The Week Junior - UK (2022-03-19)

19 March 2022 • The Week Junior 15

Science and technology

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The Moon gets a new crater

O

n 4 March, a stray rocket smashed

into the far side of the Moon. The

rocket, which weighed around three

tonnes, had been seen for several

years but it was only in January that

images taken by British amateur

astronomer Peter Birtwhistle showed

it was on a collision course with the

Moon. Originally it was thought to

be part of a rocket launched by

US company SpaceX but

experts in tracking

space junk now say it

was part of a 2014

Chinese space

launch (the Chinese

space agency

denies this).

The rocket

crashed in a 350-mile-

wide crater called

Hertzsprung, on the side

of the Moon that permanently faces

away from Earth. This meant that

astronomers weren’t able to see the

A

new computer program uses

human-like intelligence to suggest

the most likely missing words and

letters from damaged ancient Greek

texts. It can even use the style of

writing to estimate their date and

where they were written. The program,

called Ithaca, is a project shared

between historians and Google’s

artificial intelligence (AI) project

DeepMind. AI describes any system

that uses computers to imitate human

learning and intelligence; in this case,

the DeepMind team taught Ithaca by

showing it 60,000 complete documents

recorded as stone inscriptions and

ancient scrolls from Greek-speaking

areas around the Mediterranean Sea

between around 700BC and 500BC.

Once the AI had learned the rules

and patterns in these Greek texts,

the team tested it with texts that had

chunks removed. They found that

Ithaca could guess the missing material

62% of the time – more than twice as

well as individual experts looking at

the same documents. However the

best performance of all (72%) came

when the experts worked using Ithaca

as a tool to guide their own guesses.

AI tool to restore ancient texts

Enjoy these stories? Find more in this month’s The Week Junior

Science+Nature magazine sciencenature.theweekjunior.co.uk

Acid test for tooth

decay hotspots

S

cientists from the University of

Washington in the US have

invented a new sensor that can

spot areas of tooth decay before it

creates cavities (holes), so dentists

can see when teeth are at risk of

damage. A safe chemical dye is

applied to the teeth, then an

intense light is shone onto it.

Chemical reactions with the most

acidic areas in plaque (the sticky

film that covers teeth) make the

dye glow, and this shows up where

decay is starting to eat into the

enamel (the hard protective layer

on your teeth).

Stopping decay

can save your teeth.

AM

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smash directly. Based on

its size and an impact

speed of about 5,000 miles per hour,

however, it will have formed a new

crater between 20 and 33 metres wide.

In the next few months, US

space agency NASA hopes to take

images of the crash site from its

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO)

satellite, but because they don’t know

the exact point of impact, it may take

some time to track it down. Data from

LRO’s observations may be able to

reveal new information about the

composition of lunar soil in the area.

The impact site on

the Moon’s far side.

AI filled gaps

in old texts.

Hertzsprung

Crater

An artist’s impression

of a lunar impact.

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