#8 | First U.S. Moon Landing In 50 Years

Quote of the Week 💬 

U.S. Spacecraft Lands On The Moon For The 1st Time In 50 Years

⌛ The Seven Second Summary: A spacecraft developed by Intuitive Machines landed safely on the moon last week, becoming the first privately developed spacecraft to reach the moon and the first American spacecraft to pull off a lunar landing since 1972.

💡 Why This May Matter: Intuitive Machines’ spacecraft is carrying equipment for 6 NASA experiments and received $118 million USD for this mission. The success of this mission may pave the way for more government-supported programs aimed at commercializing lunar deliveries and, ultimately, creating a lunar economy for the future.

🔎 Elements To Consider: The United States joins India and Japan as countries with successful lunar landings within the past year. The pace of space achievements is accelerating, with no signs of slowing down.

📚 Learn More: AP News.

Stat of the Week 📊 

New Genetic Variants Identified in Genomic Research

275 million

⌛ The Seven Second Summary: All of Us is a massive program run by the United States’ National Institute of Health to better understand genetic variants and health profiles of 1 million people in the country by the end of 2026. They released a series a papers last week, documenting their findings thus far.

🔬 How It Was Done: The genomes of over 250,000 participants were sequenced and analyzed.

🧮 Key Results:

• 275 million previously unreported genetic variants have been discovered. This includes nearly 4 million variants that may be associated with disease risk.

• As an example, 611 genetic markers were found to possibly drive the development and progression of type 2 diabetes, including 145 markers which have never been reported before.

💡 Why This May Matter: To date, more than 90% of participants in large genomics studies are of European genetic ancestry. Thus far, 46% of the participants in All of Us belong to a minority racial or ethnic group, which may partially explain why so many new genetic variants have already been discovered. As this program grows its data set, it may serve as a valuable resource for genetics researchers who want to understand if their findings can be generalized to a broad population, or if they only apply to a limited and specific group of people.

🔎 Elements To Consider: As more genomic data is released and analyzed over time, long-standing debates will inevitably arise about how to accurately interpret and discuss what the data reveals about people with different ethnic and genomic ancestries.

📚 Learn More: NIH. Nature. Paper 2. Paper 3. Paper 4.

AI x Science 🤖

A Multimodal Model That Can Understand 1 Hour Long Videos

UC Berkeley researchers released a family of general purpose AI models to the open source community. The models were trained on data from text, images and videos, and are capable of completing various tasks such as text-to-image generation, text-to-video generation and image based conversations.

However, perhaps the most impressive task these models fulfill are its understanding of long form videos. For example, the models were provided with a 1-hour video compilation consisting of 500 individual meme clips. These models were able to accurately respond to questions about specific clips at random timestamps 44-56% of the time, which is comparable performance to Google’s and Open AI’s commercialized, state-of-the-art products.

While these open source models were not nearly as proficient at text-to-image, text-to-video and image based conversations as Google’s and Open AI’s models, this news serves as reminder of the competitive pressures in the AI space. The open source community is only a few weeks behind releasing solutions and features approaching state-of-the-art quality for free, or at a fraction of the price. Large World Model.

Our Full AI Index

• Research: Princeton researchers trained a machine learning model to predict the formation of plasma instabilities during nuclear fusion reactions. With these predictive capabilities, they were able to adjust specific parameters of the fusion reaction in real-time, such as the shape of the plasma and the strength of the power input, and maintain a sustained fusion reaction. Princeton. Nature.

• Open Source: Google released Gemma, a family of four lightweight open source language models built from the same research and technology used to create their proprietary Gemini models. According to Hugging Face’s LLM Leaderboard, Google’s Gemma 7B performs comparably to the best available open source models of a similar parameter size, which is valuable for use cases where speed and efficiency is most important. Google Blog. Hugging Face.

• Business: Remember the YouTube video we shared last week about OpenAI’s text-to-video demo? ElevenLabs, an AI voice generator and text-to-speech software, used their product to generate realistic sounds to overlay OpenAI’s Sora demo. YouTube.

• Policy: The U.S. House of Representatives announced the assembly of a bipartisan AI Task Force. The group’s focus is to explore legislation to foster AI safety, security and innovation. Speaker.

Other Observations 📰

Cooling Positronium With Laser Light For The First Time

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) managed to freeze positronium, a rare atom composed of 50% matter and 50% antimatter, for the first time ever. To do this, they tuned a laser to emit light particles with a wavelength similar to the energy level of the atom. Then, they used the laser to release light particles along the path of the atom’s direction. When positronium collided with these particles, it lost momentum and cooled down.

