After months of spaceflight, an 8-minute plunge to the surface of Mars, and weeks of exploration, NASA's Perseverance rover is beginning its primary scientific task: drilling out finger-size cores of martian rock for return to Earth. If all goes well, the first drilling sample will be collected from Jezero crater, a former lakebed, by early August. Perseverance has operated well since its February landing, and it recently tested its rock storage system, using its robotic arm to stow a sampling tube into its guts. There the empty tube was imaged and then sealed for storage. “The great news is that it all worked perfectly,” says Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We are ready to sample.” Now, 1 kilometer south of its landing site, Perseverance has reached an array of what its operating team calls paver stones—flat, white, dust-coated rocks found throughout much of the floor of Jezero crater. Here, on what is believed to be the most ancient terrain in the crater, nearly 4 billion years old, the team will direct the rover to drill and collect its sample, targeting a rock that is average in chemistry, mineralogy, and texture. The chalk-size core will be stored in an ultraclean metallic tube, one of 38 samples the rover will eventually collect, with about 30 of those likely to be returned to Earth by later missions. It will reside in the rover's belly until it is deposited in a cache on the surface near the crater's rim a year and a half from now. Whether the paver stone landscape was deposited by the lake or formed by volcanic flows isn't clear. But if it is volcanic, it might have trapped radioactive elements that a lab on Earth could analyze to determine accurate dates for the lake's existence. The drill operators don't know what to expect because the rocks are covered with sand grains and pebbles, along with some sort of purplish coating, says Ken Farley, the mission's project scientist and a geologist at the California Institute of Technology. But before drilling into the pavers, the rover will unleash one instrument that could help answer this puzzle: an abrasion bit mounted at the end of its 2-meter-long arm. After grinding into the rock, the arm will blow compressed gas to clear away the grit, giving a clear glimpse of the underlying rock. The rover can then use its arm-mounted camera and laser and x-ray probes to probe its structure and mineralogy. “I'm pretty confident we will be able to answer this question,” Farley says. Perseverance has already spotted other tantalizing sites to explore and sample in Jezero crater. In the ancient delta to its west that is the rover's destination next year, its cameras have revealed distinctive layered deposits that show the lake was high, quiet, and stable for a long time, Farley says. Above those layers lie 1-meter-wide smooth boulders that could only have been carried by floodwater later in the lake's history. This suggests the lake could have seen distinct phases in its life, which fits with a larger picture of the planet's history in which lakes were common billions of years ago, then gave way to periodic floods after the climate cooled, Farley says. A long-lived lake might have also provided the nutrients and habitat to fuel life, says Kennda Lynch, an astrobiologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute who is unaffiliated with the mission. “This is great. I feel more confident we chose the right place to go.” Samples and measurements from Perseverance's next target, Séítah, a region of sand dunes and ridges to its west that the car-size rover has skirted past, could test that picture. Seen from orbit to be rich in olivine, a volcanic mineral, and carbonates, which can form when olivine is exposed to water and carbon dioxide, Séítah has unexpectedly complex geology, including layered terrain that might preserve signs of past life or patterns of water flow. But the rover can't drive into it without getting stuck in the dunes, so the Perseverance team devised an incursion from above and behind to access its secrets. First, the rover's miniature Ingenuity helicopter, in its ninth flight earlier this month, scouted across Séètah in a 625-meter journey, breaking records for flight duration and speed before landing on the other side of the dunes. The helicopter photographed the intersection of Séètah with the paver unit that Perseverance is now exploring—a boundary that could reveal whether the pavers continue beneath Séitah's dunes, an important fact if a volcanic date is found. And it also scouted fractures that could hold evidence of whether ancient subsurface habitats existed in Jezero. Meanwhile, from afar, Perseverance has spied fine layering in Séítah's ridges, including a prominent 40-meter-tall plateau dubbed Kodiak that, in all likelihood, marks the delta's incursion into the lakebed. Such layers could be caused by mudstones, which smother and preserve life on Earth. But the layers could have a volcanic origin, as well—and so the rover will loop south around Séètah later this year, nudging into a flat space where it can safely sample and tease out that story. Once the Séítah campaign is done, Perseverance will backtrack all the way north to its landing site, “putting the pedal to the metal,” Trosper says. From there it will continue north then west on a safe route to the looming cliff of the main delta—and the life-trapping muds entombed within it.

Clinical Trials are the mandatory path for developing and bringing a new drug or vaccine to the market. Unfortunately, according to a study conducted by MIT, 86 percent of the drugs will fail during this process. This very high failure rate not only has consequences on the Pharmaceutical companies' bottom line, but it precludes potentially safe and efficacious drugs from reaching patients that could benefit from them. Recruitment is one of the main bottlenecks, is time-consuming, and very expensive. According to Chunhua Weng from Columbia University (New York), "Recruitment is the number one barrier to clinical research."

