Thursday, October 17, 2024

Navigation research often excludes the environment. That’s starting to change

Decades of research suggests navigation strategies studied in a lab may not replicate in real life



Evenki reindeer herders in Siberia rely on place names and river flow patterns to navigate.
Michael Runkel/robertharding/Getty Images

By Sujata Gupta

On a trip to Siberia in 2019, cognitive scientist Pablo Fernandez Velasco attended a raffle drawing with the region’s Evenki reindeer herders. Prizes included a soccer ball, tea, a portable radio, a GPS unit and other knickknacks. A herder in Velasco’s group won the GPS. “I thought [that] was one of the fancier prizes,” says Velasco, of the University of York in England. “He was crestfallen.”

The herder, who had been eyeing the radio, had no use for a GPS. He, like other Evenki herders, navigate the vast taiga by heeding their own gait and tracking place names, paths and river flow patterns, a suite of strategies Velasco and geographer Anna Gleizer of the University of Oxford described earlier this year.

But such real-life navigation remains understudied. Instead, researchers have long devoted their time and attention to studying how participants, mostly from the West, “navigate” on a flat computer screen. Such studies scrub out the noisy environment, including tree canopies, wildlife, weather events and other occurrences, to ensure maximum control.

In treating the environment as fixed — as is common across brain and behavior research —scientists operate under the assumption that humans behave the same way regardless of their cultural or environmental milieu, neuroscientist Hugo Spiers of University College London and colleagues write in a forthcoming Royal Society Open Science. Yet, decades of research suggests that findings in a lab may not translate to real life.

“You can do work in a lab in the United States and have everything go flawlessly and then take it out to the field and everything falls apart,” says environmental anthropologist Helen Davis of Arizona State University in Tempe.

Spiers and collaborators argue that researchers should stop using reductionist approaches that eliminate environmental “noise.” Adding the outside world to research is more complex. But newer tools mean researchers can bring that wider world to the lab, or vice versa, while still ensuring a high level of control.

Navigation research is moving from the two-dimensional world on a computer screen to a more realistic three-dimensional world, says Gabriella Vigliocco, a cognitive scientist also at UCL and coauthor of the Royal Society paper. The work isn’t just helping researchers better understand how people navigate their environment. The findings have implications for what we know about human development, public health and the human psyche.


Wilding the lab

Concerns about studying human behavior in unlifelike lab settings date back decades.

“In order to behave like scientists, [experimental psychologists] must construct situations in which our subjects are totally controlled, manipulated and measured,” wrote British psychologist Don Bannister in 1966 in the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society. “We construct situations in which they can behave as little like human beings as possible and we do this in order to allow ourselves to make statements about the nature of their humanity.”

But setting up rigorous, reproducible experiments with the messy, unpredictable environment was simply too hard, Vigliocco says. “Now the tools are there.”

One example is the video game Sea Hero Quest, in which people navigate a boat in search of mystical sea creatures. Over 4 million people from 193 countries have played the game since it launched in 2016. That has provided researchers with a trove of navigation data that has allowed them to study how people navigate through various environs.


Key among the findings from those data is that country kids are better at finding targets in the video game than city kids, Spiers and colleagues reported in 2022 (SN: 4/1/22). That’s because city kids probably grew up trekking around streets laid out in a neat grid, while country kids would have had to wander, and get lost along meandering rural paths.

Sea Hero Quest, though, still has participants navigate on a device, no locomotion needed, and hinges on wayfinding by sight. And the assumption that people everywhere navigate primarily by sight is simply false, Velasco and Spiers wrote in January in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Their review of the ethnographic literature unearthed myriad studies showing that navigation is multisensory. For instance, Batek people walking through the dense rainforests of Malaysia, where sight is often obscured, can navigate by birdsong. Elsewhere, people stay oriented by looking to patterns in the stars, snowdrifts, seaweed, ocean swells and numerous other cues.

That’s where high-tech virtual-reality facilities are starting to come in. They are pushing the boundaries of navigation research by letting participants experience sounds and smells and even walk about as they would in real life, all in a controlled environment. One such facility, the Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory, or PEARL, opened at University College London in 2021 and spans 4,000 square meters. Researchers can simulate everything from hospital wards to transportation hubs. “It’s very much like a movie studio but for research,” Spiers says.

