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The sky is about to get a lot clearer. NASAs latest infrared space telescope, SPHERExshort for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorerwill assemble the worlds most complete sky survey to better explain how the universe evolved. The $488 million mission will observe far-off galaxies and gather data on more than 550 million galaxies and stars, measure the collective glow of the universe, and search for water and organic molecules in the interstellar gas and dust clouds where stars and new planets form. The 1107-lb., 8.5 x 10.5-foot spacecraft is slated to launch March 2 at 10:09 pm (ET) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. (Catch the launch on NASA+ and other platforms.) From low-Earth orbit, it will produce 102 maps in 102 infrared wavelengths every six months over two years, creating a 3D map of the entire night sky that glimpses back in time at various points in the universe’s history to fractions of a second after the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago. Onboard spectroscopy instruments will help determine the distances between objects and their chemical compositions, including water and other key ingredients for life. SPHEREx Prepared for Thermal Vacuum Testing [Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/BAE Systems] Mapping how matter dispersed over time will help scientists better understand the physics of inflationthe instantaneous expansion of the universe after the Big Bang and the reigning theory that best accounts for the universes uniform, weblike structure and flat geometry. Scientists hypothesize the universe exploded in a split-second, from smaller than an atom to many trillions of times in size, producing ripples in the temperature and density of the expanding matter to form the first galaxies. SPHEREx is trying to get at the origins of the universewhat happened in those very few first instances after the Big Bang, says SPHEREx instrument scientist Phil Korngut. If we can produce a map of what the universe looks like today and understand that structure, we can tie it back to those original moments just after the Big Bang. [Photo: BAE Systems/Benjamin Fry] SPHEREx’s approach to observing the history and evolution of galaxies differs from space observatories that pinpoint objects. To account for galaxies existing beyond the detection threshold, it will study a signal called the extragalactic background light. Instead of identifying individual objects, SPHEREx will measure the total integrated light emission that comes from going back through cosmic time by overlaying maps of all of its scans. If the findings highlight areas of interest, scientists can turn to the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes to zoom in for more precise observations. To prevent spacecraft heat from obscuring the faint light from cosmic sources, its telescope and instruments must operate in extreme cold, nearing380 degrees Fahrenheit. To achieve this, SPHEREx relies on a passive cooling system, meaning no electricity or coolants, that uses three cone-shaped photon shields and a mirrored structure beneath them to block the heat of Earth and the Sun and direct it into space. Searching for life In scouting for water and ice, the observatory will focus on collections of gas and dust called molecular clouds. Every molecule absorbs light at different wavelengths, like a spectral fingerprint. Measuring how much the light changes across the wavelengths indicates the amount of each molecule present. It’s likely the water in Earth’s oceans originated in a molecular cloud, says SPHEREx science data center lead Rachel Akeson. While other space telescopes have found reservoirs of water in hundreds of locations, SPHEREx will give us more than nine million targets. Knowing the water content around the galaxy is a clue to how many locations could potentially host life. More philosophically, finding those ingredients for life connects the questions of how `did the universe evolve? and `how did we get here? to `where can life exist? and `are we alone in that universe? says Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of NASAs Astrophysics Division. Solar wind study The SpaceX rocket will also carry another two-year mission, the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH), to study the solar wind and how it affects Earth. Its four small satellites will focus on the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, and how it moves through the solar system and bombards Earth’s magnetic field, creating beautiful auroras but endangering satellites and spacecraft. The missions four suitcase-size satellites will use polarizing filters that piece together a 3D view of the corona capture data that helps determine the solar wind speed and direction. That helps us better understand and predict the space weather tha affects us on Earth, says PUNCH mission scientist Nicholeen Viall. This`thing that we’ve thought of as being big, empty space between the sun and the Earth, now we’re gonna understand exactly what’s within it. PUNCH will combine its data with observations from other NASA solar missions, including Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX), which views the inner corona from the International Space Station; Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE), which launches in March to investigate the relationship between magnetic field fluctuations and auroras; and Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), which launches later this year to study solar wind particle acceleration through the solar system and its interaction with the interstellar environment. A long journey SPHEREx spent years in development before its greenlight in 2019. NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory managed the mission, enlisting BAE Systems to build the telescope and spacecraft bus, and finalizing it as the Los Angeles’s January wildfires threatened its campus. Scientists from 13 institutions in the U.S., South Korea, and Taiwan will analyze the resulting data, which CalTechs Infrared Processing & Analysis Center will process and house, and the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive will make publicly available. [Image: JPL] I am so unbelievably excited to get my hands on those first images from SPHEREx, says Korngut. I’ve been working on this mission since 2012 as a young postdoc and the journey it’s taken from conceptual designs to here on the launcher is just so amazing. Adds Viall, All the PowerPoints are now worth it.
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In 2021, Eugene Kashuk was looking for a new venture. The Ukrainian entrepreneur realized in the wake of the pandemic that there was a large gap in education. Students were lagging behind, particularly in math. Kashuk started Brighterly, a platform that connects math teachers from all across the globe with students in the United States for private tutoring. Brighterly offers private lessons for $20 per 45-minute lessonmuch cheaper than the average rate of about $40 per hour in the United States. In part, Brighterly is able to keep costs down because it uses AI to generate lessons so teachers are able to use their time to focus on their student instead of coming up with problem sets and exams. Fast Company chatted with Kashuk about Brighterlys growth story and the role of AI in education. How does Brighterly work? Brighterly founder and CEO Eugene Kashuk [Photo: Brighterly] We are a marketplace that connects teachers with students, but we’re not an ordinary marketplace where there’s no control over quality levels or standardization. We have a pretty sophisticated way of hiring and managing teachers and only accept 3% of applicants. We look for teaching skills and soft skills: 90% of our teachers have prior teaching experience. We also have our own custom methodology and curriculum designed by a team of in-house experts, and then we use AI to generate content. On the other side, we’ve got a platform that connects teachers, parents, and kids and allows for lessons to happen. Lessons themselves are fun, interactive, and gamified, and it all revolves around the school curriculum. Its a high-impact education where we are able to gain academic results as fast as possible. You mentioned using AI to create lessons. How do you make sure its not hallucinating or creating misinformation? We are human driven in terms of the content that we create. There are some processes that you can automate using AI. For example, you need to explain fractions to a kid. The best way to do it is to find a circular object such as a pizza you split into pieces. You can use AI to generate images. You can use AI to generate ideas on what kind of circular object will work the best here and will be engaging and fun for the kids. We dont ask AI to tell us what to teach. As we see it, you can only use AI to create content that is aligned with what you teach. What do you see as the role of AI in education? When I think of AI technologies replacing human educators, I’m more afraid than excited. Ill caveat and say the technology evolves so fast that you never know what it will look like in a few years. At this point, I don’t see any potential that AI tutors might replace real human educators. In order for education to work, teachers need to form an emotional bond with their students. Not everything can be covered by logic and algorithms; you need to have that human input to understand what the child really needs. Were not at a moment where AI can really replace human interaction in education. However, we have great capabilities to generate content or to generate language to help create lessons and personalized assessments, which can be very useful for educators. So youre saying AI can lighten the load for teachers so they can focus on nourishing the emotional bond with students. And so teachers can also focus on decision-making. You need a human teacher to understand how well a student is doing and assess what they need next. For example, maybe a student seems to grasp a topic but the teacher can sense that they’d benefit from some more repetition. I don’t see at this point how AI can pick up on moments like this. Is there anything else youd like to add? The education gap isnt just in maththeres also a reading problem. We get daily requests for more reading lessons, so well be launching a reading course as well. There was a COVID relief program that allocated resources to cover those gaps, but its unclear if itll be funded in the future. In the meantime, the knowledge gap is growing. Currently, we only cover elementary and middle school, but well also be launching a high school product to help with that gap. Children are the future and right now existing solutions for the knowledge gap arent working. We need more.
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But what is death? I am sitting down with Katrina Crawford and we are here to talk about the White Lotus Season 3 opening credits. Together with Mark Bashore, Crawford runs the creative studio Plains of Yonder, which has crafted the White Lotus main titles for every season so far. But that question about death wasn’t posed by me. It was posed by her. And it challenges us to reflect on the meaning of death, and the many ways to die. Since White Lotus season 3 premiered on February 16, the internet has been abuzz with theories and criticisms around who died and what the opening sequence means. In response, HBO has said: You’ll get it soon enough. So while we wait, we decided to call up Crawford and Bashore so we can dissect one of the most iconic main titles in modern history. The biggest takeaway? Some things can have more than one meaning. [Photo: Courtesy Plains of Yonder] Easter eggs or red herrings? Plains of Yonder has made over a dozen main titles for shows like The Decameron and The Lord of the Rings TV show, Rings of Power. But Crawford says that this title, for White Lotus Season 3, is by far the longest they’ve ever spent developing. While some showrunners don’t consider the main title until the end, Crawford says that Mike White gave the team a whole 10 months to craft the sequence. When they started, Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who wrote the music for previous seasons’ openers, was still composing the new soundtrack. The crew wasn’t even shooting yet. All they had was the script. White Lotus Season 3 has eight episodes. They got the script for the first seven episodes. We know a lot, Crawford tells me. But they don’t know who dies. [Photo: Courtesy Plains of Yonder] Crawford combed through those scrips and crafted meticulous profiles for every character, where she tried to understand who these characters areor who she thinks they are. Once the profiles were complete, she assigned dozens of images to them. Sometimes, she paired a character with an animal (a stoned monkey for the North Carolina mom played by Parker Posy). Sometimes, she crafted a scenario around them (Jason Isaacs’s Timothy Ratliff character appears coiled up in a tree with knives for branches.) These images might intimate a character’s fate or personality, but of course, some interpretations are more literal than others. Maybe someone is presenting one way, but something else is truth, she says. [Photo: Courtesy Plains of Yonder] Animal instincts As with every season, animals carried much of the symbolism. Weve always found that using animals are a better metaphor than people, says Bashore. Season 1 was obsessed with monkeys; Season 2 introduced humping goats; Season 3 goes all in on mythological creatures that are half-human, half-beast. (Crawford spent a month poring over Thai mythology books.) The intro opens with a circus of animals, and the first humans to be portrayed are human faces attached to bird bodies. A bit later into the sequence, Lek Patravadi’s Sritala Hollinger character (the hotel owner) appears by a pond, holding a creature that is half human, half birdperhaps a clue about her mysteriously absent husband. Most of these metaphors are predictably obscure. Amy Lou Wood (who plays Chelsea) appears in the middle of an incriminating scene depicting a leopard that has bitten off a deer’s head with two foxes bearing witness. Which animal is she? Meanwhile, Natasha Rothwell, who plays Belinda from Season 1, is portrayed next to a stork staring down at its reflection in the water, while a crocodile is lying in lurk. Will it snap her up in its jaws? [Photo: Courtesy Plains of Yonder] Fiction or reality? That the team spent ten months developing the title isn’t so surprising considering the complexity of these characters. But there is one more character in the story, and that is Thailand. Like with the first two seasons, the location plays a key role in the story. To build that sense of place, the team spent ten days filming at three Royal temples in Thailand. We shot the daylights out of it, says Bashore, noting that they took over 1,000 photos of patterns, colors, outfits, and of course, those iconic Thai rooflines. We looked for quick visual cues, patterns that feel iconically Thailand. [Photo: Courtesy Plains of Yonder] Getting permits to film was no small feat considering the sacred nature of the temples. The team had to coordinate access with HBO, and other logistical challenges meant that the title took longer to make. But could the delay signal something else? Some shows, like Game of Thrones, have created main titles that change from week to week. Was the White Lotus Season 3 main title so challenging to make because the team had to tweak it as the season progresses? Crawford gives a cheeky shrug that neither confirms nor denies it: We can’t talk about anything you haven’t seen. What we can talk about is what Crawford calls the Temple of White Lotus. Indeed, the temples help anchor the show in Thailand, but the real star of the show is the White Lotus resort, which may have been filmed at the Four Seasons Resort Koh Samui, but remains a fictional place. To emphasize the otherworldly setting, the team broke down the photographs they took into little squares and shuffled them to create new images out of themlike a patchwork that looks and feels real, but ultimately isn’t. We’re not trying to say this is a real place, says Bashore. It’s just a vibe we’re soaking in. [Photo: Courtesy Plains of Yonder] This vibe ultimately blossoms in the seven worlds the team created for the title sequence. The story begins in the jungle, then unfolds in a village, a temple, a pond (in which we see Sam Nivola’s body afloat), a gloomier forest with ominous snakes coiled around trees, an epic battle scene, and the grand finaledisaster at seawhere a throng of men gets swallowed by giant fish. Could this mass killing scene signify more than one death in the show? Crawford’s response? You know it already: But what is death?
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