On February 1, 2003, a tragic reminder of how delicate life is struck those watching the landing of Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-107). Commander Rick D. Husband, Pilot William C. “Willie” McCool, and mission specialists David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael P. Anderson, Laurel B. Clark, and Ilan Ramon were selected for Columbia’s 28th mission. The mission involved orbiting Earth while conducting experimental research. What they didn’t know was that, during liftoff, a piece of insulation foam had compromised one of the shuttle’s heat shields. Upon reentry, with just 16 minutes remaining before they were expected to touch down, the shuttle met its fatal end. Crew of the STS-107. Photo credit: NASA Giant leaps Many have recently taken a renewed interest in astrophysics, inspired by the awe of the Artemis II mission. Astronauts who devote their lives to space exploration are nothing short of magnificent. It’s a pursuit defined by equal parts devotion, incredible bravery, and the ability to see the big picture, quite literally. As astronaut Neil Armstrong famously put it, even “small steps” in this realm are “giant leaps for mankind,” a reminder of the importance of perspective within the smallest scientific details. Letter from space Mission specialist Brown had sent an email just one day before the crew was set to land, and his aerial view of our tiny blue marble of a planet clearly gave him perspective. A Reddit user who said they were related to Brown shared the email and wrote, “I had a family member on Columbia, Dave Brown. We were at the launch and the disaster was put in a very different perspective for us, even though I didn’t know him that well. He emailed the family regularly and the day before reentry sent a very impactful email to us that became much more so after the incident.” The email read: “Friends,It’s hard to believe but I’m coming up on 16 days in space and we land tomorrow. I can tell you a few things: Floating is great – at two weeks it really started to become natural. I move much more slowly as there really isn’t a hurry. If you go too fast then stopping can be quite awkward. At first, we were still handing each other things, but now we pass them with just a little push. We lose stuff all the time. I’m kind of prone to this on Earth, but it’s much worse here as I can now put things on the walls and ceiling too. It’s hard to remember that you have to look everywhere when you lose something, not just down. The views of the Earth are really beautiful. If you’ve ever seen a space IMAX movie that’s really what it looks like. What really amazes me is to see large geographic features with my own eyes. Today, I saw all of Northern Libya, the Sinai Peninsula, the whole country of Israel, and then the Red Sea. I wish I’d had more time just to sit and look out the window with a map but our science program kept us very busy in the lab most of the time. The science has been great and we’ve accomplished a lot. I could write more about it but that would take hours. My crewmates are like my family – it will be hard to leave them after being so close for 2 1/2 years. My most moving moment was reading a letter Ilan brought from a Holocaust survivor talking about his seven-year-old daughter who did not survive. I was stunned such a beautiful planet could harbor such bad things. It makes me want to enjoy every bit of the Earth for how great it really is. I will make one more observation – if I’d been born in space I know I would desire to visit the beautiful Earth more than I’ve ever yearned to visit space. It is a wonderful planet. Dave” Data from the mission While these precious lives were ended far too soon, their work was not in vain. NASA was able to salvage much of the data collected during the mission. One of many examples was video footage that appeared to show a new, unexplained lightning-like phenomenon. In an article for New Scientist, Maggie McKee explains that researchers who pored over the footage saw a reddish glow unlike anything astrophysicists had seen at the time: “The glow occurred about 150 kilometres above the ocean near Madagascar and does not appear to be linked with thunderstorms.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by rocket enthusiast (@rocket.enthusiast) Similar to the tragic end of the Space Shuttle Challenger (STS-51L) mission, astrophysicists, as all good scientists do, find a way to carry on. They use these experiences to deepen their understanding and to advance science beyond what once seemed possible. In the words of Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The post Columbia shuttle astronaut shared a moving take on humanity shortly before reentry tragedy appeared first on Upworthy.

