Copernical Team
UFOs: How to calculate the odds that an alien spaceship has been spotted
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The US military has released previously classified photos and films related to unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings, which mostly show something blurry moving strangely. Still, I hear that a friend of a friend has gone from thinking there's a 1% chance that UFOs are aliens to now believing it is 50%. Is he rational?
People are constantly seeing things in the sky they don't understand. The vast majority are airplanes, satellites, weather balloons, clouds, rocket launches, auroras, optical reflections and so on. But for some sightings, there's no known explanation. The problem is that people jump to the conclusion "unknown = aliens". And when you think about it, this is fairly odd. Why not angels?
Anyway, I like to do maths instead. The Bayes formula (below), a mainstay of statistics, gives the probability (Pr) of something, given some evidence.
Cosmic cartographers map nearby Universe revealing the diversity of star-forming galaxies
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Pilotes
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ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet and NASA astronaut Megan MacArthur run sessions on the Pilote experiment proposed by France’s space agency CNES in the European Columbus module of the International Space Station.
Continuing French neuroscience experiments started on the Russian space station Mir, the Pilote experiment evaluates a new way of providing tactile and visual feedback to astronauts when operating robots. Using a virtual reality headset and a haptic joystick can recreate the feeling of pressure and touch when tele-operating a robotic arm.
The results from Pilote will improve the work space on the International Space Station and future spacecraft for lunar
Software making space missions smarter
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To help venture further into space, or to gather ever more data, space missions keep on getting smarter. The latest Earth-observing satellites decide which images need sending to users, while planetary probes or rovers located beyond the limits of real-time oversight are able to set and follow their own course.
NASA Map Gives Most Accurate Space-Based View of LA's Carbon Dioxide
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Using data from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 (OCO-3) instrument on the International Space Station, researchers have released one of the most accurate maps ever made from space of the human influence on carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The map shows tiny variations in airborne CO2 from one mile of the giant L.A. Basin to the next.
The highest CO2 readings, Space travel weakens our immune systems
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Microgravity in space perturbs human physiology and is detrimental for astronaut health, a fact first realized during early Apollo missions when astronauts experienced inner ear disturbances, heart arrhythmia, low blood pressure, dehydration, and loss of calcium from their bones after their missions.
One of the most striking observations from Apollo missions was that just over half of astr New connector for sustainable structures on Earth and in space
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During his time at EPFL under the Erasmus program, Romain van Wassenhove came up with an idea for a connector that could be used to make modular structures out of sustainable bamboo rather than wood, plastic or metal. "I wanted to focus my Master's on a topic that had meaning to me and that would lead to a concrete application," he says. "Working with bamboo was something I already had in mind w Physicists determine how auroras are created
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The aurora borealis, or northern lights, that fill the sky in high-latitude regions have fascinated people for thousands of years. But how they're created, while theorized, had not been conclusively proven.
In a new study, a team of physicists led by University of Iowa reports definitive evidence that the most brilliant auroras are produced by powerful electromagnetic waves during geomagne The origin of the first structures formed in galaxies like the Milky Way identified
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An international team of scientists led from the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB, CSIC-INTA), with participation from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), has used the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) to study a representative sample of galaxies, both disc and spheroidal, in a deep sky zone in the constellation of the Great Bear to characterize the properties of the stellar populations of Stream of stars extends thousands of light-years across the Milky Way
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It's hard to see more than a handful of stars from Princeton University, because the lights from New York City, Princeton and Philadelphia prevent our sky from ever getting pitch black, but stargazers who get into more rural areas can see hundreds of naked-eye stars - and a few smudgy objects, too.
The biggest smudge is the Milky Way itself, the billions of stars that make up our spiral ga