Tag: seeks
Proposed Mission Seeks to Resurrect Retired Spitzer Space Telescope
For more than three years, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has been idly coasting around the Sun while locked in a retirement safe mode, while its successor, the Webb Telescope, took over its cosmic observation duties. An upcoming servicing mission, however, could give the old telescope a new purpose: protecting Earth…
U.S. pipeline regulator seeks to toughen rules for detecting methane leaks
White House seeks information on tools used for automated employee surveillance
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) will soon release a public request for information (RFI) to learn more about the automated tools employers use to surveil, monitor, evaluate, and manage workers.
“Employers are increasingly investing in technologies that monitor and track workers, and making workplace decisions based on that information,” the OSTP announced in a blog on Monday. It said that while these technologies can benefit both workers and employers in some cases, they can also create serious risks to workers.
NASA Seeks ‘Citizen Scientists’ to Listen to Space Noises
So NASA is now announcing “a new NASA-funded citizen science project called HARP — or Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas ” that has “turned those once-unheard waves into audible whistles, crunches, and whooshes…” Or, as the Washington Post puts it, “NASA wants your help listening in on the universe.”
From NASA’s news release:
In 2007, NASA launched five satellites to fly through Earth’s magnetic “harp” — its magnetosphere — as part of the THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). Since then, THEMIS has been gathering a bounty of information about plasma waves across Earth’s magnetosphere. “THEMIS can sample the whole harp,” said Michael Hartinger, a heliophysicist at the Space Science Institute in Colorado. “And it’s been out there a long time, so it has collected a lot of data.”
The frequencies of the waves THEMIS measures are too low for our ears to hear, however. So the HARP team sped them up to convert them to sound waves. By using an interactive tool developed by the team, you can listen to these waves and pick out interesting features you hear in the sounds… Preliminary investigations with HARP have already started revealing unexpected features, such as what the team calls a “reverse harp” — frequencies changing in the opposite way than what scientists anticipated…
“Data sonification provides human beings with an opportunity to appreciate the naturally occurring music of the cosmos,” said Robert Alexander, a HARP team member from Auralab Technologies in Michigan. “We’re hearing sounds that are literally out of this world, and for me that’s the next best thing to floating in a spacesuit.”
To start exploring these sounds, visit the HARP website.
“Think listening to years’ worth of wave patterns is a job for artificial intelligence? Think again,” writes the Washington Post.
In a news release, HARP team member Martin Archer of Imperial College London says humans are often better at listening than machines. “The human sense of hearing is an amazing tool,” Archer says. “We’re essentially trained from birth to recognize patterns and pick out different sound sources. We can innately do some pretty crazy analysis that outperforms even some of our most advanced computer algorithms.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why did SQM plunge? Hard choices ahead as Chile seeks to bring lithium under state control
California seeks to force Tesla to comply with racial bias investigation
California regulators are taking legal action against Tesla to force the company to comply with a state investigation into allegations of unlawful harassment of and discrimination against certain Black Tesla workers. The California Civil Rights Department (CRD) said Thursday it is seeking a court order that will run parallel to the state’s current lawsuit into […]
California seeks to force Tesla to comply with racial bias investigation by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch