Potential life on Mars likely lived below the surface

    Life on Ancient Mars may have been living a few miles below the surface. This is likely due to the subsurface melting of geothermal heat-fuelled thick ice sheets. In order to see whether heating via geothermal or underground heat would have been possible 4.1 billion to 3.7 billion years ago, research examined different Mars datasets.

    Study may help to resolve what is known as the paradox of the faint young sun. Lead author Lujendra Ojha claims that the subsurface may represent Mars' longest-lived habitable environment. Over time, in our solar system, the Sun has gradually brightened and warmed the surface of the planets.

    There are many geological indicators on the surface of Mars, such as ancient riverbeds. These suggest that in the Noachian era, the Red Planet had abundant liquid water. The faint young sun paradox, the researchers said, is this apparent contradiction between the geological record and climate models.

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The AI Learning to Sing Like a Human

    The new singing bot is called XiaoiceSing. In "singing voice synthesis," the task is to turn a musical score into a song with a voice. The team worked on a way to offer the ability to sing to the company's chatbot, Xiaoice (pronounced Shao-ice). Xiaoice Sing, and the results are impressive. The first research results are available on the website of Microsoft Technology Center Asia.

    XiaoiceSing does this by dividing the worlds into phonemes and then assigning each one a pitch and duration. This can be expressed in the form of a vector that can be' read by a computer, but this process of translation is tricky. Each word is made up of syllables, and they are formed from phonemes in turn. The score might indicate that the entire word is sung for several beats. But XiaoiceSing's problem is dividing those beats between the phonemes.

    XiaoiceSing uses a system called FastSpeech for text-to-speech. It must then be decoded and vocalised, or "vocoded." By associating the spectral characteristics of the human song with the machine-readable score, the machine essentially learns. Then, given a new score the machine has never seen a human-like output can be produced. The results are impressive, with XiaoiceSing repeatedly coming out on top. 

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Researchers are using AI to create the family tree of the Milky Way

    Researchers used AI to analyses large groups of stars with as many as million stars, orbiting the Milky Way. The researchers were able to predict the merger times of the Milky Way's ancestor galaxies with high precision by applying AI on these groups of globular clusters. The process also revealed a previously unknown collision between the Milky way and an enigmatic galaxy, which according to the Royal Astronomical Society, includes Sagittarius, Sequoia, Kraken, Helmi streams, Gaia-Enceladus-Sausage, along with the main originator of the Milky Ways (RAS).

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