Facilities like PEARL could be game changers for navigation research, Spiers says. But they also come with drawbacks that could limit their widespread adoption, including a hefty price tag. “The cost to run I think is like £7,000 [or more than $9,000] a day,” Spiers says.


Taking the lab to the wild

Work in the lab and the field each present unique challenges, says Helen Davis. But in tandem, these approaches have allowed for rigorous study. “What I think has been really cool … is that there is this mash-up now between fieldwork and lab work.”

Davis and colleagues have studied the daily movements and spatial cognition ability of Tsimane people in Bolivia, ranging in age from 6 to 84, using mobile GPS units and compasses mounted on a tripod. In one task, participants pointed the compass to a distant, out-of-sight landmark, a measure of dead reckoning ability. Researchers measured participants’ accuracy by calculating the difference between the correct bearing and the pointed bearing.

The average error rate of Tsimane children ages 6 to 18, whose GPS units showed that they traveled an average of over 5 kilometers per day, was 40 degrees, Davis and anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City reported in 2019. That put their ability roughly on par with adults in Salt Lake City.

An Ovatwa teenager in Namibia uses a compass to point to an out-of-sight landmark, a measure of navigation ability.
An Ovatwa teenager in Namibia points to an out-of-sight landmark using a compass. Ovatwa children have better pointing accuracy, on average, than many U.S. adults.Helen Davis

Children in the Ovatwa foraging community in Namibia, meanwhile, could point with, on average, 20-degree accuracy, Davis and her team reported in 2021. Most Ovatwa children attend boarding schools during the week and return home on weekends — traveling upward of 20 kilometers each way. That huge range seems to be helping Ovatwa children develop exceptional navigational skills. “Young kids were better at dead reckoning than adults in the U.S.,” Davis says.

Wayfinding prowess is more than a neat hat trick. The comparatively poor spatial navigation abilities of people in the Western world — exacerbated, mounting research suggests, by people’s deepening reliance on GPS systems — tend to be treated as the norm, Davis says. Yet her work with the Tsimane and other foraging communities suggests such skills are highly malleable.

Tsimane children who traveled more widely and along curvier routes had better dead reckoning skills than Tsimane children who explored less. Researchers comparing college students from the Faroe Islands of Denmark, where children typically have the freedom to roam far from their homes without adult supervision, to students in the United States, where roaming distance has been declining in recent years, found a similar disparity in navigation skills. Researchers are starting to suspect that shrinking opportunity to roam could be hurting people’s lifelong spatial navigation abilities.

Similarly, while Western adults tend to show worsening dead reckoning ability as they age, Tsimane adults show no comparable decline, Davis and her team reported in 2022. Tsimane adults continue traveling long distances through their communities’ dense forests and snaking paths well into old age, averaging over 5 kilometers per day.

Work by Spiers and others shows that navigation ability declines with age. Spatial disorientation is also often one of the first signs of dementia. But this gradual loss of navigation ability may not be inevitable, as is widely assumed. Instead, a Western lifestyle — one in which loss of mobility (and hence the ability to explore) frequently occurs alongside aging — might be partly to blame, the authors write.

Notably, the researchers did observe mobility declines — and corresponding increases in pointing errors — for Tsimane women ages 20 to 39. The average Tsimane woman has nine children, so increased child-rearing responsibilities likely underpin that decline, the authors note. The women’s pointing errors, however, returned to baseline by the time they hit age 40 or so.

“This suggests that one can experience increases as well as decreases [in mobility] throughout the life span,” the authors write. “If so, even sedentary individuals may be able to enhance their navigational abilities by increasing mobility at any stage of life.”

And the ability to roam may, in turn, impact one’s outlook on life. Evenki reindeer herders, Velasco has observed, detest planning out their routes. The herders instead see space as laden with possibility, a sweeping canvas that should not be sullied by prescribed routes.

The Western fear of getting lost is incomprehensible to the Evenki herder, Velasco and Gleizer reported in their recent study. “When we asked an Evenki hunter what he would do if lost,” Velasco says, “he looked at us confused and said, “Well, I would just find my way.’”

