By Trevor Hunnicutt, Krishn Kaushik and Rajesh Kumar Singh WASHINGTON/NEW DELHI The Biden administration is poised to sign

Nasa has received “puzzling” data from a spacecraft that was studying a distant asteroid. The space agency’s Lucy Spacecraft left Earth in 2021, with the aim of studying “Jupiter trojans”, a set of asteroids that fly around the Sun along Jupiter’s orbit and remain largely mysterious. Recently, scientists decided to send it to visit another small object on its way, largely as a test of the systems on the spacecraft that let it track asteroids for its mission. When Lucy arrived at that object – a main belt asteroid named Dinkinesh – it found a surprise, however. Images taken of the asteroid showed that it had a satellite, which flies around the asteroid like a tiny moon of its own. Now, further examination of those images show that the satellite is not one but two objects. Those objects make up a “contact binary”, or two smaller objects that are touching each other as they fly through space. The unexpected discovery explains some of the strange data that scientists had received as they approached Lucy. But it opens up more confusion about the whole system, which one called “bizarre”. “Contact binaries seem to be fairly common in the solar system,” said John Spencer, Lucy deputy project scientist, in a statement. “We haven’t seen many up-close, and we’ve never seen one orbiting another asteroid. “We’d been puzzling over odd variations in Dinkinesh’s brightness that we saw on approach, which gave us a hint that Dinkinesh might have a moon of some sort, but we never suspected anything so bizarre!” The flyby of Dinkinesh was only intended as a test of the spacecraft’s systems but has now posed new possible research for scientists. “It’s truly marvelous when nature surprises us with a new puzzle,” said Tom Statler, Lucy program scientist from NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Great science pushes us to ask questions that we never knew we needed to ask.” “It is puzzling, to say the least,” said Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy, also from Southwest Research Institute. “I would have never expected a system that looks like this. In particular, I don’t understand why the two components of the satellite have similar sizes. This is going to be fun for the scientific community to figure out.” The scientists were only able to confirm the nature of the system with the multiple images that were sent back by Lucy in the wake of its encounter with Dinkinesh. Nasa is working now to get the rest of the data from the spacecraft, which might include yet more surprises. Lucy itself will continue flying through space on a journey that is due to take 12 years. Lucy is actually heading back to Earth, which it will use for a gravity assist to propel it onto the next part of its journey, back through the main asteroid belt and onto the Trojan asteroids. Read More Nasa sending VR headset up to ISS to treat astronaut’s mental health All-UK space mission will ‘push boundaries of human knowledge’ All-female Nasa astronaut team departs International Space Station on spacewalk

(Reuters) -Videogame publisher Electronic Arts Inc beat fourth-quarter booking estimates on Tuesday as the latest installments in its "FIFA" and

Robots could soon take over doctors’ jobs, according to experts. A recent study found that AI technology was able to accurately diagnose patients in a healthcare setting. Investigators found the controversial model ChatGPT to be nearly 72 per cent accurate in making clinical decisions. It was also 77 per cent accurate in making final diagnoses. It was able to come up with possible diagnoses, final diagnoses and care management decisions. The artificial intelligence chatbot was found to perform equally well in both primary care and emergency settings. Researchers at Mass General Brigham in Boston, Massachusetts conducted the study. They tested how ChatGPT would be able to work through an entire clinical encounter with a patient. This included recommending a diagnostic workup, deciding the clinical management course, and ultimately making the final diagnosis. It was tested by putting 36 published clinical descriptions into ChatGPT. Patient gender, age and symptoms were put into the language model. ChatGPT was then given further information and asked to make management decisions and a final diagnosis. This simulates the process of seeing a real patient. However, scientists also found it was less accurate - 60 per cent - at making several possible diagnoses. Co-author Marc Succi said: “Our paper comprehensively assesses decision support via ChatGPT from the very beginning of working with a patient through the entire care scenario, from differential diagnosis all the way through testing, diagnosis, and management. ”No real benchmarks exist, but we estimate this performance to be at the level of someone who has just graduated from medical school, such as an intern or resident. ”This tells us that LLMs in general have the potential to be an augmenting tool for the practice of medicine and support clinical decision making with impressive accuracy.” The research team say they will soon be looking at whether AI tools can improve patient care and outcomes in resource-constrained areas of hospitals. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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