After they repeated this laser cooling technique several times, the team managed to decrease the temperature of the atom by 55%. The positronium went from the hot temperature of 380° Kelvin (106° Celcius / 224° Fareinheit), to the freezing temperature of 170° Kelvin (-103° Celcius / -153° Fareinheit). The researchers plan to continue this experiment until they freeze a sample of positronium to just 10° Kelvin, which is near absolute zero temperatures.

This feat would be a significant STEM accomplishment because positronium is an extremely unstable substance that annihilates into gamma rays once its matter and antimatter particles collide. If the researchers manage to freeze this atom to near absolute zero, its matter and antimatter particles won’t be able to collide and destroy themselves. This would give researchers time to study the substance in a way that has not been possible before, and may lead to new understandings of fundamental physics. CERN. Physical Review Letters.

Our Full Science Index

• Energy: BloombergNEF’s (BNEF) 1Q 2024 Global PV Market Outlook report dropped and their analysis estimates the world may install anywhere from 520GW - 655GW of solar PV capacity in 2024, with China expected to account for ~54% of the global solar installation capacity. For reference of how quickly the world’s solar capacity is growing, the report also mentions, “our 2030 [solar PV capacity] forecast is… well above BNEF's Net Zero Scenario and relatively comparable with global power generation capacity of 8.5 TW at the end of 2022.“ PV Magazine.

• Crohn’s Disease: A clinical trial involving 386 patients in the UK compared two treatment strategies for patients diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. The first approach followed today’s conventional treatment strategy, where patients received therapy treatments that were progressively more advanced if their symptoms continued to worsen over time. The second approach provided early advanced therapy to all patients as soon as their Crohn’s disease diagnosis was known. The early advanced therapy strategy led to a 10x reduction in the number of patients who needed urgent abdominal surgery for their disease in the future when compared to the group following conventional treatment strategies. University of Cambridge. The Lancet.

• Paleontology: An international team of researchers screened the DNA of ~10,000 ancient humans spanning Bulgaria, Finland, Greece, and Spain, dating back as far as 4,500 years ago, and identified 6 cases of Down syndrome and 1 case of Edwards syndrome in the population. This marks the first ever identified case of Edwards syndrome in prehistoric remains. University of Adelaide. Nature.

• Medical Approvals: After demonstrating significant overall survival improvements in clinical trial patients, the FDA approved osimertinib, a medication to be taken alongside platinum-based chemotherapy, for patients diagnosed with advanced or metastatic non-small cell lung cancer exhibiting specific genetic characteristics. FDA. New England Journal of Medicine.

• Public Health: Last but not least, two noteworthy indications of progress we found within the public health domain:

  • Cambodia is well on its way to fulfilling its goal to eradicate malaria from the country by 2025. In 2023 the country experienced 1,384 cases of malaria, indicating a 66% year-over-year case decline. Khmer Times. Malaria Journal.

  • Our World In Data released an article and accompanying set of data and visuals about the world’s triumphant efforts to eradicate polio. In 1981, there was an estimated ~460,000 global cases of the disease. In 2020, there was ~1,800 global cases, and the disease has been eradicated from several regions. Our World In Data.

Media of the Week 📸 

Integrating Language & Vision AI Models Into A Robot

A team of researchers integrated OpenAI’s Vision & GPT-4 Turbo AI models with Boston Dynamic’s Spot robot to create a real-time, conversational robotics machine. Watch the video to see the team test out the robot. They ask it general questions like “what is the capital of Canada?”, and give it specific instructions to follow. Github.

100+ New Species Discovered In Underwater Mountain

The international team of scientists recently embarked on an ocean expedition off the coast of Chile. They now report discovering over 100 species likely new to science, including deep-sea corals, glass sponges, sea urchins, amphipods, squat lobsters and other species. Their expedition charted 10 different underwater sea mountains, much of which was explored for the first time. The larger area where this expedition took place has 200+ underwater sea mountains. How many more species have yet to be found? Schmidt Ocean Institute.

One Of The Most Powerful Eruptions From A Black Hole Ever

Astronomers observed one of the most powerful eruptions from a supermassive black hole in recorded history. The scientists used telescopes like NASA’s Chandra to assess a cluster of stars and galaxies about 3.8 billion light-years away, and they noticed a powerful jet force emanating from a supermassive black hole in one of the cluster’s central galaxies. When they measured the magnitude of this jet’s energy output, they found it emitted 100,000 trillion times more energy than our Sun will release over its entire lifetime. Chandra.

This Week In The Cosmos 🪐

No major astronomical events this week. How sad…