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SPACE / COSMOS

A 21st-century moon suit: Axiom Space's lunar spacesuit sports 4G comms, Prada looks and Oakley visors for Artemis astronauts

Space.com
Oct 16/2024

The AxEMU is designed to allow Artemis 3 astronauts to explore the south pole of the moon.

Axiom Space and Prada unveiled the design of the new Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan on Oct. 16, 2024. (Image credit: Andrew Jones/Space.com)

MILAN — If you're going to team up with Prada for a 21st-century moon suit, it only makes sense to unveil it in one of the fashion capitals of the world.

Axiom Space and Prada revealed the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit in a press conference held at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here today (Oct. 16).

AxEMU will be used for NASA's Artemis 3 mission, which is currently scheduled to launch in late 2026. It has been specially designed for the lunar south pole, which will be a colder environment than astronauts experienced on the Apollo missions, which landed around the moon's equator.


The AxEMU spacesuit that Artemis astronauts will wear on the moon. 
(Image credit: Axiom Space)

The new spacesuit incorporates multiple redundant systems and an onboard diagnostic system to ensure safety for crewmembers, according to Axiom. It features lights and an HD camera on the helmet, 4G/LTE communication, a suit control interface, biometric monitoring, regenerable carbon dioxide scrubbing and portable life support to keep astronauts safe for up to eight hours. It can also accommodate a wide range of crewmembers, male or female.


Related: Artemis moon suit designed by Axiom Space and Prada revealed in Milan (photos)

Matt Ondler, Axiom Space president, described the unveiling as an historic day. "So two years from now, when NASA applies the Artemis 3 mission, the astronauts will be wearing the suit design," Ondler said. "More profoundly for us, the first woman to walk on the moon will wear this suit, the first person of color [on the moon] will be wearing this suit, and the first non-American will be wearing this suit."


The suit needs to be ready for 2026, but further testing, including in vacuum chambers and reduced-gravity environments, is needed to meet the deadline. Teams have also been working on integration of the spacesuit with SpaceX's new Starship vehicle — which will be NASA's human landing system for the mission — and address any remaining interface challenges.

The partnership with Prada was highlighted as a cross-industry collaboration success. "I'm very proud of the result we're showing today, which is just the first step in a long-term collaboration with Axiom Space," said Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada chief marketing officer, in a statement. "We've shared our expertise on high-performance materials, features, and sewing techniques, and we learned a lot."

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Russell Ralston, Axiom's executive vice president of extravehicular activity, speaking at the unveiling, said the partnership was groundbreaking.

"This collaboration exemplifies the power to create better technology solutions together by merging Axiom Space's elite engineering experience with Prada's all-round craftsmanship. We've blended engineering, science and art to produce the ultimate garments, ensuring that astronauts can perform their tasks and missions in safety and comfort."



The AxEMU suit has a variety of advanced features, including 4G/LTE communications and an HD camera system. (Image credit: Axiom Space)

Building a new suit for the extreme conditions on the moon has not exactly been a walk in the park, however.

Ralston, in response to a question, also highlighted many challenges, including the suit's boots. "How you insulate the foot from the surface is a tough challenge," Ralston said, noting the extreme temperatures and temperature changes, but also the need to ensure comfort and safety.

The suit has a mostly white external layer in order to reflect the sun and keep wearers cool despite extremely high temperatures. Many components also went through extensive testing to ensure the suit can withstand strong radiation environments.

AxEMU will not have a heads-up display but instead will come with a handheld device. This will offer an "enhanced confirmation display, imagery and navigation data," Ralston said.

The suit also has features and materials designed to combat the accumulation of fine and damaging lunar dust on the suit's exterior. This includes proprietary coatings and cleaning tools.

In contrast to Apollo suits, AxEMU is specifically geared to the lunar south pole. This means taking into account factors such as the sun often being low in the sky and affecting visibility. For this, Axiom looked elsewhere for solutions.

"We've partnered with others like Oakley for optimal system design to enhance astronaut visibility," Ondler said.

Related: The evolution of the spacesuit in pictures

AxEMU will not just be heading to the moon. The suit will also be used for Axiom's planned space station activities. "We also think there are commercial opportunities to work with commercial and private astronauts," Ondler said.

The architecture is evolvable, scalable and adaptable for missions on the lunar surface and in low Earth orbit, an Axiom statement noted.

