The Download: an exclusive chat with Jim O'Neill, and the surprising truth about heists Over the past year, Jim O'Neill has become one of the most powerful people in public health. As the US deputy health secretary, he holds two roles at the top of the country's federal health and science agencies. He oversees a department with a budget of over a trillion dollars. And he signed the decision memorandum on the US's deeply controversial new vaccine schedule. In an exclusive interview with earlier this month, O'Neill described his plans to increase human healthspan through longevity-focused research supported by ARPA-H, a federal agency dedicated to biomedical breakthroughs. Fellow longevity enthusiasts said they hope he will bring attention and funding to their cause.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory won our Innovation of the Year honors. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. From the most detailed movie of the night sky ever made to the first commercial soft landing on the moon, this year has been an inflection point for exploring and understanding the vast expanse above our heads. We also saw breakthroughs in small changes to commercial airliners that improve efficiency, as well as a new type of rocket engine that might be the future of extremely high speed air travel, plus the closest view of Mercury we've ever seen! Vera C. Rubin Observatory by U.S. National Science Foundation & Department of Energy: World's largest digital camera to conduct 10-year survey of the night sky Prepare to see space like never before.

FOX Nation takes viewers back to the '90's in their new series, 'Who Can Forget? The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has just released its first images, captured by the world's most powerful digital camera. Located on Cerro Pachón in Chile, this camera is set to transform how we see the universe. After years of planning and building, the observatory is ready to deliver stunning, ultra-detailed views of the night sky. Sign up for my FREE CyberGuy Report Get my best tech tips, urgent security alerts, and exclusive deals delivered straight to your inbox.

We hear about artificial intelligence all the time nowadays--but what is it doing for astronomy? New research papers are published almost every week using AI for some new investigation in astronomy: classifying galaxies, identifying solar flares, exploring exoplanet atmospheres, and more. AI's biggest strength is that it can sort through mountains of data much faster than a human--a skill that's particularly timely as new telescopes are generating more and more data for astronomers to handle. "We can use [AI] to tackle problems we couldn't tackle before because they're too computationally expensive," said Daniela Huppenkothen, astronomer and data scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, in MIT Technology Review. One telescope in particular has many astronomers abuzz about AI: the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scheduled to be completed in January 2025, just a few short months away.

Artificial intelligence is classifying real supernova explosions without the traditional use of spectra, thanks to a team of astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. The complete data sets and resulting classifications are publicly available for open use. By training a machine learning model to categorize supernovae based on their visible characteristics, the astronomers were able to classify real data from the Pan-STARRS1 Medium Deep Survey for 2,315 supernovae with an accuracy rate of 82-percent without the use of spectra. The astronomers developed a software program that classifies different types of supernovae based on their light curves, or how their brightness changes over time. "We have approximately 2,500 supernovae with light curves from the Pan-STARRS1 Medium Deep Survey, and of those, 500 supernovae with spectra that can be used for classification," said Griffin Hosseinzadeh, a postdoctoral researcher at the CfA and lead author on the first of two papers published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Most ground-based observatories require a dark night sky to uncover answers to some of the most fundamental questions about the nature of our Universe. However, a number of companies and governments are in various stages of planning or deploying bright satellites in low-Earth orbit (or LEOsats) in greater numbers than ever before. These “megaconstellations” will fundamentally change astronomical observing at visible wavelengths. Nighttime images will be contaminated by streaks caused by the passage of Sun-illuminated satellites. If proposals calling for 100,000 or more LEOsats are realized, no combination of mitigations will be able to fully avoid the negative impact on astronomy. This threat comes at a time when new technology offers unprecedented scientific opportunities, all requiring access to dark skies. One example is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is nearing completion. Its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will soon offer a dramatic new view of the changing sky. Rubin Observatory will employ the 8.4-m Simonyi Survey Telescope and the 3200-megapixel LSST Camera to capture about 1000 images of the sky, every night, for 10 years. A single 30-s exposure will reveal distant objects that are about 40 million times fainter than those visible with the unaided eye. The observatory's combination of a large light-collecting area and field of view is unparalleled in the history of astronomy, which is why the project was the top ground-based priority for U.S. astronomers in the 2010 National Academies Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics. LSST six-color images will contain data for about 20 billion ultrafaint galaxies and a similar number of stars, and will be used for investigations ranging from cosmological studies of the Universe to searches for potentially hazardous Earth-impacting asteroids. However, the discoveries anticipated from Rubin and other observatories could be substantially degraded by the deployment of multiple LEOsat constellations. The most exciting science to come out of current and planned astronomical facilities may be the discovery of types of objects and phenomena not yet observed or predicted. Such profound surprises have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of every field from exobiology to cosmology. Rubin Observatory's LSST, for example, opens the prospect of observing how ultrafaint objects change over time. It is precisely this kind of astronomy that is most at risk from image artifacts arising from LEOsat megaconstellations. These satellites scatter sunlight for several hours after sunset or before sunrise, are relatively close and bright, and thus can affect ground-based telescopes observing at visible wavelengths. Constellations in orbits well above 600 km will be illuminated by the Sun all night long. Astronomers worldwide are seeking ways to diminish the satellites' most damaging effects—the focus of a recent virtual workshop[*][1] sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation—and are collaborating with SpaceX (in particular, the Rubin Observatory), the first operator to launch a substantial constellation of LEOsats. SpaceX has shown that satellite operators can reduce reflected sunlight through satellite orientation, Sun shielding, and surface darkening. A joint effort to obtain higher-accuracy public data on the predicted location of individual satellites could help astronomers point their instruments to avoid some of the interference. Although all of these measures are helpful, there are no guarantees, and the research community is left to hope for good corporate citizenship. Future constellations owned and operated by foreign governments pose a different sort of challenge. Although there are international regulations covering radio-frequency interference, there are no such regulations in place for visible-frequency light pollution from space. Earth orbit is a natural resource without environmental protections, and we are now witnessing its industrialization. Currently there are about a thousand bright LEOsats, but that may be just the beginning. Proposals to expand telecommunications and data relay to serve new technologies like self-driving cars could lead to a 100-fold increase in the number of LEOsats in the next decade. The American Astronomical Society is working with astronomy stakeholders, commercial satellite operators, and international organizations to begin to forge policy on light pollution from space. It is unclear how long this will take and how effective it can be. What is clear is that without productive industry-observatory collaboration, voluntary operator compliance with best practices for mitigation, and subsequent regulatory action, we are slated to lose a clear view of the Universe and its secrets. [1]: #fn-1