Compute power is a big draw for top talent, but not just in the world of AI.
Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife and the cofounder of the couple’s philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, spoke about the appeal of massive GPU clusters for biology researchers during a recent episode of Ashlee Vance’s “Core Memory” podcast.
“The other thing researchers really care about is access to GPUs,” she said. “You’re not going to make the most of someone if you don’t actually have the GPUs for them to work from.”
Chan said, “We have that at CZI,” adding that the organization has roughly 1,000 GPUs in its cluster, with plans to keep growing.
In short, Chan said the pitch is: “Come work with us because we’re going to have the computing power to support the research that you want to do.”
Another important factor is compensation, which she said is “obviously important,” though she added that “we cannot compete with tech companies on this.”
CZI has in recent years narrowed its mission to focus on its “next phase” with a “bolder, clearer identity as a science-first philanthropy.” The change marks a strategic shift, as the organization previously also supported education and other causes.
“While CZI remains committed to our work in education and our local communities, we recognize that science is where our biggest investments and bets have been and will be made moving forward,” Chan, a pediatrician by training, wrote in a memo to staff last year.
Zuckerberg made a similar point about the importance of GPUs in recruiting on a recent episode of The Information’s TITV show. Meta is spending billions to build an AI division it calls Superintelligence Labs.
“Historically, when I was recruiting people to different parts of the company, people are like, ‘Okay, what’s my scope going to be?’” the Meta CEO said. “Here, people say, ‘I want the fewest number of people reporting to me and the most GPUs.’”
Meta, of course, has significantly more GPUs than CZI. Zuckerberg has said the company will have 1.3 million GPUs for AI by the end of 2025.
“Having basically the most compute per researcher is definitely a strategic advantage, not just for doing the work but for attracting the best people,” he said.
Welcome to NeurologyLive® Brain Games! This weekly quiz series, which goes live every Sunday morning, will feature questions on a variety of clinical and historical neurology topics, written by physicians, clinicians, and experts in the fields of neurological care and advocacy.
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Which clinical feature most reliably distinguishes progressive MS from relapsing forms?
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Since entering Jupiter’s orbit in 2016, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been hard at work unveiling the many mysteries of our solar system’s largest planet. And its latest discovery may be one of the most intriguing yet: an entirely new type of plasma wave near Jupiter’s poles.
In a paper published Wednesday in Physical Review Letters, astronomers describe an unusual pattern of plasma waves in Jupiter’s magnetosphere—a magnetic “bubble” shielding the planet from external radiation. Jupiter’s exceptionally powerful magnetic field appears to be forcing two very different types of plasmas to jiggle in tandem, creating a unique flow of charged particles and atoms in its polar regions.
Plasma is a key force in shaping Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere. As such, the researchers believe the new observations will further advance our understanding of not only Jupiter’s weather events but also the magnetic properties of distant exoplanets.
For the study, the researchers analyzed the behavior of plasma waves in Jupiter’s magnetosphere containing highly magnetized, low-density plasma. The team, a collaboration between researchers from the University of Minnesota, the University of Iowa, and the Southwest Research Institute, Texas, found an unexpected oscillation between Alfvén waves and Langmuir waves, which reflect the movement of the plasma’s atoms and the movement of the electrons in the plasma, respectively.
Electrons are much lighter than charged atoms, meaning that, normally, the two wave types ripple at very different frequencies—which was clearly not the case for Jupiter’s magnetosphere, prompting the researchers to take a closer look. The ensuing investigation unveiled a never-before-seen type of plasma oscillation near Jupiter’s poles.
“The observed plasma properties are really unusual, not found before and elsewhere in our solar system,” John Leif Jørgensen, a planetary scientist at the Technical University of Denmark who wasn’t involved in the new work, told New Scientist.
Unlike Earth’s auroras, which are caused by solar storms, Jupiter’s auroras—a barrage of frisky, superfast particles that are hundreds of times more energetic than auroras on Earth—sometimes emerge as a product of its powerful magnetic field. Getting a better grasp on how such phenomena work could be valuable information for future missions in the search for alien life on exoplanets, according to the study authors.