Minor tweaks may still be made to AxEMU as the suit enters more strenuous testing. However, the team is committed to pushing forward with the schedule and ensuring the spacesuit is ready for its intended missions, according to Ondler.

It is not just Axiom's new lunar spacesuit that has recently emerged. China late last month unveiled the exterior design of its new extravehicular spacesuit that will allow its astronauts to walk on the moon. The country aims to launch its first crewed lunar mission before 2030.


Andrew Jones
Contributing Writer
Andrew is a freelance space journalist with a focus on reporting on China's rapidly growing space sector. He began writing for Space.com in 2019 and writes for SpaceNews, IEEE Spectrum, National Geographic, Sky & Telescope, New Scientist and others. Andrew first caught the space bug when, as a youngster, he saw Voyager images of other worlds in our solar system for the first time. Away from space, Andrew enjoys trail running in the forests of Finland. You can follow him on Twitter @AJ_FI.


The cataclysmic origins of most of Earth’s meteorites have been found

Seventy percent of meteorites can be linked to a just a handful of asteroid belt collisions


A brilliant meteor blazes through the sky over radio dishes of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in the Chilean Andes.
Christoph Malin, ESO

By Robin George Andrews

Most of Earth’s meteorites can be linked to just a few collisions within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, two new studies report, including a particularly cataclysmic impact event around 470 million years ago.

The upside to this discovery, published October 16 in Nature, is that it provides researchers with vital context: By knowing the return address of meteorites, scientists can more easily work out how and where the building blocks of planets came together to create the solar system we see today. The downside is that it may mean researchers have an extremely biased meteorite collection that can tell only a sliver of the story.

Meteorites record the tumultuous history of the solar system’s formative years, but the origins of these ancient space rocks are often unknown (SN: 4/18/18). “It’s absolutely like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow for a meteoriticist to know what asteroid the sample’s come from,” says Sara Russell, a planetary scientist at London’s Natural History Museum who wasn’t involved with either study. Without that information, a meteorite is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle without a picture of the full puzzle to accompany it.

Most of the meteorites on Earth are stony ones named ordinary chondrites. Two classes of these chondrites, known as H and L, make up 70 percent of all meteorite falls.

Scientists had suspected that the L chondrites originated from a single parent asteroid. Many have mineralogical features indicating they were heavily shocked, scorched and degassed before gradually cooling, implying they were liberated from a giant asteroid — at least 100 kilometers long — via a supersonic collision.

Using radioactively decaying elements to determine the age of the meteorites has revealed that they first emerged from a collision that happened 470 million years ago. To search for the site of that destruction derby in the asteroid belt, researchers used NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii to scan many prominent stony-type asteroids, comparing each one’s mineral signatures to those of L chondrites.

The best fit was a group of asteroids named the Massalia family. Their scattered presence and current orbits could effectively be rewound by the scientists — and it looked like the asteroids all formed around 500 million years ago after splitting from an older, larger asteroid. That timing suggested that the impact that created the L chondrites also created the Massalia family. One of the asteroids in that family is about 140 kilometers long, a perfect fit for the estimated size range of the L chondrite parent body.

Other independent lines of data also point to the Massalia family, including the fact that near-Earth asteroids with L chondrite–like signatures have orbits that trace back to the family, as do the orbits of the L chondrite meteors that burn through Earth’s skies, before leaving telltale meteorites behind.

“All point at the same thing. There’s no doubt,” says Michaël Marsset, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, Chile, and an author of both studies.

That ancient impact also set the stage for a more recent bombardment, sending streams of L chondrite material tumbling back onto the largest asteroid remnant. Another impact no more than 40 million years ago then sent that rubble Earth’s way.

What of the H chondrites? Many are 5 million to 8 million years old, so came from a different impact event — or two events, it seems. By reconstructing the past orbits of the mineralogically matching Koronis2 asteroid family, the team found that many of those asteroids existed unified as a single asteroid 7.6 million years ago.

Prior research had already applied the same time-rewinding technique to another asteroid group, known as the Karin family, and found many of those were also united as a solitary asteroid 5.8 million years ago, just before another asteroid struck it. As both families cover each end of the date range for the H chondrites, the team concluded that they are the source of this meteorite class.