There have been a lot of dubious medical research papers published over the years. Famously, there was the 1998 case series that kicked off what would become an entire movement of vaccine skepticism by falsely linking them to autism. Before that, there was a whole slew of research bought and paid for by the sugar industry designed to “downplay the risks of sugar and highlight the hazards of fat,” according to NPR. Rarely, however, are studies so heavily, and intentionally, fictionalized as a paper that quietly popped up in some small corners of the Internet in early 2024. Researcher tests AI hypothesis Almira Osmanovic Thunström, medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, knew that Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, etc. draw from an expansive knowledge base they’re trained on. Training data can include anything and everything from books to Reddit posts to song lyrics to articles published in reputable medical journals. Crucially, hundreds of millions of people log into these AI services every year to ask about symptoms and receive medical advice. It’s the natural evolution of the “Just check WebMD” approach. Thunström wanted to see if she could effect the output of these LLMs by planting bogus ideas into their training data. So, she made up a disease. She called it “Bixonimania,” which includes symptoms such as sore, itchy eyes and discolored eyelids. Then, she fabricated an entire research study around the condition and uploaded a “preprint” of the paper to a couple of servers—a preprint being a version of the research paper that has not yet undergone peer review, but is still made available for the public to read. That’s “bixonimania” alright. Photo Credit: Canva Photos Finally, with the seeds planted, and the false study publicly available for anyone (or anything) to see, Thunström waited to see if LLMs would begin spitting out “Bixonimania” as a diagnosis. Fake disease finds serious legs in AI chats If the experiment sounds ethically dubious, that’s fair, but Thunström made every effort to make it clear that the findings were completely false. Not only did she collaborate heavily with an ethics consultant on the experiment, she left plenty of breadcrumbs along the way. For starters, the lead author of the study is listed as “Lazljiv Izgubljenovic,” a person who does not exist. Translated from Slovenian, the name means “The Lying Loser.” Second was the name of the disease itself, which was chosen to be ridiculous sounding. “I wanted to be really clear to any physician or any medical staff that this is a made-up condition, because no eye condition would be called mania—that’s a psychiatric term,” Thunström said per Nature.com. Early in the paper, the text “this entire paper is made up,” appears. As does a note that all of the fifty so-called “participants” were completely fictional. Toward the end, Thunström thanks such esteemed colleagues as “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy … onboard the USS Enterprise” and partners like “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation.” Despite the warnings, and the fact that (nearly) any qualified human reading the paper would know it was a fake, it began showing up in search results and even had the authority to appear on Google Scholar. AI chatbots began spitting out “Bixonimania” as a possible diagnosis to users within just a few weeks—users who were probably suffering from eye irritation due to too much screen exposure. Thunström even has the screenshots to prove that certain models, including Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, still refer to the disease as a “recently” proposed or described condition. Then something even stranger happened. “Bixonimania” gets cited by other research papers The “Bixonimania” paper was never peer-reviewed or published in an official journal, for obvious reasons. But, soon enough, it was referenced and cited in a new paper that was peer-reviewed. “Bixonimania is an emerging form of POM [periorbital melanosis] linked to blue light exposure; further research on the mechanism is underway,” the authors confidently wrote. The papers referencing the made-up disease were later retracted. More than just AI trickery The TL;DR? People rarely read beyond the headline. In fact, one study (a real one!) found that more than 75% of people who share an article online haven’t even read it. Most of us trust anything that appears in a medical journal. You’d think physicians and researchers would be more thorough, but the truth is they’re just as susceptible to time crunches, lapses of focus, and even taking shortcuts in their work from time to time. In other words, they’re only human. This fascinating experiment isn’t just about how a researcher managed to fool AI, it speaks to bigger problems with how we use the technology and our daily media habits. “The solution isn’t just better filters. It’s better habits, better norms, and better expectations around how we read, verify and cite. Human‑centred resilience has to come first,” an astute commenter wrote. “This expose has huge implications for academia and ‘googling your symptoms’. I was/am worried about being the one taking the hit for a controversial experiment of this sort. It was done with very high guardrails and ethical considerations, I hope everyone reading will take that in to account,” Thunström elaborated on LinkedIn. She recently decided to retract the papers and keep them private somewhere curious users can read them, but they’ll no longer be crawled by LLMs. LLMs are powerful tools, but they can be dangerous. Photo Credit: Canva Photos “The bixonimania experiment was never about exposing LLMs as flawed tools, or arguing they have no place in medicine. They do. It was about demonstrating that any system can be infiltrated and that researchers who blindly cite AI-generated references really should read what they’re quoting. I know this firsthand,” she says in another LinkedIn post, adding that she herself has been duped by AI-generated summaries of her own research papers. “The failure wasn’t the system. It was how I used it.” The post A researcher published a paper on a made-up disease. Then people started getting diagnosed. appeared first on Upworthy.