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Science Quickly

AI Could Help Save Us from Conspiracy Theories, and Massachusetts Could Help Save Us from Our Trash

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.41.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week's news roundup: The European Space Agency’s Juice mission tested its instruments with a flyby of Earth in preparation for studying habitability on moons of Jupiter’. Also, a study found that Massachusetts has reduced food waste through composting and enforcement while four other states have not successfully done so despite also having bans on disposing of such waste in landfills. And researchers tested the generative artificial intelligence platform GPT-4 Turbo’s ability to counter conspiracy theories through personalized, fact-based conversations, yielding promising results. E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new everyday: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter.  Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Here's the truth about AI. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into.

0:05.7

ServiceNow puts AI to work for people across your business, removing friction and frustration

0:11.2

for your employees, supercharging productivity for your developers, providing intelligent tools

0:16.9

for your service agents to make customers happier, all built into a single platform you can

0:21.9

use right now. That's why the world works with ServiceNow. Visit ServiceNow.com

0:27.8

slash UK slash AI for people. Happy Monday listeners. Let's kick off the week by catching up on some of the

0:36.2

latest science news. For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.

0:41.3

We'll start with some good news. It turns out that Earth is habitable.

0:46.3

That's according to the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icey Moons Explorer,

0:52.3

aka Juice, which made a flyby of our planet recently.

0:56.6

The ESA took the opportunity to do a test run of Juice's instruments, which it will use to look

1:01.4

for molecular signatures of habitability on the moon's Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

1:06.7

It's actually making several loops around the sun to get a gravity assist to slingshot it all the way into Jupiter's orbit.

1:12.5

So it's going to make a few more flybys before it finally gets to its destination in 2013.

1:17.6

But if we want to keep that habitability status, we really need to clean up our act.

1:23.9

Last Tuesday, a study found that human methane emissions jumped by 15 to 20 percent between

1:29.4

2000 and 2020, which is the most recent year we have complete data for. Methane levels in the air

1:35.2

have more than doubled compared to pre-industrial levels. The study also found an increase in natural

1:40.6

methane emissions from sources like tropical wetlands, which is likely due to factors

1:44.4

that include rising temperatures. Methane dissipates from the atmosphere much faster than carbon dioxide

1:49.7

does, but it's also a much more potent greenhouse gas, meaning it causes more warming while it's up

1:55.4

there. So cutting our methane emissions won't solve the climate crisis on its own, but it could

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