deemed that its US$11 billion (£8.7 billion) price tag was too expensive and its 2040 timeline too far in the future.

In brief, the ambitious plan was to collect rock samples cached inside containers by NASA’s Perseverance rover and deliver them to laboratories on Earth. Perseverance has been exploring Mars’ Jezero Crater, thought to have once hosted an ancient lake, since 2021...

Speech is critical to detecting suicidal ideation and a key to understanding the mental and emotional state of people experiencing it. Suicide hotline counselors are trained to quickly analyze speech variation to better help callers through a crisis.

But just as no system is perfect, there is room for error in interpreting a caller’s speech. In order to assist hotline counselors to properly assess a caller’s condition, Concordia Ph.D. student Alaa Nfissi has developed a model for speech emotion recognition (SER) using artificial intelligence tools. The model analyzes and codes waveform modulations in callers’ voices. This model, he says, can lead to improved responder performance in real-life suicide monitoring.

The research is published as part ...

A team of astronomers and citizen scientists has discovered a planet in the habitable zone of an unusual star system, including two stars and potentially another exoplanet.

The planet hunters spotted the Neptune-like planet as it crossed in front of its host star, temporarily dimming the star’s light in a way akin to a solar eclipse on Earth...