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- #Scientists finetune odds asteroid hitting earth how to#
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Similar methods are being used in almost every field, often with striking success–from diagnosing cancer patients more quickly in hospitals, to predicting future human behavior from video clips in AI labs and from companies like Apple, which are making personal-assistant AIs more intuitive and helpful than ever before, to improving real-time translation with services like Google Translate. Just ignore all that business with the nuclear bombs and time travel.


#Scientists finetune odds asteroid hitting earth movie#
It’s not the all-encompassing AI Skynet from the Terminator movie series, but it’s along the same lines.
#Scientists finetune odds asteroid hitting earth how to#
We’ve turned to artificial intelligence and machine learning–in essence, teaching a computer how to learn by itself, so that it becomes better and better at a set task without needing a human programmer to fine-tune it. NASA’s Frontier Development Lab (FDL) is pioneering a new approach, however, which could dramatically improve our chances of responding to a threatening object hurtling toward us. Also, the researchers believe that the event could explain the extinction of Neanderthals and the sudden appearance of art in caves around the globe.The logo of NASA’s Frontier Development Lab. They found that megafauna across mainland Australia and Tasmania went through simultaneous extinctions 42,000 years ago. While it was known the magnetic poles had temporarily flipped around 41 or 42,000 years ago in an event called the ‘Laschamps Excursion’, scientists were not aware how it had impacted life on the planet, if at all, the statement continued.Īfter ascertaining the time window of Adams event, the team compared the changes seen in the climate across the world during the same time. Guided by the spike in radiocarbon levels some 40,000 years ago, scientists were able to date and measure the rise in atmospheric radiocarbon from the collapse of Earth’s magnetic field. The Carbon-14 isotope, or radiocarbon, is rarely found in nature in large quantities. In this case, New Zealand's kauri trees were studied, which have been preserved in sediments for over 40,000 years and were alive during Adam's Event. The researchers studied the rings of some ancient trees. Trees store records of atmospheric activity in their annual 'growth rings' as they age.
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The period on Earth 42,000 years ago was a turbulent one, with widespread electrical storms, auroras and cosmic radiation seeping in through the atmosphere. Co-led by researchers at the UNSW Sydney and the South Australian Museum, the study coins the dangerous time the 'Adams Transitional Geomagnetic Event' or simply, 'Adams Event'.Īccording to an UNSW statement of the finding, the name is a tribute to science fiction writer Douglas Adams, who wrote that '42' was the "ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything" in his science fiction novel series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.Īn Homo sapien invasion is among the many theories that is thought to have prompted the extinction of the Neanderthals, some 40,000 years ago. The researchers that conducted the study used radiocarbon preserved in ancient tree rings to narrow down to the time period when the magnetic field of Earth had reversed and solar winds had recorded changes. A recent study has found that planet Earth's magnetic poles underwent a flip some 40,000 years ago, in an event that was followed by global environmental change and mass extinctions among other serious implications.
