Venture capital titan Sequoia is splitting its business into three independent partnerships, each with separate brands.

By Rollo Ross and Alan Devall PALM SPRINGS, California (Reuters) -Tropical Storm Hilary made its historic arrival in California on

An algorithm has spotted a nearly 600-foot, potentially hazardous asteroid near Earth. The tool is intended to find dangerous objects in Earth’s vicinity, to allow scientists to better track them and understand any threat they might pose. The new discovery is the system’s first detection of a “potentially hazardous” asteroid, a term that is used for those rocks that are near enough and possibly threatening enough to cause a danger to Earth. An asteroid gets the designation if it is within about 5 million miles of Earth’s orbit. The asteroid, known as 2022 SF289, does not pose any threat to Earth for the foreseeable future. Its closest approach brings it 140,000 miles from Earth – closer to us than the Moon, but still far enough away to be safe. But the creators of the algorithm said that it showed that the system could be used to detect others in the future – some of which may pose a threat to life on Earth. “By demonstrating the real-world effectiveness of the software that Rubin will use to look for thousands of yet-unknown potentially hazardous asteroids, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer,” said scientist Ari Heinze, the principal developer of the algorithm, known as HelioLinc3D. Astronomers are looking forward to switching on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, in Chile, in 2025. It will allow for a much more detailed view of the night sky. They hope that it can be used to spot more potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs. But the extra detail will also make more work for those poring through the data to find them, and so algorithms will be important to helping that work. HelioLinc3D is one such algorithm, and was built specifically to find asteroids within the Rubin observatory’s dataset. Though the equipment is not yet switched on, its creators looked to test whether it would successfully be able to find asteroids when it is looking through that data. The discovery of 2022 SF289 suggests that it will be. It was found in data from the ATLAS survey, based in Hawaii. ATLAS had actually seen the object three times on four separate nights, but an asteroid has to be seen four times on one night to be identified as a near-Earth object. “Any survey will have difficulty discovering objects like 2022 SF289 that are near its sensitivity limit, but HelioLinc3D shows that it is possible to recover these faint objects as long as they are visible over several nights,” said Denneau. “This in effect gives us a ‘bigger, better’ telescope.” Until now it had also been missed because it was passing in front of the busy and bright stars of the Milky Way. But scientists were able to confirm the existence of the object by looking back through data when they knew where to look. Scientists are aware of 2,350 PHAs already, but expect there are 3,000 out there waiting to be found. “This is just a small taste of what to expect with the Rubin Observatory in less than two years, when HelioLinc3D will be discovering an object like this every night,” said Rubin scientist Mario Jurić, director of the DiRAC Institute, professor of astronomy at the University of Washington and leader of the team behind HelioLinc3D. “But more broadly, it’s a preview of the coming era of data-intensive astronomy. From HelioLinc3D to AI-assisted codes, the next decade of discovery will be a story of advancement in algorithms as much as in new, large, telescopes.” Read More Reddit closes Place after obscene protests Kenya suspends eyeball-scanning crypto worldcoin Google warns Gmail users they could be about to lose their account Reddit closes Place after obscene protests Kenya suspends eyeball-scanning crypto worldcoin Google warns Gmail users they could be about to lose their account

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Scientists have theorised that if we are going to find life on Mars, it will be microbes and they will be living in caves below the surface. The Perseverance rover, NASA’s exploration robot on the Red Planet, is currently searching for signs of ancient life in the Jezero Crater. Scientists already know that there are so-called lava tubes on Mars, which some think could be large enough to shelter the first human astronauts from the cosmic radiation which is bombarding the planet. When these were formed, they thought conditions on Mars were more similar to those on Earth, with flowing water, an atmosphere and a warmer climate. One theory is that as conditions changed on the surface and Mars lost its magnetic field and atmosphere, life could have shifted underground. Daniel Viúdez-Moreiras from Spain’s National Institute for Aerospace Technology calculated that UV radiation levels would be about 2 percent of the radiation levels found at the surface. Fortunately, we have lava tubes here on Earth too, which could tell us what life could look like in similar conditions elsewhere in the Solar System. Hawai’i’s Mauna Loa volcano lava tubes were recently explored by NASA. Within them, life is sheltered from conditions on the surface. On Earth, that is a bad thing: we have sunlight and oxygen. But on Mars, where conditions are much harsher, that is a big advantage. “The microbes we found in Hawaii could be similar to microbes that once lived on Mars,” researcher Chloe Fishman explained to NASA following a trip to collect samples in April, “or even microbes that live there today.” The team brought back samples from the cave so as to sequence the genomes of the microbes they found there. And there are already plans to explore lava tubes on the Moon, too. So maybe, just maybe, they will hold the secret to life on Mars. Sign up to 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.

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina pushed back Thursday against Republican rival Ron DeSantis over his state's new Black history curriculum, which says middle school students should be taught that enslaved people learned some skills they later used to their benefit.

A mysterious object crashed into the Moon last year, and scientists think they’ve finally figured out what it was. On March 4, 2022, a piece of space junk hurtled towards the surface of our celestial companion, leaving behind not one but two craters – prompting speculation as to what exactly the manmade object was. And now, in a paper published in the Planetary Science Journal, a team of researchers at the University of Arizona (UArizona) have offered “definitive proof” that it was a booster from a Chinese space rocket that had spent several years hurtling through space. But the most interesting part of all this? The defunct piece of spacecraft was apparently carrying a secret cargo. Initially, based on its path through the sky, the UArizona team thought it was an errant SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster from a 2015 launch. However, after analysing how precise light signals bounced off its surface, they later concluded that it was more likely to be a booster from a Chang'e 5-T1 – a rocket launched back in 2014 as part of China’s lunar exploration programme. And yet, the Chinese space agency denied ownership, insisting that their rocket booster burned up in the Earth's atmosphere upon re-entry. But the US Space Command refuted this claim by revealing that the rocket’s third stage never re-entered the planet’s atmosphere. Furthermore, two key pieces of evidence gathered by the UArizona researchers suggested that there was more to the object than just a simple abandoned rocket booster. Firstly, the way it reflected light. The paper’s lead author, Tanner Campbell, explained in a statement: "Something that's been in space as long as this is subjected to forces from the Earth's and the moon's gravity and the light from the sun, so you would expect it to wobble a little bit, particularly when you consider that the rocket body is a big empty shell with a heavy engine on one side. “But this was just tumbling end-over-end, in a very stable way." In other words, the rocket booster must have had some kind of counterweight to its two engines, each of which would have weighed around 545kg (1,200lbs) without fuel. The stability with which the object rotated led Campbell and his colleagues to deduce that “there must have been something more mounted to [its] front”. Secondly, the team were struck by the impact the booster left when it slammed into the Moon. It created two craters, around 100ft (30.5 metres) apart, instead of one, which, according to Campbell was very unusual. He pointed out that the craters left behind by Apollo rockets are either round, if the object came straight down, or oblong if it crashed down at a shallow angle. "This is the first time we see a double crater," he said. "We know that in the case of Chang'e 5 T1, its impact was almost straight down, and to get those two craters of about the same size, you need two roughly equal masses that are apart from each other." And yet, despite the rigour of their investigation, the UArizona team have been unable to identify what exactly this additional object was. "We have no idea what it might have been – perhaps some extra support structure, or additional instrumentation, or something else," Campbell admitted. "We probably won't ever know." 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