Oceans have never existed on Venus

Earth’s neighbour Venus has never had liquid water on its surface. One theory of the rocky planet’s history posited that after being covered by magma, the planet maintained a temperate climate for billions of years, which allowed oceans of water to form. Researchers used the chemical composition of volcanic gases in Venus’s atmosphere to infer the water content of its interior — a barometer of whether it ever had such oceans. They found only a 6% water content in the gases, suggesting a very dry planet that has never had liquid water on its surface.

How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

How close are we to developing an artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a machine capable of the whole range of cognitive tasks that human brains can handle? Some think that the large language models (LLMs) currently out there already have some of the ingredients in place. One point in these models’ favour is their underlying transformer architecture, which can find statistical patterns in a range of information beyond text, such as audio. Yet there are also signs that transformer-based LLMs have limits. For a start, the data used to train the models are running out.

Two ancient human relatives crossed paths 1.5 million years ago

Some 1.5 million years ago, two ancient hominin species crossed paths on a lake shore in Kenya. Their footprints in the mud were frozen in time and lay undiscovered until 2021. Now, analysis of the impressions reveals that they belonged to Homo erectus, a forebear of modern humans, and the more distant relative Paranthropus boisei. The two individuals walked through the lake area within hours or days of each other — leaving the first direct record of different archaic hominin species coexisting in the same place.