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When we think of woolly mammoths, what typically comes to mind is the classic hairy pachyderm that inhabited what is now Siberia’s tundra, megafauna that went extinct shortly after the end of the Pleistocene, nearly 12,000 years ago. But a number of mammoth species survived for thousands of years into the current era, including a colony of mammoths on Russia’s Wrangel Island that did not disappear until 1650 BC.
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Discovered in September of 1999, asteroid 101955 Bennu is a 500-meter (1,640 foot) asteroid that crosses Earth’s orbit once every six years. Because it has been observed for 17 years, astronomers have been able to plot its orbit very accurately, and have found that it will make a series of extremely close passes to the Earth between 2169 and 2199, but they calculate that the chance of an impact is only 1-in-2,700.

Unfortunately, this possibility of an impact has fueled the circulation of a great deal of misinformation on the internet, with most articles illustrating a civilization-ending impact to take place in 2135, with the equivalent energy of 3 billion tons of TNT — but this figure appears to be grossly erroneous.
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Speaking at the Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures in New York, professor Alexi Samsonovich, from Moscow’s National Research Nuclear University Cybernetics Department, stated that Russian researchers are on the verge of a major breakthrough in AI. But Samsonovich feels this breakthrough won’t necessarily be measurable in terms of artificial consciousness — we can’t even prove that humans are conscious, let alone an entity that might be as alien as AI — but rather that true advancement in AI would be seen in terms of AE: artificial emotions.
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