A new age of commercial moon exploration is upon us, and one of the most exciting missions yet is about to launch--one laden with rovers, a drill, and even a hopper spacecraft that will try to "jump" into a permanently dark lunar crater to search for ice. The IM-2 mission, from Texas-based company Intuitive Machines, is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Wednesday, February 26. The lander, nicknamed Athena and about the size of a car, is partially funded by NASA, as the US space agency attempts to create a new lunar economy that can support upcoming planned human missions to the moon. "NASA and the space industry is creating a new business, getting science and payloads to the surface of the moon," says Laura Forczyk, founder of the Georgia-based space consultancy firm Astralytical. "And these uncrewed missions are preparing us to send humans."

Artificial intelligence has made significant progress in natural language processing, with models like GPT-3 demonstrating impressive capabilities. However, these models still have limitations when it comes to complex tasks that require an understanding of the user, such as mastering human comedy writing strategies. This paper explores humor generation using GPT-3 by modeling human comedy writing theory and leveraging step-by-step thinking instructions. In addition, we explore the role of cognitive distance in creating humor.

America's top minds are apparently putting their all into developing space technology -- but we've gotta admit, we wouldn't really have had this in mind. As the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed in a blog post, the Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System (WORMS) modular lunar robot is intended to help NASA and other space agencies build and establish permanent Moon colonies by being able to do a bunch of different types of grunt work. "Robots could potentially do the heavy lifting [on a lunar colony] by laying cables, deploying solar panels, erecting communications towers, and building habitats," the press release reads. "But if each robot is designed for a specific action or task, a moon base could become overrun by a zoo of machines, each with its own unique parts and protocols." WORMS would head off that potential eventuality, MIT notes, by having mix-and-match components that can be traded in and off for whatever task is at hand -- and it's about as weird-looking as one could imagine a mix-and-match lunar robot could look, too.

The current development of particular robots for NASA represents a methodical shift in how some Lunar or Martian vehicles are designed and how the related components or systems are included to support vehicle operation. Carnegie Mellon University and Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic are working on a lunar robot for NASA's Lunar Surface and Instrumentation and Technology Payload program, or LSITP, that is small, fast, solar-powered and will not be teleoperated nor radiation-hardened, which is quite a change from more risk-adverse prior methods. The more affordable yet dynamic approach of constructing the so-called MoonRanger is a shift from past rovers that were behemoth in size, protected from radiation and very slow, says William "Red" Whittaker, director of Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU's) Field Robotics Center, who is leading the technical development and construction of the MoonRanger. The rover will have fully autonomous operations and will provide high-fidelity 3D maps of the ice fields on the moon's south pole. The robot will be equipped with a special instrument with an optical laser designed to help guide the robot in the dark, as well as measure the ice fields and map the terrain of the pole.

"This is aimed at simulating a future, hypothetical landing mission on the moon or Mars and they use a lot of robots which are there to transport and install different instruments", said Boris Behncke, a volcanologist from the National Vulcanology Institute in Catania, near Mount Etna.