science

The comet's hyperbolic orbit will bring it just inside the orbit of Mars at perihelion, later this October. On the other side of the Sun, unfortunately. Fortunately, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may be watching it.

It's thought that the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory will be spotting lots more of these puppies.

On average, solar supplied 22 percent across the EU.

It supplied more than 40 percent in the Netherlands and 35 percent in Greece.

An Alaskan volcano that has been inactive for more than 100 years is showing signs of rumbling, according to scientists.

However, there's a chance that the activity could be signs of a pending avalanche, rather than a volcanic eruption, NASA said.

The Iliamna volcano, located near the Cook Inlet in southern Alaska, last erupted in 1867, but would still rumble every few years due to avalanches large enough to register on nearby seismic and infrasound instruments, according to NASA.

"In the 12 months ending April 2025, solar generated 83.1 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, compared to 81.6 TWh from natural gas."

"Nationally, solar generation continues to climb. In April, solar supplied 10.64% of U.S. electricity for the month (marking the first time the country crossed the 10% mark) and contributed 7.35% of generation over the rolling 12 months. California, by comparison, produced 42% of its electricity from solar at its seasonal peak in April, with May expected to push that figure even higher."

Good 'ol CA, long-time nation-leader.

Scientists spot traces of 10,000 miles of rivers in area where many believed ‘there wasn’t any evidence for water’

Thousands of miles of ancient riverbeds have been discovered in the heavily cratered southern highlands of Mars, suggesting the red planet was once a far wetter world than scientists thought.

Researchers spotted geological traces of nearly 10,000 miles (16,000km) of ancient watercourses, believed to be more than 3bn years old, in high resolution images of the rugged landscape captured by Mars orbiters.

While some of the riverbeds are relatively short, others form networks that stretch for more than 100 miles. The widespread rivers were probably replenished by regular rain or snowfall in the region, researchers said.

Andi's Writeup

Researchers have developed Centaur, a computational model that can predict and simulate human behavior across a wide range of psychological experiments[^1]. Built by fine-tuning Meta's Llama 3.1 70B language model on a dataset called Psych-101, Centaur was trained on over 10 million choices made by 60,000 participants across 160 psychology experiments[^1].

The model outperforms existing cognitive models in predicting human behavior, even generalizing to entirely new scenarios it wasn't trained on[^1]. "You can basically run experimental sessions in silico instead of running them on actual human participants," said Marcel Binz, cognitive scientist at the Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI[^2].

Centaur demonstrates unprecedented capabilities in capturing human cognition:

• Predicts behavior with 64% accuracy across varied tasks[^3]
• Generalizes to modified experimental scenarios, like switching from "spaceships" to "magic carpets" in decision-making tasks[^4]
• Shows alignment between its internal representations and human neural activity[^1]
• Performs well on out-of-distribution tasks in moral decision-making, economic games, and logical reasoning[^1]

"It's the first model that can do any kind of task exactly like a human can," said Russ Poldrack, cognitive scientist at Stanford University[^4].

[^1]: Nature - A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition

[^2]: Nature - This AI 'thinks' like a human — after training on 160 psychology studies

[^3]: Live Science - New AI is better at predicting how we behave than ever before, scientists say

[^4]: Gigazine - A basic model 'Centaur' that predicts human responses in psychological experiments has appeared

Save the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration From Devastating Cuts

Research in Chile suggests climate crisis makes eruptions more likely and explosive, and warns of Antarctica risk

The melting of glaciers and ice caps by the climate crisis could unleash a barrage of explosive volcanic eruptions, a study suggests.

The loss of ice releases the pressure on underground magma chambers and makes eruptions more likely. This process has been seen in Iceland, an unusual island that sits on a mid-ocean tectonic plate boundary. But the research in Chile is one of the first studies to show a surge in volcanism on a continent in the past, after the last ice age ended.

Global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels is now melting ice caps and glaciers across the world. The biggest risk of a resurgence of volcanic eruptions is in west Antarctica, the researchers said, where at least 100 volcanoes lie under the thick ice. This ice is very likely to be lost in the coming decades and centuries as the world warms.

Melting glaciers may be silently setting the stage for more explosive and frequent volcanic eruptions in the future, according to research on six volcanoes in the Chilean Andes.

Presented today [Tuesday 8 July] at the Goldschmidt Conference in Prague, the study suggests that hundreds of dormant subglacial volcanoes worldwide – particularly in Antarctica – could become more active as climate change accelerates glacier retreat.