NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Mission
Let’s have the bad news first! The cost of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx and OSIRIS-APEX missions is slightly north of a billion dollars. You may ask why we have spent that money, and I will attempt to answer that question farther down the page. But first, allow me to applaud...
News from the Eighth Grade Classroom
A lot of the information below comes from EarthSky.org. What follows is from my extremely limited and non-scientific perspective. Today’s eighth grader is learning things about which I am only vaguely aware. Here’s what I know: The ancient Greeks had various ideas on...
OpenAI and Sam Altman
From an NPR Business report: The importance of all news related to OpenAI cannot be overstated. Huge decisions that will seriously impact our lives are being made behind closed doors. On a world tour this year, he was mobbed by a crowd of adoring fans at an event in...
The Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton
The Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, was interviewed on 60 Minutes last night. He revealed that his original area of study was the human brain. He started by developing a digital model of the Neural Networks that humans use to process information. The fact that AI...
A Visitor from Outer Space
Pictured is a carboniferous asteroid named Bennu. Eons ago, during the chaotic early stages of the cosmos, our Earth was bombarded by space rocks like Bennu and space debris. Knowledgeable scientists agree that life on Earth was made possible by those early impacts...