Lifeboat Foundation

Observing these types of stars is rare; only one was previously identified. Now, researchers have found a whole population of these stars in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, relatively nearby satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. The finding may give insight into hot helium stars, which are thought to be the start of neutron star mergers and hydrogen-poor core-collapse supernovae. The study was published this month in Science.

“Our work sheds light on these fascinating relationships, revealing a universe that is far more interconnected and active than we previously imagined,” says Bethany Ludwig, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and coauthor of the study, in a press release. “Just as humans are social beings, stars too, especially the massive ones, are rarely alone.”

COPENHAGEN, Dec 28 (Reuters) — Denmark’s Maersk (MAERSKb. CO) will sail almost all container vessels travelling between Asia and Europe through the Suez Canal from now on while diverting only a handful around Africa, a Reuters breakdown of the group’s schedule showed on Thursday.

Major shipping companies, including container giants Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd (HLAG.DE), stopped using Red Sea routes and the Suez Canal earlier this month after Yemen’s Houthi militant group began targeting vessels, disrupting global trade.

Instead, they rerouted ships around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope to avoid attacks, charging customers extra fees and adding days or weeks to the time it takes to transport goods from Asia to Europe and to the east coast of North America.

Philospher of A.I.

Researchers at Peking University in China have successfully observed the elusive 0₂⁺ state of ⁸ He, revealing a novel cluster structure with two strongly correlated neutron pairs. This finding provides insights into exotic nuclear structures and their potential implications for understanding neutron stars. The findings are published in Physical Review Letters.

The conventional nuclear model in physics posits a single-particle picture where nucleons, protons, and neutrons move independently within a nucleus, forming a well-defined shell structure. Governed by a mean potential created by nuclear forces, nucleons fill distinct energy levels or shells, leading to increased stability associated with magic numbers.

This model, rooted in quantum mechanics, successfully explains nuclear structure and stability but encounters limitations when addressing exotic nuclei, particularly those that are neutron-rich and unstable.

An international research group has engineered a novel, high-strength flexible device by combining piezoelectric composites with unidirectional carbon fiber (UDCF), an anisotropic material that provides strength only in the direction of the fibers. The new device transforms kinetic energy from human motion into electricity, providing an efficient and reliable means for high-strength and self-powered sensors.

Details of the group’s research were published in the journal Small on Dec.14, 2023.

Motion diction involves converting energy from human motion into measurable electrical signals and is something that may be crucial for ensuring a sustainable future.

In 2015, the LIGO/Virgo experiment, a large-scale research effort based at two observatories in the United States, led to the first direct observation of gravitational waves. This important milestone has since prompted physicists worldwide to devise new theoretical descriptions for the dynamics of blackholes, building on the data collected by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration.

Researchers at Uppsala University, University of Oxford, and Université de Mons recently set out to explain the dynamics of Kerr black holes, theoretically predicted black holes that rotate at a constant rate, using theory of massive high-spin particles. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, specifically proposes that the dynamics of these rotating black holes is constrained by the principle of gauge symmetry, which suggests that some changes of parameters of a physical system would have no measurable effect.

“We pursued a connection between rotating Kerr black holes and massive higher-spin particles,” Henrik Johansson, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. “In other words, we modeled the black hole as a spinning fundamental particle, similar to how the electron is treated in quantum electrodynamics.”

Strain-induced crystallization can strengthen, toughen, and facilitate an elastocaloric effect in elastomers. The resulting crystallinity can be induced by mechanical stretching in common elastomers that are typically below 20%, with a stretchability plateau.

In a new report now published in Science Advances, Chase M. Hartquist and a team of scientists in mechanical engineering and materials sciences at MIT and Duke University in the U.S. used a class of elastomers formed by end-linking to achieve a percentage of strain-induced crystallinity.

The deswollen and end-linked star elastomer abbreviated as DELSE reached an ultrahigh stretchability to scale, beyond the saturated limit of common elastomers, to promote a high elastocaloric effect with an adiabatic temperature change.

An international team of astronomers has employed a set of space telescopes to observe a peculiar nuclear transient known as AT 2019avd. Results of the observational campaign, presented in a paper published December 21 on the pre-print server arXiv, deliver important insights into the properties and behavior of this transient.

Nuclear astrophysics is key to understanding supernova explosions, and in particular the synthesis of the chemical elements that evolved after the Big Bang. Therefore, detecting and investigating nuclear transient events could be essential in order to advance our knowledge in this field.

At a redshift of 0.028, AT 2019avd is a peculiar nuclear transient discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) in 2009. The transient has been detected in various wavelengths, from radio to soft X-rays, and has recently exhibited two continuous flaring episodes with different profiles, spanning over two years.

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health have identified a protein in the visual system of mice that appears to be key for stabilizing the body’s circadian rhythms by buffering the brain’s response to light. The finding, published Dec. 5 in PLoS Biology, advances efforts to better treat sleep disorders and jet lag, the study authors say.

“If circadian rhythms adjusted to every rapid change in illumination, say an eclipse or a very dark and rainy day, they would not be very effective in regulating such periodic behaviors as sleep and hunger. The protein we identified helps wire the brain during neural development to allow for stable responses to circadian rhythm challenges from day to day,” says Alex Kolodkin, Ph.D., professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Neuroscience and deputy director for the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences.

Kolodkin co-led the study with Samer Hattar, Ph.D., chief of the Section on Light and Circadian Rhythms at the National Institute of Mental Health.