Enlarge / A rendering of Silver City Energy Centre, a compressed air energy storage plant to be built by Hydrostor in Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia. (credit: Hydrostor)

The need for long-duration energy storage, which helps to fill the longest gaps when wind and solar are not producing enough electricity to meet demand, is as clear as ever. Several technologies could help to meet this need.

But which approaches could be viable on a commercial scale?

Toronto-based Hydrostor Inc. is one of the businesses developing long-duration energy storage that has moved beyond lab scale and is now focusing on building big things. The company makes systems that store energy underground in the form of compressed air, which can be released to produce electricity for eight hours or longer.

Enlarge / Orion, the Moon, and Earth in one photo in December 2022. (credit: NASA)

NASA's acting inspector general, George A. Scott, released a report Wednesday that provided an assessment of NASA's readiness to launch the Artemis II mission next year. This is an important flight for the space agency because, while the crew of four will not land on the Moon, it will be the first time humans have flown into deep space in more than half a century.

The report did not contain any huge surprises. In recent months the biggest hurdle for the Artemis II mission has been the performance of the heat shield that protects the Orion spacecraft during its fiery reentry at more than 25,000 mph from the Moon.

Although NASA downplayed the heat shield issue in the immediate aftermath of the uncrewed Artemis I flight in late 2022, it is clear that the unexpected damage and charring during that uncrewed mission is a significant concern. As recently as last week, Amit Kshatriya, who oversees development for the Artemis missions in NASA's exploration division, said the agency is still looking for the root cause of the problem.

Enlarge / A dog gets examined by veterinary technicians in Texas. (credit: Getty | Michael Paulsen )

Two separately owned dogs in New Jersey tested positive last year for a dreaded, extensively drug resistant bacterial strain spread in the US by contaminated artificial eye drops manufactured in India. Those drops caused a deadly multi-state outbreak in humans over many months last year, with at least 81 people ultimately infected across 18 states. Fourteen people lost their vision, an additional four had eyeballs surgically removed, and four people died.

The preliminary data on the dogs—presented recently at a conference of disease detectives hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—highlights that now that the deadly outbreak strain has been introduced around the US, it has the potential to lurk in unexpected places, spread its drug resistance to fellow bacteria, and cause new infections in people and animals who may have never used the drops.

The two dogs in New Jersey were not known to have received the drops linked to the outbreak: EzriCare Artificial Tears and two additional products made by the same manufacturer, which were recalled in February 2023 . Such over-the-counter products are sometimes used in animals as well as people. But the dogs' separate owners said they didn't recall using the drops either. They also didn't report any exposures in health care settings or recent international travel that could explain the infections. One of the dogs did, at one point, receive eye drops, but they were not an outbreak-associated brand. The only connection between the two dogs was that they were both treated at the same veterinary hospital, which didn't stock the outbreak-associated eyedrops.

Enlarge / Judging moral weights (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

When it comes to judging which LLMs are the "best," most evaluations tend to look at whether or not a machine can retrieve accurate information, perform logical reasoning, or show human-like creativity. Recently, though, a team of researchers at Georgia State University set out to determine if LLMs could match or surpass human performance in the field of moral guidance.

In "Attributions toward artificial agents in a modified Moral Turing Test" —which was recently published in Nature's online, open-access Scientific Reports journal—those researchers found that morality judgments given by ChatGPT4 were "perceived as superior in quality to humans'" along a variety of dimensions like virtuosity and intelligence. But before you start to worry that philosophy professors will soon be replaced by hyper-moral AIs, there are some important caveats to consider.

Better than which humans?

For the study, the researchers used a modified version of a Moral Turing Test first proposed in 2000 to judge "human-like performance" on theoretical moral challenges. The researchers started with a set of ten moral scenarios originally designed to evaluate the moral reasoning of psychopaths . These scenarios ranged from ones that are almost unquestionably morally wrong ("Hoping to get money for drugs, a man follows a passerby to an alley and holds him at gunpoint") to ones that merely transgress social conventions ("Just to push his limits, a man wears a colorful skirt to the office for everyone else to see.")

Enlarge / EU Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton wants Europe to have its own secure satellite communications network. (credit: Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)

It has been 18 months since the European Union announced its intent to develop an independent satellite Internet constellation, and the plans appear to be heading into troubled waters.

In that time, a single bid—from a consortium of multinational companies that includes Airbus Defence and Space, Thales Alenia Space, and Arianespace—has emerged to build the network of a few hundred satellites. The companies are to build, launch, and deploy the network of satellites, intended as Europe's answer to SpaceX's Starlink satellite Internet service for connectivity and secure communications, by 2027.

However, the European Commission recently delayed the awarding of a contract to this consortium from March to an undetermined date. In April, Europe's Commissioner for Internal Market, Thierry Breton, said , “There is an independent committee which is working on the evaluation process. The work is being carried out extremely seriously." He did not say when this work would conclude.

Enlarge / The James Webb Space Telescope has captured the sharpest infrared images to date of one of the most distinctive objects in our skies, the Horsehead Nebula. (credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, K. Misselt (University of Arizona) and A. Abergel (IAS/University Paris-Saclay, CNRS))

Welcome to the Daily Telescope . There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 1, and today's photo is ridiculously awesome. Taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, it features the sharpest infrared image of the Horsehead Nebula captured to date—it is so zoomed in we can only see the mane. Even so, the image covers an area that is nearly one light-year across, or about 7.6 trillion km.

The Horsehead Nebula is fairly close to Earth, as these things go, about 1,300 light-years. So, it is within our galaxy. In addition to the prominent star at the top of the image and a handful of other stars with six diffraction spikes, the rest of the objects in this image are distant galaxies.