“While such conditions do not occur [on] Earth, it is possible that they apply in polar regions of the other giant planets and potentially in strongly magnetized exoplanets or stars,” the astronomers wrote in the paper.
“Jupiter is the Rosetta Stone of our solar system,” said Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator, in NASA’s introductory page for the spacecraft. “Juno is going there as our emissary—to interpret what Jupiter has to say.”
Initially, NASA expected Juno’s mission to conclude in 2017, when they would intentionally steer the spacecraft into Jupiter’s atmosphere, a decision that adheres to NASA’s planetary protection requirements. But Juno’s flight path evolved over time, and NASA concluded that the spacecraft no longer posed a threat to Jupiter’s moons. As a result, the agency authorized extensions to the mission.
That being said, the scientists do believe that, by September this year, Juno’s orbit will degrade naturally, and it will be gobbled up by Jupiter’s atmosphere. However, this by no means ends humanity’s exploration of Jupiter; Europa Clipper is slated to reach Europa, Jupiter’s moon, in 2030 (the last time we checked, it did some sightseeing near Mars). Of course, even after Jupiter consumes Juno, scientists will still have loads of invaluable data from the spacecraft that they’ll continue to meticulously analyze for years to come.
A rock from Mars that traveled tens if not hundreds of millions of miles before improbably landing on our planet’s surface has found its final resting place: the private collection of some secretive plutocrat, whose identity has not been revealed to us members of the nosy public.
At roughly 54 pounds, NWA 16788, as it’s been dubbed, is by far the largest known rock we have from the Red Planet — the runner up in the category is barely half that weight — and is one of the only 400 meteorites confirmed to be of Martian origin ever found, according to a database maintained by the Meteoritical Society. That such a large portion survived a crash landing on Earth makes it an incredibly valuable object to scientists.
On Wednesday, the rock was bought at an auction at Sotheby’s in New York for $5.3 million. It’s now the most expensive meteorite ever sold, according to the luxury items broker.
“You get close to it, you can feel like you’re looking at the planet,” Cassandra Hatton, vice chairman for science and natural history at Sotheby’s, told the Washington Post. “This really looks like a piece of Mars, whereas pretty much every other Martian meteorite you see is going to just kind of look like a little rock.”
Discovered in November 2023 by a meteorite hunter scouring a remote region of Niger, an analysis determined that NWA 16788 was likely catapulted into space by another, much larger meteor smashing into Mars, according to CNN. The Martian surface is pockmarked with countless scars documenting encounters like these.
Hatton declined to reveal who the buyer of the huge rock was. While we can’t say for certain what will happen to it, or what the anonymous buyer’s intentions are, some scientists aren’t happy with the idea of this ultra-rare space rock being locked away, or even being put up for sale in the first place.
“It would be a shame if it disappeared into the vault of an oligarch. It belongs in a museum, where it can be studied, and where it can be enjoyed by children and families and the public at large,” Steve Brusatte, a professor of paleontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, told CNN before the rock was sold.
Meteorites “carry information about the history of the solar system that cannot be learned any other way,” Paul Asimow, professor of geology and geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, told WaPo.
More streetwise scientists argue, however, that this is what it takes to keep the lights on, so to speak.
“Ultimately, if there was no market for searching, collecting and selling meteorites, we would not have anywhere near as many in our collections — and this drives the science!” Julia Cartwright, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in England, told CNN.
For scientists whining about losing access to this massive Mars slab, Hatton recommends they consult with the literal crumb of evidence that’s been graciously left behind for them to examine, preserved at the Purple Mountain Observatory in China.
“A sample has been taken and analyzed and published in the meteoritical bulletin, so they could go and get that,” Hatton told Space.com.
More on Mars: Trump Wants to Shut Down Several Perfectly Good Spacecraft Orbiting Mars for No Reason
It’s little wonder that astronomers are excited for the launch of NASA’s next big space telescope project, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope.
Recent research has suggested that Roman, currently set to launch no later than May 2027, will discover as many as 100,000 powerful cosmic explosions as it conducts the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey observation program.
