SpaceX Starship explodes during routine test
Musk's Space X said the rocket was preparing for the tenth flight test when it "experienced a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase," without elaborating on the nature of the complication. "A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted for," Space X said on social media. "There are no hazards to residents in surrounding communities, and we ask that individuals do not attempt to approach the area." — AFP
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Observer
3 days ago
- Observer
Eggs en Provence: France's unique dinosaur egg trove
At the foot of Sainte Victoire, the mountain in Provence immortalised by Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne, a palaeontologist brushes meticulously through a mound of red clay looking for fossils. These are not any old fossils, but 75-million-year-old dinosaur eggs. Little luck or skill is needed to find them: scientists believe that there are more dinosaur eggs here than at any other place on Earth. The area, closed to the public, is nicknamed 'Eggs en Provence', due to its proximity to the southeastern city of Aix en Provence. 'There's no other place like it,' explained Thierry Tortosa, a palaeontologist and conservationist at the Sainte Victoire Nature Reserve. 'You only need to look down to find fragments. We're literally walking on eggshells here.' Around 1,000 eggs, some of them as big as 30 centimetres (12 inches) in diameter, have been found here in recent years in an area measuring less than a hectare — a mere dot on a reserve that will span 280 hectares once it is doubled in size by 2026 to prevent pillaging. 'We reckon we've got about one egg per square metre (11 square feet). So there are thousands, possibly millions, here,' Tortosa said. 'Eggs' is not in the business of competing with other archaeological sites — even though Tortosa finds the 'world record' of 17,000 dinosaur eggs discovered in Heyuan, China, in 1996 vaguely amusing. 'We're not looking to dig them up because we're in a nature reserve and we can't just alter the landscape. We wait until they're uncovered by erosion,' he said. 'Besides, we don't have enough space to store them all. We just take those that are of interest from a palaeontology point of view.' Holy Grail Despite the plethora of eggs on site, the scientists still have mysteries to solve. Those fossils found so far have all been empty, either because they were not fertilised or because the chick hatched and waddled off. 'Until we find embryos inside — that's the Holy Grail — we won't know what kind of dinosaur laid them. All we know is that they were herbivores because they're round,' said Tortosa. Fossilised dinosaur embryos are rarer than hen's teeth. Palaeontologists discovered a tiny fossilised Oviraptorosaur that was at least 66 million years old in Ganzhou, China, around the year 2000. But Tortosa remains optimistic that 'Eggs' holds its own Baby Yingliang. 'Never say never. In the nine years that I've been here, we've discovered a load of stuff we never thought we'd find.' Which is why experts come once a year to search a new part of the reserve. The location is always kept secret to deter pillagers. When AFP visited, six scientists were crouched under camouflage netting in a valley lost in the Provencal scrub, scraping over a few square metres of clay-limestone earth, first with chisels, then with pointy-tipped scribers. 'There's always something magical — like being a child again — when you find an egg or a fossilised bone,' specialist Severine Berton said. Unique Their 'best' finds — among the thousands they have dug up — include a small femur and a 30-centimetre-long tibia-fibula. They are thought to come from a Rhabdodon or a Titanosaur — huge herbivores who roamed the region. In the Cretaceous period (89-66 million years BCE), the Provencal countryside's then-flooded plains and silty-clayey soils offered ideal conditions for dinosaurs to graze and nest, and perfect conditions to conserve the eggs for millennia. The region, which stretched from what is now Spain to the Massif Central mountains of central France, formed an island that was home to several dinosaur species found nowhere else in the world. Alongside the endemic herbivores were carnivores such as the Arcovenator and the Variraptor, a relative of the Velociraptor of Jurassic Park fame. In 1846, French palaeontologist Philippe Matheron found the world's first fossilised dinosaur egg in Rognac, around 30 kilometres from Eggs. Since then, museums from across the world have dispatched people to Provence on egg hunts. Everyone, it seems, wants a bit of the omelette. Despite efforts to stop pillaging, problems persist, such as when a wildfire uncovered a lot of fossils in 1989 and 'everyone came egg collecting', Tortosa said. Five years later, the site was designated a national geological nature reserve, closed to the public -- the highest level of protection available. The regional authorities are now mulling over ways to develop 'palaeontology tourism', a move Tortosa applauds. 'France is the only country in the world that doesn't know how to promote its dinosaurs,' Tortosa said. 'Any other place would set up an entire museum just to show off a single tooth.' — AFP
Observer
4 days ago
- Observer
'Writing is thinking': do students who use ChatGPT learn less?
