Physics

MIT researchers have discovered “a red dwarf [star] slowly and steadily consuming its orbital object, a brown dwarf [star],” in a process that could continue for millions of years, writes reporter Mary Randolph for the Scientific American. The discovery was “a happy accident,” says graduate student Aaron Householder. “We’re excited to see if we can find a star eating a planet or maybe even two planets eating each other—different types of combinations of these objects.”  

Prof. Max Tegmark joins Fox Business's “The Claman Countdown,” to discuss warning lawmakers about the risks of rogue AI at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington. “It’s very obvious that if you make these things [AI] vastly smarter than humans in the next few years, give them robotic bodies, have millions and billions of them all over earth, and don’t understand how they work, we could lose control over them. So, let’s not do that,” says Tegmark. “We have very clear ideas for how we can control AI that cures cancer and [fuels] all sorts of other powerful tools. We want to build tools, not beings that are going to replace us.” 

Prof. Max Tegmark speaks to Fox Business about the need for government regulations on AI. AI agents “have goals; they’re actively pursuing them and being incredibly creative about getting things done, even if it wasn’t the way you wanted,” says Tegmark. “Put that together with robotic bodies, and you’ve got yourself a species. If they’re vastly smarter than us, which is the goal of these companies, then they can not only do hacking, they can go online and hire a bunch of humans to work for them.”  

The Boston Globe’s Hiawatha Bray spotlights Prof. Max Tegmark speaking at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington, an event advocating for government regulations on AI, sponsored by Tegmark’s Future of Life Institute. “We are here today because we know that what’s up next is a fork in the road,” said Tegmark at the assembly. “We know that the future of AI is not inevitable. It is for us to decide.”  

Prof. Tracy Slatyer speaks to CNN’s Jacopo Prisco about the possibility that a LUX-ZEPLIN device, containing 7 active metric tons of liquid xenon at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, detected dark matter below Earth’s surface. “If this really is a dark matter signal, this could be a key that unlocks a great deal of information about new physics, as well as giving us a new way to measure the behavior of dark matter in the neighborhood of the Earth and possibly more broadly through the cosmos,” says Slatyer.  

Prof. Max Tegmark joins David Gura and Christina Ruffini, hosts of “Bloomberg This Weekend,” to discuss briefing the U.S Senate on regulating AI, in wake of recent reports of rogue agents. “I want to emphasize for anyone who gets stressed by this, that this dystopian future where we build smarter than human AIs and robots, super intelligence, and then they take over Earth, is not at all inevitable,” says Tegmark.  

Cailin Plunkett speaks to the Scientific American’s Mary Randolph about her research discovering that 14% of black holes may be hierarchical mergers, made from the merger of two smaller black holes. “At minimum, we’re finding evidence that there are these highly spinning and weirdly tilted black holes in the dataset, and the most straightforward way to interpret that, the Occam’s razor answer, is that these black holes probably came from previous mergers,” says Plunkett.  

MIT researchers have discovered that peptides can remain stable and form into, reports Earth.com’s Eric Ralls. “First, we were astounded that peptides remain stable at all in concentrated sulfuric acid, for many weeks on end,” says Prof. Mei Hong, an author on the study. “Even more remarkable was that they adopt specific three-dimensional structures instead of random shapes.” 

MIT researchers have discovered that peptides “not only survive in highly concentrated sulfuric acid but take on stable 3D conformations too,” writes Chemical & Engineering News’ Fionna Samuels. “The project started with a new collaboration between [Prof. Sara] Seager and the MIT chemist [Prof.] Mei Hong,” notes Samuels. “In the years since finding phosphine signals in Venusian clouds, Seager had been working her way through the building blocks of life—nucleic acids, amino acids, and lipids—to see if any survived concentrated acid exposure.”  

According to new research by MIT physicists, a laser able to capture neutrinos, abundant yet intangible particles in the universe, is likely impossible to build, writes New Scientist’s Karmela Padavic-Callaghan. “The key to the neutrino laser proposal was a memory effect: when an atom in the BEC (Bose-Einstein condensate) emitted a neutrino, it would be more likely to continue emitting more neutrinos in the same direction, thus pushing them into a beam, because the quantum state that all the ultracold atoms share would retain a trace of that first emission,” Padavic-Callaghan explains. “[Prof. Wolfgang] Ketterle and his colleagues showed that this memory, although present, would be about 10,000 billion times too brief to affect the neutrinos as intended.” 

Postdoctoral Associate Rohan Naidu joins John Batchelor and David Livingston, hosts of the “Hotel Mars” podcast, to discuss his research discovering black hole stars from little red dots using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. “When we first discovered the little red dots, we assumed that red means dust, and so the idea was that the little red dots are the kind of black holes that we see in our backyard,” says Naidu. “But now we have this paradigm shift where we are realizing that red does not mean dust. Red could mean that you have this black hole star kind of object where all the blue light is being soaked up in this dense star-like cocoon.” 

Prof. Erin Kara speaks to NPR’s Ari Daniel about how the fastest star ever observed in the galaxy, located next to the Sagittarius A* black hole, experiences how space and time are distorted by the black hole. “This is a really exciting result," says Kara. "It kind of sets the stage in the next decade to make these kind of unprecedented measurements of black holes.” 

Prof. Max Tegmark joins Steve Clemons, host of Al Jazeerah’s, “The Bottom Line,” to discuss regulating AI. “Normally with technology we have a problem we want to solve: cure cancer, be able to get faster from point A to point B, and then we develop technology to meet those needs, to solve those problems—and that’s how we should deal with AI also,” says Tegmark. “We should look at what we would like to have accomplished in our society and then companies can sell products that solve those problems without causing a bunch of harm.” 

Popular Science’s Andrew Paul spotlights how MIT astronomers have identified a black hole star (MoM-BH*-1), a gigantic, dense gas cloud fueled by a central black hole, discovered in an image of a large red dot on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). “The groundbreaking realization and newest addition to the cosmic catalogue wouldn’t have been possible without the JWST, whose smallest discoveries have massive ramifications,” writes Paul. “Even something as tiny as a 100-million-year-old red dot.” 

Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), MIT researchers have discovered a black hole star, MoM-BH*‑1, the earliest example of a black hole in the universe, writes Mashable’s Elisha Sauers. “We argue that Black Hole Stars may be powering all of JWST's Little Red Dots that are found almost everywhere in the early Universe,” says Postdoctoral Associate Rohan Naidu. “Which is to say, this channel of making massive black holes must be very common, to the point where every massive black hole (like the Milky Way's) may have gone through this phase.”