That Earth’s meteorite collection could be highly biased to just a few asteroids is distressing, Russell says. The asteroid belt is home to a dizzying array of rocks, boulders and even dwarf planets, each revealing something unique about the solar system (SN: 8/3/16). “Maybe we’re only just seeing a tiny fraction of them” through our meteorites, she says.

There is a solution, though more costly than scouring Earth for more meteorites. “We’ve got to have space missions to go out there,” she says, and hunt these ancient rocky archives down ourselves (SN: 2/15/24).

Citations

M. Brož et al. Young asteroid families as the primary source of meteorites. Nature. Published online October 16, 2024. doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-08006-7.

M. Marsset et al. The Massalia asteroid family as the origin of ordinary L chondrites. Nature. Published online October 16, 2024. doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-08007-6.

About Robin George Andrews


Saturn’s first Trojan asteroid has finally been discovered

All four giant planets now have known asteroids sharing their orbits



Saturn is known for its stunning rings and its many moons (four seen here), but they aren’t the planet’s only companions. Its first known Trojan — an asteroid that shares the planet’s orbit around the sun — has now been discovered.

USGS/JPL/NASA

By Ken Croswell


Astronomers have finally found an asteroid keeping pace with Saturn in its orbit around the sun. Such objects, called Trojan asteroids, are already known for the other three giant planets.

“Saturn was sort of the odd man out, if I can call it that, because even though it’s the second most massive planet in the solar system, it didn’t have any Trojans,” says Paul Wiegert, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Like Saturn, the new asteroid takes about 30 years to revolve but lies 60 degrees ahead of the planet in its orbit, Wiegert and colleagues report in work submitted September 29 to arXiv.org


Most asteroids in the solar system revolve around the sun between the paths of Mars and Jupiter. In 1906, however, German astronomer Max Wolf discovered the first Trojan, which he named Achilles, orbiting the sun 60 degrees ahead of Jupiter. Since then, astronomers have found thousands of additional Trojan asteroids — some are 60 degrees ahead of Jupiter, others are 60 degrees behind. The NASA spacecraft Lucy will visit eight of them between 2027 and 2033 (SN: 10/15/21) .

Trojan asteroids also exist for Uranus and Neptune and even for Earth and Mars (SN: 2/1/22).

After a telescope image in Hawaii captured the new asteroid in 2019, an amateur astronomer in Australia, Andrew Walker, suggested that the object might be a Saturnian Trojan — if it had the right orbit around the sun.

“The key to getting a good orbit for something in our solar system is having a lot of observations of it through different telescopes over a long period of time,” Wiegert says. So astronomer Man-To Hui at Macau University of Science and Technology in China looked for previous images of the asteroid and planned new observations as well. Measurements of the asteroid’s position — from 2015 to 2024 — confirmed its Trojan nature. Named 2019 UO14, the asteroid is only about 13 kilometers across, the same size as Deimos, the smaller of the two moons of Mars.

Scientists have long predicted Saturnian Trojans, says astronomer Carlos de la Fuente Marcos of Complutense University of Madrid, who was not involved with the discovery. But all Saturnian Trojans should have unstable orbits, because Saturn has giant planets on either side of it.

“Jupiter seems to be the culprit,” de la Fuente Marcos says. Jupiter’s great gravity gradually pulls on a Saturnian Trojan, making its orbit around the sun more and more elliptical. The asteroid then wanders so close to Jupiter or Uranus that one of those giant planets yanks the small body out of its Trojan orbit.

In fact, the researchers estimate the asteroid has been a Trojan for only about 2,000 years and will remain so for only another 1,000 years. Prior to its affair with the ringed planet, the asteroid was probably a centaur, an asteroid moving around the sun among the orbits of the giant planets (SN: 11/12/77).

The asteroid probably isn’t Saturn’s sole Trojan. “I’m quite sure there are more — maybe only a few, but this can’t be the only one,” Wiegert says.




See the First Section of the Largest-Ever Cosmic Map, Revealed in Stunning Detail by the Euclid Space Telescope

The final 3D atlas of the sky will help scientists study dark matter and dark energy, which make up 96 percent of the universe but remain mysterious

An area of the mosaic released by ESA’s Euclid space telescope on October 15, 2024, which is zoomed in 36 times compared to the large mosaic.
 ESA / Euclid / Euclid Consortium / NASA, CEA Paris-Saclay, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi


Margherita Bassi
SMITHSONIAN
Daily Correspondent
Smart News | October 16, 2024


On its mission to reveal the secrets of the “dark universe,” the Euclid space telescope has released its most detailed image yet. The wide-angle telescope built and operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) has been investigating the cosmos since it launched into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on July 1, 2023.