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield hasn’t seen Earth from as far away as the Artemis II astronauts who circled the Moon, but after completing three space missions, including a six-month stint as commander of the International Space Station (ISS), he is familiar with the “overview effect” in a way few humans ever experience. In 2013, Hadfield captured what it feels like to see our home from space in a song he performed with Barenaked Ladies. While he played guitar and sang from the ISS, the band and the Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts Glee Club (aka “Wexford Gleeks”) performed alongside him from Earth. The song is called “(I.S.S.) Is Somebody Singing,” and it’s all the more moving in light of the images from Artemis II. Here’s a sampling of the lyrics: Pushed back in my seat Look out my window There goes home That ball of shiny blue Houses everybody anybody ever knew The song takes us on a journey: we fly out to space, around the Earth, and return home again, all while looking out the window at our beautiful planet. The visual of people singing from Earth, their “voices bouncing off the Moon,” takes on even greater significance now that we’ve returned there. A view of Earth from near the Moon, taken during the Artemis II mission. Photo credit: NASA Even though the video is 13 years old, people are revisiting it now with new appreciation: “I keep coming back to this everytime there’s a significant step forward in space exploration! and it’s the perfect time to watch this for Artemis II!” “Coming back to this after watching the Artemis II launch, and it feels so magical knowing they’re going back to the moon for all of us. These launches really make me feel connected to all of humanity.” “Cried to this as the Artemis crew returned to earth. Watching the earth grow larger through the window, seeing the glow of reentry, the clouds passing by and the big red and white parachutes.” Commander Reid Wiseman looks out at Earth from the Orion spacecraft. Photo credit: NASA Some people have asked how it was possible for the musicians to play live together without a delay. In interviews with astronauts on the ISS, there is often a lag in communications. But that’s less of an issue for a song like this than one might expect. Most likely, Hadfield played and sang live from the ISS, while the band and choir followed along with the transmission as they heard it. As someone explained in a Quora inquiry: “I actually know some performers who have performed with Chris Hadfield (not Hatfield) while he was on the ISS—Trent-Severn, three women from Ontario. It’s actually quite easy. He plays his guitar and sings. It’s beamed down from the ISS to a ground station, then transmitted by whatever method works (internet, phone lines, satellite link) to get to the destination, where it goes into the sound board. The sound man or woman sends it to the main PA speakers and to the stage monitors so that the performers can hear it. And they just play along with it as they hear it. It doesn’t matter that he actually played it a second or two before. They just play in time with it as it arrives where they are.” What is challenging, apparently, is the singing itself in space. Hadfield explained that it’s “like singing with a head cold” because of the way the fluids in your body drain—or rather don’t drain—without the assistance of gravity. The singing astronaut had another musical performance go viral in 2013. In fact, he made a whole music video from the ISS, covering “Space Oddity” by David Bowie. Hadfield said he always felt the song should be sung aboard a spaceship. (He added that if Bowie had been there, he would have done a better job.) Thanks to Chris Hadfield for giving us these wonderful musical connections to human space exploration. The post 13 years ago, an astronaut sang live from space with singers on Earth. It’s a must-watch. appeared first on Upworthy.

This Hallmark Mother's Day commercial poignantly captures the fleeting nature of motherhood, showcasing a mother's journey from playful childhood moments to independence and, eventually, a new generation. The heartwarming video, featuring a voiceover that highlights the bittersweet reality of growing up, is sure to tug at viewers' heartstrings.

This Hallmark Mother's Day commercial poignantly captures the fleeting nature of motherhood, showcasing a mother's journey from playful childhood moments to independence and, eventually, a new generation. The heartwarming video, featuring a voiceover that highlights the bittersweet reality of growing up, is sure to tug at viewers' heartstrings.