These powerful and violent events will include supernovas that signal the deaths of massive stars, kilonovas, which happen when two of the universe’s most extreme dead stars, or “neutron stars,” slam together, and “burps” of feeding supermassive black holes. Roman could even detect the explosive destruction of the universe’s first generation of stars.
These explosions could help scientists crack the mystery of dark energy, the placeholder name for the strange force that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate, and a multitude of other cosmic conundrums.
“Whether you want to explore dark energy, dying stars, galactic powerhouses, or probably even entirely new things we’ve never seen before, this survey will be a gold mine,” research leader Benjamin Rose, an assistant professor at Baylor University, said in a statement.
The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will obtain its explosive results by scanning the same large region of space every five days for a period of two years.
These observations will then be “stitched together” to create movies revealing a wealth of cosmic explosions.
Many of these will be Type Ia supernovas, a type of cosmic explosion that occurs when a “dead star” or white dwarf feeds on a companion star so ravenously that it blows its top.
These cosmic explosions are vital to astronomers because their light output and peak brightness are so regular from event to event that they can be used to measure cosmic distances. This regularity means astronomers refer to Type Ia supernovas as “standard candles.”
This new research, which simulated Roman’s entire High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, suggests the space telescope could reveal up to 27,000 new Type Ia supernovas. That is about 10 times as many of these white dwarf destroying explosions as the combined harvest of all previous surveys.
By looking at standard candles across differing vast distances, astronomers are essentially looking back into cosmic time, and that allows them to determine how fast the universe was expanding at these times.
Thus, such a wealth of Type Ia supernovas should reveal hints at the secrets of dark energy. This could help verify recent findings from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) that suggest this strange force is actually weakening over time.
“Filling these data gaps could also fill in gaps in our understanding of dark energy,” Rose explained. “Evidence is mounting that dark energy has changed over time, and Roman will help us understand that change by exploring cosmic history in ways other telescopes can’t.”
The team estimates that as many as 60,000 of the 100,000 cosmic explosions that could be detected by Roman will be so-called “core collapse supernovas.”
These occur when massive stars at least 8 times heavier than the sun reach the end of their nuclear fuel and can no longer support themselves against gravitational collapse.
As these stars’ cores rapidly collapse, the outer layers are blasted away in supernovas, spreading the elements forged by these stars through the cosmos to become the building blocks of the next generation of stars, their planets, and maybe even lifeforms dwelling on said planets. Core collapse supernovas leave behind either neutron stars or black holes, depending on the mass of the progenitor star.
This means that while they can’t help unravel the mystery of dark energy like Type Ia supernovas may, they can tell the tale of stellar life and death.
“By seeing the way an object’s light changes over time and splitting it into spectra — individual colors with patterns that reveal information about the object that emitted the light—we can distinguish between all the different types of flashes Roman will see,” research team member Rebekah Hounsell from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center explained. “With the dataset we’ve created, scientists can train machine-learning algorithms to distinguish between different types of objects and sift through Roman’s downpour of data to find them.
“While searching for Type Ia supernovas, Roman is going to collect a lot of cosmic ‘bycatch’—other phenomena that aren’t useful to some scientists, but will be invaluable to others.”
One of the rarer events that Roman could also detect occurs when black holes devour unfortunate stars that wander too close to them.
During these tidal disruption events (TDEs), the doomed star is ripped apart by the tremendous gravitational influence of the black hole via the immense tidal forces it generates.
Though much of the star is consumed by the black hole, these cosmic titans are messy eaters, meaning the vast amount of that stellar material is vomited out at velocities approaching the speed of light.
This jet of matter and the stellar material of the destroyed star that settles around the black hole in a flattened swirling cloud called an accretion disk generate emissions across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Roman will hunt these emissions to detect TDEs, with this team predicting that the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will turn up around 40 of these star-destroying events.
Even more elusive than TDEs are kilonovas, explosive bursts of light that occur when two neutron stars smash together and merge.
