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Skynet is here: Autonomous drone hunts down human without being instructed, says UN report

After a United Nations commission to block killer robots was shut down in 2018, a new report from the international body now says the Terminator-like drones are now here. An autonomous weaponized drone hunted down a human target last year and attacked them without being specifically ordered to, according to a report from the UN Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Libya, published in March 2021 that was published in the New Scientist magazine and the Star. In other words, a drone may have killed one or several people. According to a recently uncovered UN report, this happened during a…

China’s Artificial Sun Sets New World Record of 120 million degrees C, Getting Closer to Nuclear Fusion

China has reached another milestone in its quest for a fusion reactor, with one of its “artificial suns” sustaining extreme temperatures for several times longer that its previous benchmark, according to state media. State news agency Xinhua reported that the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in a facility in the eastern city of Hefei registered a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds on Friday. It also maintained a temperature of 160 million degrees Celsius for 20 seconds, the report said. Last year, EAST achieved a plasma temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius for 20 seconds. Friday’s…

4.5 billion-year-old particles from the sun lurk in Earth’s core and mantle

High-precision noble gas analyses indicate that solar wind particles from our primordial Sun were encased in the Earth’s core over 4.5 billion years ago. Researchers from the Institute of Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University have concluded that the particles made their way into the overlying rock mantle over millions of years. The scientists found solar noble gases in an iron meteorite they studied. Because of their chemical composition, such meteorites are often used as natural models for the Earth’s metallic core. The rare class of iron meteorites make up only five percent of all known meteorite finds on Earth. Most…

NASA’s Curiosity rover spots strange, colourful shining clouds on Mars

It might look like a postcard from Arizona, but this snapshot shows something much more exotic: the planet Mars, as seen by NASA’s Curiosity rover. The image is a combination of 21 individual photographs the rover took recently to study a strange type of wispy cloud over its Gale Crater home. Scientists realized two Earth years ago that the cloud type was forming earlier in the Martian year than they expected. So this Martian year, Curiosity was watching for the early clouds, and it was not disappointed. The clouds did indeed show up beginning in late January, when the robotic…

Biden’s $6 trillion budget includes a big jump in climate spending

President Joe Biden is calling for a more than 60% increase in spending to fight climate change in his first federal budget, with more than $US36 billion in climate-related investments spread across nearly every agency of the government. That includes more than $10 billion in non defense spending on clean energy innovation, among other investments in research and development. How much of this proposal Congress agrees to fund will be crucial to the nation’s and the world’s ability to lower emissions. The total federal budget released on May 28, 2021, is about $6 trillion. Its climate-related spending is more than…