39,762 research outputs found

    What Do These Images Show?

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    In this activity, students, working in small groups, will examine images of surface features on Mars and attempt to identify them, speculate as to their origins, and determine their size. They will share their ideas in a class discussion and attempt to reach a consensus for the interpretation of each image. Most of the images are from the Viking missions; they are accompanied by sample questions for the class. Educational levels: High school, Middle school

    Astrobiology: Science Learning Activities for Afterschool

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    This product consists of eight astrobiology after-school activities, each of which may be completed in about one hour. The science of astrobiology is concerned with the question of whether or not life exists on other planets. These activities were adapted for use in afterschool programs with ages 5-12. A Astrobiology: Science Learning Activities for Afterschool was produced by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) as a part of a 18 month study and demonstration project funded by NASA. Educational levels: Informal education

    Mars Activities: Teacher Resources and Classroom Activities

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    This set of classroom activities presents the challenges of operating a planetary rover, how to construct a scale model of the Earth-Moon system, how Martian surface core samples can be identified and what they tell us about Mars. Each activity comes with clearly delineated instructions, associated standards, guides and worksheets, and enhancement materials. Educational levels: High school, Intermediate elementary, Middle school, Primary elementary

    Astrobiology: Science Learning Activities for Afterschool

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    The science of astrobiology is concerned with the question of whether or not life exists on other planets. This educator's guide presents eight activities in which younger students investigate this question and explore topics related to the search for life beyond their own planet by using some of the same strategies that astrobiologists use. They will express their opinions on the existence of alien life in a survey, compare living to non-living objects, investigate the observable characteristics of living things, and learn about the conditions necessary for living things to survive. They will expand their thinking to consider microbes as living things, and match recently discovered life forms with the extreme environments in which they live. Then the students will examine images of planets, moons, and the sun, read about the environmental conditions on each, and try to decide if any of these bodies might support life. In a final activity, they will revisit their ideas, repeat the survey of the opening activity, and look for information and evidence that influenced their current opinions. Educational levels: Primary elementary, Intermediate elementary, Middle school

    AI Feynman: a Physics-Inspired Method for Symbolic Regression

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    A core challenge for both physics and artificial intellicence (AI) is symbolic regression: finding a symbolic expression that matches data from an unknown function. Although this problem is likely to be NP-hard in principle, functions of practical interest often exhibit symmetries, separability, compositionality and other simplifying properties. In this spirit, we develop a recursive multidimensional symbolic regression algorithm that combines neural network fitting with a suite of physics-inspired techniques. We apply it to 100 equations from the Feynman Lectures on Physics, and it discovers all of them, while previous publicly available software cracks only 71; for a more difficult test set, we improve the state of the art success rate from 15% to 90%.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figs. Our code is available at https://github.com/SJ001/AI-Feynman and our Feynman Symbolic Regression Database for benchmarking can be downloaded at https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/aifeynman.htm

    Wilderness on the Page

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    This essay explores the role that literature can play in a rethinking of Western culture\u27s relationship with the natural environment

    The complex planetary synchronization structure of the solar system

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    The complex planetary synchronization structure of the solar system, which since Pythagoras of Samos (ca. 570-495 BC) is known as the music of the spheres, is briefly reviewed from the Renaissance up to contemporary research. Copernicus' heliocentric model from 1543 suggested that the planets of our solar system form a kind of mutually ordered and quasi-synchronized system. From 1596 to 1619 Kepler formulated preliminary mathematical relations of approximate commensurabilities among the planets, which were later reformulated in the Titius-Bode rule (1766-1772) that successfully predicted the orbital position of Ceres and Uranus. Following the discovery of the ~11 yr sunspot cycle, in 1859 Wolf suggested that the observed solar variability could be approximately synchronized with the orbital movements of Venus, Earth, Jupiter and Saturn. Modern research have further confirmed that: (1) the planetary orbital periods can be approximately deduced from a simple system of resonant frequencies; (2) the solar system oscillates with a specific set of gravitational frequencies, and many of them (e.g. within the range between 3 yr and 100 yr) can be approximately constructed as harmonics of a base period of ~178.38 yr; (3) solar and climate records are also characterized by planetary harmonics from the monthly to the millennia time scales. This short review concludes with an emphasis on the contribution of the author's research on the empirical evidences and physical modeling of both solar and climate variability based on astronomical harmonics. The general conclusion is that the solar system works as a resonator characterized by a specific harmonic planetary structure that synchronizes also the Sun's activity and the Earth's climate.Comment: 9 figure, 19 pages. This article is a chapter of the special issue "Pattern in solar variability, their planetary origin and terrestrial impacts" available at the url: http://www.pattern-recogn-phys.net/special_issue2.htm
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