The team estimates that Roman could uncover around 5 new kilonovas, and while this is a small harvest, these observations could be vital to understanding where precious metals like gold and silver come from.
Though most of the elements we see around us are generated at the heart of stars, even these stellar furnaces lack the pressures and temperatures needed to form elements heavier than iron. The environments around neutron star collisions are thought to be the only furnaces in the cosmos extreme enough to generate elements like gold, silver and plutonium.
These would start life as even heavier elements that are unstable and rapidly decay. This decay releases the light seen as kilonovas, and thus studying that light is vital to understanding that process.
The study of kilonovas could also help determine what types of celestial bodies are created when neutron stars merge. This could be an even larger neutron star that rapidly collapses into a black hole, an immediately formed black hole, or something entirely new and unthought of.
Thus far, astronomers have only definitively confirmed the detection of one kilonova, meaning even another five would be a real boon to science.
Perhaps the most exciting cosmic explosion discovery that Roman could make would be the observation of the strange explosive death of the universe’s first stars.
Currently, it is theorized that these early massive stars may have died differently than modern stars.
Rather than undergoing the core collapse described above, gamma-rays within the first stars could have generated matter-antimatter pairs in the form of electrons and positrons. These particles would meet and annihilate each other within the star, and this would release energy, resulting in a self-detonation called a “pair-instability supernova.”
These blasts are so powerful that it is theorized that they leave nothing behind, barring the fingerprint of elements generated during that star’s lifetime.
As of yet, astronomers have dozens of candidates for pair-instability supernovas, but none have been confirmed. The team’s simulation suggests that Roman could turn up as many as ten confirmed pair-instability supernovas.
“I think Roman will make the first confirmed detection of a pair-instability supernova,” Rose said. “They’re incredibly far away and very rare, so you need a telescope that can survey a lot of the sky at a deep exposure level in near-infrared light, and that’s Roman.”
The team intends to perform a further simulation of Roman’s study of the cosmos, which could indicate its capability to spot and even wider array of powerful and violent events, maybe even some that haven’t yet been theorized.
“Roman’s going to find a whole bunch of weird and wonderful things out in space, including some we haven’t even thought of yet,” Hounsell concluded. “We’re definitely expecting the unexpected.”
This research was published on Tuesday (July 15) in The Astrophysical Journal.
QUICK FACTS
What it is: NGC 6188, also known as the Fighting Dragons of Ara or the Firebird Nebula
Where it is: 4,000 light-years away, in the constellation Ara (“the altar”)
When it was shared: July 9, 2025
From a cat’s paw to a cosmic tadpole, humans love to see figures of animals in the night sky — but the “‘Fighting Dragons of Ara” has to be one of the most dramatic. Astronomers using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) in Chile have unveiled a mesmerizing new image that evokes a mythical duel of two celestial beasts.
The striking image appears to show two dragon heads emerging from dense clouds of cosmic dust, seemingly locked in an eternal standoff. Their glowing, sinuous forms are shaped by powerful stellar winds emitted from bright young stars born within the nebula, most of which are only a few million years old.
The mesmerizing shapes created by the interplay of radiation and dust are officially known as NGC 6188. It’s an emission nebula, which forms when the intense radiation of stars energizes gas, causing it to emit light, according to NASA. It’s in the little-known constellation Ara and is observable only from the Southern Hemisphere, where it’s found just under the tail of Scorpius, “the scorpion.” NGC 6188 is close to the edge of a massive molecular cloud, where stars form.
Related: 42 jaw-dropping James Webb Space Telescope images
The red in NGC 6188 comes from ionized hydrogen being illuminated by 27 very bright stars, which are barely a few million years old — newborns, on a cosmic scale — giving the image incredible depth. Ultraviolet radiation in the stellar winds coming from these stars have ignited, sculpted and shaped the gas and dust into the dragons’ heads. According to NASA, this ultraviolet radiation floods the gas with so much energy that it strips electrons from the hydrogen atoms in the nebula. This is called ionization. As the atoms recombine, they emit energy in the form of photons, which makes the nebula’s gas glow.
DECam is mounted on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.
