AI Unboxed: In-Depth Reviews of the Best Tools Shaping the Future

HATFIELD, England – In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in Tuesday on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place. European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d , was in the prime habitable zone for potential life. "The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone,'" said Michel Mayor , an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland. An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet "extraordinary." Gliese 581 e is only 1.9 times the size of Earth — while previous planets found outside our solar system are closer to the size of massive Jupiter , which NASA says could swallow more than 1,000 Earths. Gli...

An U.S. spacecraft was scheduled to beam hundreds of photos of Mercury back to Earth on Tuesday after a close encounter with the planet closest to the sun. The images should show scientists never-before-seen landscapes on the planet closest to the sun. The high-resolution images are scheduled to be made public at 10 a.m. ET Tuesday. The MESSENGER spacecraft, launched in 2004, buzzed 124 miles (200 km) above Mercury's surface Monday at almost 15,000 mph. It's the second Mercury flyby for MESSENGER -- formally known as the Mercury Surface, Space, Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging craft. The NASA ship is more than halfway through a five-billion-mile journey that should take it around the sun 15 times and put it into the Mercury's orbit in March 2011. The American spacecraft Mariner 10 made flew by Mercury in 1974 and 1975, but MESSENGER is focusing on part of the planet that was not viewed then or during the craft's first pass in January. Photos taken during i...

June 19, 2008 -- Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it. "It must be ice," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that." The chunks were left at the bottom of a trench informally called "Dodo-Goldilocks" when Phoenix's Robotic Arm enlarged that trench on June 15, during the 20th Martian day, or sol, since landing. Several were gone when Phoenix looked at the trench early today, on Sol 24. Also early today, digging in a different trench, the Robotic Arm connected with a hard surface that has scientists...

Purveyors of the Cosmic 'Occult ' To a non-scientist, the words 'radio occultation' might sound a little spooky. But this relatively simple NASA-developed technology at the heart of a new satellite network named Cosmic is proving to be a powerful new tool for weather and climate forecasting. Launched April 14, 2006, the six spacecraft of the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate measure the bending and slowing of microwave radio signals as they pass through Earth's atmosphere. The signals are transmitted from U.S. global positioning system (GPS) satellites to Cosmic's GPS science receivers, which were designed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These bending and slowing events, referred to as occultations, occur when the GPS satellite signals are interrupted as the satellites rise or set on Earth's horizon, blocking their transmission. Haha, this one is funny. Notice the name "radio occultation" and then they ...