When Jocelyn Leitzinger had her university students write about times in their lives they had witnessed discrimination, she noticed that a woman named Sally was the victim in many of the stories. "It was very clear that ChatGPT had decided this is a common woman's name," said Leitzinger, who teaches an undergraduate class on business and society at the University of Illinois in Chicago. "They weren't even coming up with their own anecdotal stories about their own lives," she told AFP. Leitzinger estimated that around half of her 180 students used ChatGPT inappropriately at some point last semester -- including when writing about the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), which she called both "ironic" and "mind-boggling". So she was not surprised by recent research which suggested that students who use ChatGPT to write essays engage in less critical thinking. The preprint study, which has not been peer-reviewed, was shared widely online and clearly struck a chord with some frustrated educators. The team of MIT researchers behind the paper have received more than 3,000 emails from teachers of all stripes since it was published online last month, lead author Nataliya Kosmyna told AFP. For the small study, 54 adult students from the greater Boston area were split into three groups. One group used ChatGPT to write 20-minute essays, one used a search engine, and the final group had to make do with only their brains. The researchers used EEG devices to measure the brain activity of the students, and two teachers marked the essays. The ChatGPT users scored significantly worse than the brain-only group on all levels. The EEG showed that different areas of their brains connected to each other less often. And more than 80 percent of the ChatGPT group could not quote anything from the essay they had just written, compared to around 10 percent of the other two groups. By the third session, the ChatGPT group appeared to be mostly focused on copying and pasting. The teachers said they could easily spot the "soulless" ChatGPT essays because they had good grammar and structure but lacked creativity, personality and insight. However Kosmyna pushed back against media reports claiming the paper showed that using ChatGPT made people lazier or more stupid. She pointed to the fourth session, when the brain-only group used ChatGPT to write their essay and displayed even higher levels of neural connectivity. Kosmyna emphasised it was too early to draw conclusions from the study's small sample size but called for more research into how AI tools could be used more carefully to help learning. Ashley Juavinett, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Diego who was not involved in the research, criticised some "offbase" headlines that wrongly extrapolated from the preprint. "This paper does not contain enough evidence nor the methodological rigour to make any claims about the neural impact of using LLMs (large language models such as ChatGPT) on our brains," she told AFP. Leitzinger said the research reflected how she had seen student essays change since ChatGPT was released in 2022, as both spelling errors and authentic insight became less common. Sometimes students do not even change the font when they copy and paste from ChatGPT, she said. But Leitzinger called for empathy for students, saying they can get confused when the use of AI is being encouraged by universities in some classes but is banned in others. The usefulness of new AI tools is sometimes compared to the introduction of calculators, which required educators to change their ways. But Leitzinger worried that students do not need to know anything about a subject before pasting their essay question into ChatGPT, skipping several important steps in the process of learning. A student at a British university in his early 20s who wanted to remain anonymous told AFP he found ChatGPT was a useful tool for compiling lecture notes, searching the internet and generating ideas. "I think that using ChatGPT to write your work for you is not right because it's not what you're supposed to be at university for," he said. The problem goes beyond high school and university students. Academic journals are struggling to cope with a massive influx of AI-generated scientific papers. Book publishing is also not immune, with one startup planning to pump out 8,000 AI-written books a year. "Writing is thinking, thinking is writing, and when we eliminate that process, what does that mean for thinking?" Leitzinger asked.
Times of Oman
26-06-2025
- Times of Oman
Axiom-4 piloted by Group Captain Shukla docks successfully at International Space Station
Florida: Axiom 4 mission aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft successfully docked at the International Space Station on Thursday. The Dragon spacecraft was ahead of schedule, autonomously docking at 4:05 pm (IST) to the space-facing port of the space station's Harmony module. NASA Flight Engineers Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers monitored Dragon's automated approach and docking manoeuvres. The Ax-4 crew will be welcomed by the seven-member Expedition 73 team and will now take part in a safety briefing. Former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) astronaut Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla, ESA (European Space Agency) astronauts Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski of Poland, and Tibor Kapu of Hungary lifted off at Noon IST on June 25, on the SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. The astronauts plan to spend about two weeks aboard the orbiting laboratory, conducting a mission comprised of science, outreach, and commercial activities. The mission is sending the first ISRO astronaut to the station as part of a joint effort between NASA and the Indian space agency. The private mission also carries the first astronauts from Poland and Hungary to stay aboard the space station. Earlier, in a live interaction from aboard the spacecraft, Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla, serving as the mission pilot, described the launch as "magical" and reflected on his journey. "I am thrilled to be here with my fellow astronauts--what a ride it was. Honestly, as I sat in the capsule 'Grace' on the launchpad yesterday after 30 days of quarantine, all I could think was: just go. When the launch finally happened, it was something else entirely. You're pushed back into the seat--and then suddenly, there's silence. You're just floating in the vacuum, and it's magical," Shukla said. He expressed gratitude to the mission team, calling the experience a "collective achievement." "I truly appreciate the efforts of every individual who made this journey possible. It's not just a personal accomplishment--it belongs to all of us," he said. The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Centre at noon IST on Wednesday with Shukla, Whitson, Uznanski-Wisniewski, and Kapu onboard. The Ax-4 team will remain aboard the ISS for up to 14 days, engaging in science experiments, outreach, and commercial work. This marks Axiom Space's most research-intensive mission yet, with NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) jointly conducting experiments on muscle regeneration, edible microalgae growth, survival of aquatic microorganisms, and human interaction with digital displays in microgravity.