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched'AI For All' initiative at the first anniversary of National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. 'AI for All' is an online course aimed at offering a basic understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) for every citizen in the country. Under the programme, the government aims to train 1 million citizens in its first year. This is one of the largest AI public awareness programmes across the globe. To ensure the course reaches a wider range of people, it will be available in 11 different vernacular languages.

The International Space Station (ISS) received a new module Thursday when Russia docked its 22-ton Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module at 9:29am ET – the first time in a decade that a new part has been sent to the floating space lab. Nauka, which means'science' in Russian' launched on July 21 atop a Russian Proton rocket. This rocket also carried the new European Robotic Arm, or ERA, a 16-foot-long two-handed robot that can move freely outside of the ISS. After eight days in free-flight, the uncrewed 43-foot-long module linked up to the port on the Earth-facing Russian segment of the ISS. Nauka will be a new science facility, docking port and spacewalk airlock for future operations, along with providing additional crew quarters, a galley and a toilet.

Russia's long-delayed lab module successfully docked with the International Space Station on Thursday, eight days after it was launched from the Russian space launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The 20-metric-ton (22-ton) Nauka module, also called the Multipurpose Laboratory Module, docked with the orbiting outpost in an automatic mode after a long journey and a series of manoeuvres. Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, confirmed the module's contact with the International Space Station at 13:29 GMT. It carried with it the European Robotic Arm (ERA) payload, which can handle components up to 8000 kilograms and transport astronauts. The launch of Nauka, which is intended to provide more room for scientific experiments and space for the crew, had been repeatedly delayed because of technical problems.

New EU regulations on AI seek to ban mass and indiscriminate surveillance. For many, that is the good news. The'not so good' news is that the proposed prohibitions are considered by some as being too vague, with serious loopholes. Most recently, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), called for a ban on the use of AI for the automated recognition of human features in "publicly accessible spaces" as well as other uses that might lead to "unfair discrimination". Broadly speaking, this reflects the response to the EU's attempt to set a standard on how tech is regulated around the world.

Now, with mining jobs hard to find, he's cleaning up the mess the industry left behind. The 68-year-old operates a bucket loader scraping away red, rocky waste dumped years ago by failed coal mine operators in a valley in the town of Clinchco, Virginia. The $17.50 an hour before overtime he makes cleaning up massive "gob piles," as the locals call them, is less than what he earned in decades as a miner. "If this work goes away, I don't know what I would do," Mullins said. Appalachia, long the heart of the U.S. coal-mining industry, may be set for a surge in jobs like Mullins' if President Joe Biden is successful in his ambitions to transition the United States to a cleaner energy economy to fight climate change.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is seeking public input on what to include in forthcoming guidance that will set rules of the road for fielding trustworthy artificial intelligence in and out of government. NIST, following the recommendations of the National Security Commission on AI, is working on an AI Risk Management Framework that will set voluntary standards for agencies and industries to consider when adopting AI solutions. NIST, in a request for information posted Wednesday, said the upcoming framework will define trustworthy AI in terms of transparency, fairness and accountability. The agency plans to release the framework as a "living document" that adapts to changes in technology and practices. "Defining trustworthiness in meaningful, actionable, and testable ways remains a work in progress," the agency wrote in its RFI.

This weekend, Jungle Cruise heads upriver towards the deep, dark heart of box office success, marking the eleventh feature film or TV movie based on an attraction at a Disney theme park. The studio's return on these projects has been, let's say, uneven: The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has been wildly successful, but the second-tier of Disney rides adapted for the big screen is a parade of embarrassments like The Haunted Mansion, oddities like Mission to Mars, and outright weirdness like the 1997 Tower of Terror TV movie starring Kirsten Dunst and Steve Gutenberg, a kid-friendly riff on The Shining that I promise actually exists: As Disney tries once again to create cinematic greatness out of amusement park rides, here are some of the Disney attractions that are most overdue for screen adaptations. Look, you can't create something as unholy and terrifying as the Donald Trump figure in the Hall of Presidents and not make a movie where it kills people, that's just mad science. The obvious choice for a Hall of Presidents movie would be a riff on Westworld or Five Nights at Freddy's, but this might work best as a Frankenstein-type story, as the audio-animatronic Trump cuts a bloody swath through the Imagineering department trying to find his creator and get him to admit he began life as Hillary Clinton. Maybe the Trump robot could team up with what's left of the original "Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln" figure from the 1964 New York World's Fair, who looks like he'd like to have a word or two with whoever stole his clothes: Verhoeven would knock this out of the park.

Europe is lagging behind not only the US and Japan, but also China in terms of technological innovation. The world's 15 largest digital firms are not European! It is beyond question that Europe produces bright minds with amazing ideas and an entrepreneurial mindset. The problem is very simple: European companies do not make it beyond the start-up phase and if they do, their business is believed to be better off out of Europe. Skype is one famous example that was bought up by Microsoft.