MAROKO133 Update ai: Saturn’s Moon Shows Major Signs of Life Wajib Baca

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Saturn’s Moon Shows Major Signs of Life Hari Ini

Astronomers have found that Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, is spewing out copious amounts of complex organic molecules, suggesting it’s an even more promising place to look for extraterrestrial life than previously thought.

As detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers examined data collected by NASA and the European Space Agency’s Cassini spacecraft, which visited the tiny moon between 2005 and 2015. They found evidence that its suspected underground ocean is home to complex chemical reactions, which on Earth are closely associated with life.

The research builds on existing findings that jets of water are bursting forth from Cassini’s underground ocean, shooting ice particles straight into space, some of which find their way back onto the moon’s surface.

“Cassini was detecting samples from Enceladus all the time as it flew through Saturn’s E ring,” said lead author and Freie Universität Berlin researcher Nozair Khawaja in a statement. “We had already found many organic molecules in these ice grains, including precursors for amino acids.”

Specifically, the team examined ocean spray data collected by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer in 2008.

“The ice grains contain not just frozen water, but also other molecules, including organics,” Nozair explained. Since these particular particles traveled fast enough — roughly 11.2 miles per second — when hitting the instrument, they didn’t “cluster,” giving the researchers a “chance to see these previously hidden signals,” per Nozair.

They found evidence that the organic molecules originated in Enceladus’ ocean, including ones never observed before, such as signs of nitrogen- and oxygen-bearing compounds, ethers, and esters.

These organic molecules are involved in the kinds of chemical reactions that are believed to have eventually led to the formation of life on Earth, making it a particularly exciting finding.

“There are many possible pathways from the organic molecules we found in the Cassini data to potentially biologically relevant compounds, which enhances the likelihood that the moon is habitable,” Nozair said.

However, we’re still far from being able to confirm there’s life on Enceladus, something that would require a standalone mission to its surface.

“There is much more in the data that we are currently exploring, so we are looking forward to finding out more in the near future,” Nozair said.

Excitingly, the ESA is considering sending a spacecraft to the moon since it “ticks all the boxes to be a habitable environment.”

“Even not finding life on Enceladus would be a huge discovery, because it raises serious questions about why life is not present in such an environment when the right conditions are there,” Nozair concluded.

More on Saturn’s moons: Scientists Puzzled by Mysterious Motion in Atmosphere of Saturn’s Moon

The post Saturn’s Moon Shows Major Signs of Life appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: Honeybees’ dance includes cognitive complexity, informs nestma

Researchers studied the famous “waggle dance” of honeybees, which they use to communicate to one another about the location of resources, to evaluate whether they integrate memory of the terrain into their flight. They do.

A poetic form of communication, though it may be, the waggle dance is thought to convey only a vector—direction and distance from the hive to a food source. A recent study published in Current Biology investigated the remarkable communication strategy to a new degree of depth.

Did the dance teach the bees, if you can imagine a bee moving with fear, though emotion didn’t play into this study, to anticipate a bump in the road at a specific point on the journey? Are the bees, in fact, pantomiming the way itself?

Researchers trained a small group of foragers to visit a feeder located north of a hive along a gravel road. However, they released the bees from three different sites, discovering that the dance was even more complex and detailed than they had originally understood.

A truly intelligent and efficient form of communication

Researchers placed a feeder with a sugar solution north of the hive along a gravel road and trained forager bees to visit it. One site, as reported by Phys, had a distinct path, whereas another lacked these types of markers.

Then they let the bees perform their magic trick of dancing to attract mates and indicate where the food was located. They had never visited the hive themselves. Researchers awaited to determine whether any information about the landscape, what to anticipate on the flight itself, was communicated in “the waggle.”

“We employed harmonic radar tracking, a powerful tool for recording the detailed flight trajectories of individual bees,” the study authors wrote.

Researchers found that the receivers of the dance weren’t just following the direction and distance indicated by the waggle dance. They integrated the dance’s vector information with the memory of landscape features that they might encounter along the way.

“In the absence of an expected landmark, their search behavior became more exploratory,” according to Phys. “They flew farther and in less straight paths,” according to a news release by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A multifaceted form of communication

“In conclusion,” study authors stated in the study, “our experiments addressed the question of whether the vector information conveyed by the dance is integrated into a recruit’s spatial representation—constructed from its own experience—and whether this integration occurs within a common frame of spatial reference shared by both the reported symbolically communicated vector and self-experienced locations.

The recruits developed an expectation, they continued, about the landscape that they would fly over when bees integrated the dance, as if “body language” communicated so much more than words did. Researchers called it “a multifaceted form of communication.”

What they saw was that the cognitive structure at play here is “most adequately conceptualized as a cognitive map.”

So bees are even more impressive than we already give them credit for. These intelligent bees aren’t just following the vector; they retain a spatial layout of the environment and incorporate it into their navigation.

“Our study reveals a higher level of cognitive complexity in honeybee communication. Waggle dance-following bees do not simply follow a blind vector instruction; they integrate it with a cognitive map of their surroundings built during earlier exploratory flights. This allows them to form expectations and navigate more efficiently,” said the lead researcher in Phys.

Read the study in Current Biology.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com