Source of Largest ever Mars Quake Revealed

A spacecraft with a tripod structure on the surface of Mars, seen as an arid, desert-like landscape. The spacecraft has an arm-like probe that extends upwards, and two solar panels on either side, which stick out like wings.
An illustration of NASA’s InSight spacecraft with its instruments deployed on the Martian surface. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

A global team of scientists have announced the results of an unprecedented collaboration to search for the source of the largest ever seismic event recorded on Mars. The study, led by the University of Oxford, rules out a meteorite impact, suggesting instead that the quake was the result of enormous tectonic forces within Mars’ crust.

The quake, which had a magnitude of 4.7 and caused vibrations to reverberate through the planet for at least six hours, was recorded by NASA’s InSight lander on May 4 2022...

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Hypervelocity Impact Experiments Probe the Origin of Organics on the Dwarf Planet Ceres

Hypervelocity impact experiments probe the origin of organics on the dwarf planet Ceres
Side view of the ejecta curtain created during a hypervelocity impact experiment at the NASA Ames Vertical Gun Range. The experiment was designed to investigate the effects of impacts on Ceres’ organics. Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

One of the most exciting findings from NASA’s Dawn mission is that Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter, hosts complex organics. The discovery of aliphatic molecules, which consist of carbon and hydrogen chains, in conjunction with evidence that Ceres has abundant water ice and may have been an ocean world, means this dwarf planet might have once harbored the main ingredients associated with life as we know it.

How the aliphatic organics originated on Ceres has been the ...

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Study reveals how Young Children’s Immune Systems Tame SARS-CoV-2

virus
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

New research helps explain why young children have lower rates of severe COVID-19 than adults. A study of infants and young children found those who acquired SARS-CoV-2 had a strong, sustained antibody response to the virus and high levels of inflammatory proteins in the nose but not in the blood. This immune response contrasts with that typically seen in adults with SARS-CoV-2 infection. The research was published in the journal Cell.

The investigation involved 81 full-term infants and young children whose mothers enrolled in a NIAID-supported cohort study at Cincinnati Children’s during their third trimester of pregnancy. The study team trained mothers to collect weekly nasal swabs from their infants starting when the babies were 2 weeks old...

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Scientists begin Building AI for Scientific Discovery using Tech behind ChatGPT

particle graphic
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

An international team of scientists, including from the University of Cambridge, have launched a new research collaboration that will leverage the same technology behind ChatGPT to build an AI-powered tool for scientific discovery.

While ChatGPT deals in words and sentences, the team’s AI will learn from numerical data and physics simulations from across scientific fields to aid scientists in modeling everything from supergiant stars to the Earth’s climate.

The team launched the initiative, called Polymathic AI earlier this week, alongside the publication of a series of related papers on the arXiv open access repository.

“This will completely change how people use AI and machine learning in science,” said Polymathic AI principal investigator S...

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