Its mission? To create a 3D map of one-third of the sky—the largest such map ever made. This “cosmic atlas,” as it’s also called, will be the culmination of six years of observations with Euclid’s 600-megapixel camera, studying billions of galaxies up to ten billion light-years away.

The world got its first sneak peeks of Euclid’s magnificent images in November 2023 and May 2024, with the space telescope’s survey officially beginning in February of this year. These first looks only built up anticipation in the scientific community, which expressed thrill and awe when ESA officials revealed the first part of Euclid’s cosmic atlas at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan, Italy, on Tuesday.
This mosaic capturing a section of the southern sky contains 260 observations from the Euclid space telescope gathered over the course of just two weeks. ESA / Euclid / Euclid Consortium / NASA, CEA Paris-Saclay, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi

This first section is a mosaic created from 260 observations of the southern sky captured between March 25 and April 8, 2024, per a statement from the ESA. The final product is a 208-gigapixel image revealing tens of millions of stars in the Milky Way, as well as 14 million other galaxies in shocking detail. To the human eye, its area is equivalent to more than 500 times the area of the full moon as it appears in the sky.

“This stunning image is the first piece of a map that in six years will reveal more than one-third of the sky,” Valeria Pettorino, a Euclid project scientist at ESA, says in the statement. “This is just 1 percent of the map, and yet it is full of a variety of sources that will help scientists discover new ways to describe the universe.”

Euclid is nicknamed the “dark universe detective,” because it’s meant to reveal truths about little-understood phenomena such as dark energy and dark matter, which make up about 96 percent of the universe. Dark energy is hypothesized to be the cause behind the universe’s accelerated expansion. But details about these “dark” elements of the universe remain a mystery.

To shed light on these concepts, Euclid will image a wide range of galaxies. Dark matter will have bent the light from the most distant galaxies over time, so scientists could work backward from Euclid’s observations to find out where that dark matter lies. By tracing the distribution of galaxies throughout the universe’s history, the telescope can also uncover more about dark energy.

“Euclid is observing the universe in a brand new way, and it’s gonna get a gigantic census of the galaxies,” Universidad ECCI cosmologist Luz Ángela García Peñaloza tells Space.com’s Robert Lea. “Any image that reveals information about the distribution of galaxies in the large-scale structure of the universe will provide handfuls of information on the nature of the dark side of the cosmos.”

Spiral galaxy ESO 364-G036 appears in detail, even though this view is zoomed in 600 times from Euclid's full mosaic. ESA / Euclid / Euclid Consortium / NASA, CEA Paris-Saclay, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi

Astronomers can zoom into the mosaic 600 times relative to the original image and still see celestial bodies in shocking detail. The telescope resolved the structure of spiral galaxy ESO 364-G036, which is about 420 million light-years away and fills up less than 0.0003 percent of the mapped area.

Another magnificent element captured by Euclid in this first atlas section is “galactic cirrus,” a mix of galactic gas and dust that forms dim clouds between the stars within our galaxy and reflects optical light from the Milky Way. Like wispy cirrus clouds on Earth, this phenomenon appears as streaks of light blue in the image.

“Before Euclid, we would never be able to see the faint cirrus clouds in the Milky Way and pick out every star that’s illuminating them in super-high resolution,” Mat Page, lead for Euclid’s VIS (visible instrument) camera, tells the Guardian’s Nicola Davis.

Shown against a backdrop of the entire universe, Euclid's new detailed mosaic (highlighted in yellow) makes up just 1 percent of what the telescope will capture. ESA / Euclid / Euclid Consortium / NASA; ESA / Gaia / DPAC; ESA / Planck Collaboration


Since February, Euclid has completed 12 percent of its survey. In March 2025, experts and casual enthusiasts alike can expect the reveal of 53 square degrees of the map, as well as a preview of the Euclid Deep Field areas—a detailed survey of just three patches of sky. Data from the mission’s first year will be released in 2026.

