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Experts weigh hunt for unearthly life in solar system

Carolyn Porco and Enceladus
Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco shows a graphic that compares the size of Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, with the British Isles. (Breakthrough Initiatives Photo)

STANFORD, Calif. — Are there microbes falling in the snows of Enceladus? Could a drone fly to biological hot spots on Titan? Is life floating in the sulfurous clouds of Venus?

All those extraterrestrial locales — plus Mars and Europa — had their turn in the spotlight on Thursday at the third annual Breakthrough Discuss conference on Stanford University’s campus. The gathering was organized by the Breakthrough Initiatives, a program created by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and his wife Julia to spotlight future frontiers in the search for life beyond Earth.

The program is supporting the radio-based search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, through Breakthrough Listen. It’s also backing Breakthrough Starshot, a decades-long campaign aimed at sending blizzards of beam-powered nanoprobes to the Alpha Centauri star system.

This week’s proceedings signal that Breakthrough’s quest will focus broadly on our own solar system as well.

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Boeing CEO: Humans could reach Mars in decade

Albritton and Muilenburg
Politico’s Robert Albritton (left) chats with Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg (right) during a space conference. (Politico Live via Facebook)

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg says it’s possible that humans will set foot on Mars in the next decade, and he’s convinced the first people will get there on a Boeing-built rocket.

Muilenburg’s comments, made today during a Q&A at the first Politico Space conference, could be interpreted as yet another challenge to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who also has plans to send people to Mars within a decade.

Politico’s founder and publisher, Robert Allbritton, gave Muilenburg ample opportunities to reflect on the SpaceX effect during the session.

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Paul Allen’s team finds USS Helena shipwreck

Helena remains
The “50” painted on the hull helped identify the shipwreck as the USS Helena, which was sunk during World War II. The inset image shows the ship’s sonar signature. (Paul G. Allen Photo)

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s seagoing sleuths are reporting one more find in their quest to locate sunken military vessels from World War II.

This time it’s the USS Helena, a St. Louis-class light cruiser that was hit during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 but went on to meritorious service in three Pacific naval battles. Its service was so meritorious that the Helena became the first U.S. ship to receive a Navy Unit Commendation.

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Going hypersonic: Boeing boosts Reaction Engines

Space plane
An artist’s conception shows a space plane powered by Reaction Engines’ SABRE system deploying an upper stage with a payload heading to orbit. (Reaction Engines Illustration)

Boeing’s HorizonX venture investment arm is placing a big bet on hypersonic flight.

Today it announced that it’s going in with Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems on a $37.3 million Series B investment round for Reaction Engines, a British aerospace startup focusing on a hybrid rocket-jet propulsion technology that could send aircraft zipping into space and back at multiple times the speed of sound.

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Policy experts seek intelligent ways to regulate AI

AI panel
The World Economic Forum’s Kay Firth-Butterfield, Carnegie Mellon University’s Lorrie Faith Cranor and Wired’s Tom Simonite discuss AI governance during a conference at Carnegie Mellon. (CMU via YouTube)

Regulations for the proper use of artificial intelligence are almost as inevitable as the rise of AI itself — but the way it’ll be done is far from clear.

“This isn’t as simple as just ‘trust,’ ” said Kay Firth-Butterfield, project head for AI and machine learning at the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. “This is more complex, because the technology itself is very fast, changing all the time, and is complex as well.”

Firth-Butterfield and other policy experts weighed in on the challenges of regulating AI, and dropped some hints about the road ahead, today at the Carnegie Mellon University – K&L Gates Conference on Ethics and AI in Pittsburgh.

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Titanic sub rises to the next level of testing

Titan submersible
OceanGate’s Titan submersible heads out from the marina at Everett, Wash., for its final test dive in Puget Sound. The sub is due to begin a journey to the Bahamas this week. (OceanGate Photo)

OceanGate has finished putting its Titan submersible through its first round of shallow-water tests in Puget Sound, and is packing it up for deep-water tests in the Bahamas. Then it’s off to the Titanic.

The OceanGate team custom-designed the 22-foot-long craft to take up to five people to a depth of 13,000 feet, with the objective of studying one of the world’s most famous shipwrecks starting in June.

Construction was completed in January, and for the past several weeks, the company has been taking Titan out from its homebase marina in Everett, Wash., for dives of up to 100 feet.

“It’s going well,” said Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s CEO and Titan’s chief test pilot.

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NanoRacks plans to turn rockets into space outposts

NanoRacks space outpost
Artwork shows a Centaur upper stage that’s been converted into an outpost. (NanoRacks Illustration)

Don’t call them commercial space stations, or gateways, or portals. NanoRacks is laying claim to a different moniker for its new breed of refurbished orbital modules.

“We like ‘outposts,’” NanoRacks CEO Jeffrey Manber told GeekWire.

The space outposts that Manber has in mind, at least to start out with, are converted Centaur upper stages — the rocket boosters that sit atop the first stage of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket.

NanoRacks’ concept calls for refurbishing the insides of a Centaur upper stage after it’s finished delivering an Atlas payload to its proper orbit, so that it can be reused as an orbital habitat. The work could be done by a crew on the International Space Station, or by a robot.

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Microsoft is turning down some sales over AI ethics

Eric Horvitz
Microsoft Research Lab’s Eric Horvitz speaks at Carnegie Mellon University. (CMU via YouTube)

Concerns over the potential abuse of artificial intelligence technology have led Microsoft to cut off significant sales, says Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and director at Microsoft Research Labs.

Horvitz laid out Microsoft’s commitment to AI ethics today during the Carnegie Mellon University – K&L Gates Conference on Ethics and AI, presented in Pittsburgh.

One of the key groups focusing on the issue at Microsoft is the Aether Committee, where “Aether” stands for AI and Ethics in Engineering and Research.

“It’s been an intensive effort … and I’m happy to say that this committee has teeth,” Horvitz said during his lecture.

He said the committee reviews how Microsoft’s AI technology could be used by its customers, and makes recommendations that go all the way up to senior leadership.

“Significant sales have been cut off,” Horvitz said. “And in other sales, various specific limitations were written down in terms of usage, including ‘may not use data-driven pattern recognition for use in face recognition or predictions of this type.’ ”

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Report: Satellite loss blamed on Northrop Grumman

Investigators have tentatively concluded that January’s loss of a U.S. spy satellite code-named Zuma was due to problems with a payload adapter that was provided by the satellite’s manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, rather than the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

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‘One Strange Rock’ shows the benefits of bat poop

What do giant fruit bats have in common with Johnny Appleseed? Tonight’s episode of “One Strange Rock,” National Geographic Channel’s documentary series about the interconnectedness of Earth’s ecosystems, provides an answer that’ll awe the grossologist in your family.

During each rainy season, between October and December, up to 10 million of the bats — also known as flying foxes — converge on Zambia’s Kasanka National Park from all over Africa.

“It’s the largest mammal migration on Earth,” conservationist Frank Willems says in National Geographic’s video clip, available via GeekWire as an exclusive preview for tonight’s show. “They fly out in every direction, covering an area of 10,000 square miles.”

The bats gorge themselves on the waterberries, mangoes, musuku fruit and red milkwood berries hanging from the park’s trees, eating enough to equal half of their body weight each night.

As the bats fly back and forth, the fruit and the seeds pass through their digestive system — and yes, National Geographic shows that part of the process, using what appears to be an internal gut-cam. Then the seeds come out the other end and drop to the forest floor.

“The seeds might end up in a completely different place where a new tree can then grow,” Willems says. “We are looking at literally billions of seeds flying all over the continent.”

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