“This is just the beginning of what we will be able to see in Euclid’s lifetime,” García Peñaloza adds to Space.com. “For sure, the best is still to come! I’m positive Euclid will shed light on our understanding of the cosmic mysteries.”



Margherita Bassi | READ MORE
Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.
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The Authors Guild launches partnership to ensure authors in ‘driver’s seat’ in AI licensing


October, 10 2024


Collaboration with online platform Created by Humans aims to protect and monetise authors’ work in age of AI




Platform aims to provide authors a clear path to control, manage and monetise their content in the age of AIJakub Jirsak


By  Maura O’Malley

The Global Legal Post


The Authors Guild and online platform Created by Humans have launched a partnership enabling authors to license their works to AI developers.

The guild, which is the largest professional organisation for writers in the US, said that the partnership aims to help protect and promote authors’ rights in the age of AI, ensuring that authors who retain their copyrights are “in the driver’s seat when it comes to AI licensing” – so that authors can decide if, when and how AI companies use their works.

AI companies like ChatGPT creator OpenAI have faced a slew of lawsuits from novelists and performers like Sarah Silverman and US media organisation The New York Times who have accused them of using their copyrightable material without their permission to train their large language models (LLMs).

The aims of the platform, the guild says, is to offer authors a clear path to control, manage and monetise their content while giving AI developers access to high-quality, curated written works with the full consent of rightsholders.

Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, said that the platform provides authors who are interested in engaging with AI platforms “a way to do so on their own terms, ensuring they have a say in how their work is used and are fairly compensated for it”.

She noted that generative AI is “here to stay and it does not appear that all the books LLMs have been trained on can be effectively purged”.

“We urgently need to give control back to authors and their publishers, and licensing is the means to accomplish that going forward,” she added.

The Authors Guild notes that licensing is already happening, with publishers and publications striking deals with AI companies in most cases without consultation with the authors.


LAW OVER BORDERS COMPARATIVE GUIDES
Artificial Intelligence
This second edition, written by leading AI legal specialists, provides answers and insight on how to integrate Artificial Intelligence into business operations, whilst working within the relevant law and guidelines in key jurisdictions around the world....
| 1w



In the UK in April, the Financial Times struck a “strategic partnership” and licensing agreement with OpenAI. OpenAI has also signed a deal to bring news content from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Times and the Sunday Times to the AI platform.

The platform will open for authors and publishers to register their choices later this year and should be ready to offer licences to AI companies in early 2025.

Trip Adleris, co-founder and CEO of Created by Humans, said: “This collaboration shows that it is possible to build ethical AI systems that respect creators’ rights while advancing technology. Authors maintain control of their work and gain a new revenue stream, while AI developers get access to authorised, accurate, high-quality content.”

As part of the partnership, Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger will serve on the Created by Humans advisory board.

The platform can be found here.


The Global Legal Post launches international comparative law guide to Artificial Intelligence


October, 10 2024


Second edition, edited by Osborne Clarke’s John Buyers, provides detailed commentary on EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act

John Buyers

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The Global Legal Post today launches the second online edition of the Law Over Borders comparative guide to Artificial Intelligence.

Edited by John Buyers, head of AI and machine learning at Osborne Clarke, the guide features contributions from an array of leading firms in key jurisdictions across the world, providing answers and insight on how to integrate AI into business operations.

The guide also provides pragmatic and clear guidance on emergent AI laws in the European Union, China and Canada as well as insight into how national AI laws and regulations are likely to develop in the future.

Notably, the second edition contains detailed commentary on the EU’s far-reaching Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AIA), which came into force on 1 August, and a new chapter covering China’s regulation of AI, contributed by Global Law Office.

“In this edition of the guide we give concrete guidance on the provisions of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act – vital if you are intending to use, deploy or sell AI in the European Union, as well as key developments in the AI laws of China,” said Buyers.

The online guide’s easy-to-use digital format allows readers to quickly assess how different jurisdictions tackle common issues by comparing contributing authors’ answers to a series of carefully framed questions.

The print edition, meanwhile, will be officially launched by Buyers at Luxury Law Summit New York, which is hosted by The Global Legal Post, on 19 November. Click here to read the online guide and here to pre-order the print edition.
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