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Our universe is so vast that it appears impossible for anything else to exist. Experts are beginning to suspect that our universe might exist inside a fourth-dimensional black hole.

Our cosmos began as a singularity, a point in space that was endlessly hot and dense. According to researchers at CERN such as James Beecham, black holes in our universe may have the same characteristics as those described by the scientific community.

Red giants are dying stars, in advanced stages of stellar evolution, which have depleted the hydrogen in their cores. In a study published today in Nature Communications, a team of astronomers mainly from Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA), have found new evidence that red giant stars experience “glitches”—sharp structural variations—in their inner core.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to look directly inside a star. However, a technique dubbed asteroseismology, which measures oscillations similar to “earthquakes” in stars, can provide indirect glimpses of stellar interiors. The “glitches” can affect these oscillations, or the frequencies and paths of gravity and traveling through the stellar interior.

As IA researcher Margarida Cunha explains, “Waves propagating inside stars induce minute stellar brightness variations that can be detected with highly precise space-based instruments. These waves reveal the conditions of the medium where they propagate, which is to say, the physical properties of the stellar interiors.”

Death is perhaps one of the most universally discussed topics across the board, and at least once in our lives, the vast majority of us wonder what happens during our final moments. For a long time, we haven’t had many answers, well, that is until now.

One of the most common ‘rumors’ about death is that right before our final moment, our life flashes before our eyes. And recent research may offer some interesting answers that indicate this theory isn’t far from the truth.

The research was carried out by accident, as they had intended to study the brainwaves of an 87-year-old patient with epilepsy. However, during their research, the patient ended up suffering from a fatal heart attack. During the death of the patient, their brainwaves were recorded up until the moment of death.

The earliest dinosaurs included carnivorous, omnivorous and herbivorous species, according to a team of University of Bristol paleobiologists.

By looking at the tooth shapes of the earliest dinosaurs and simulating their tooth function with computational modeling, experts were able to compare them to living reptiles and their diets. Their findings, published December 16 in Science Advances, show that many groups of plant-eating dinosaurs were ancestrally omnivorous and that the ancestors of our famous long-necked herbivores, such as Diplodocus, ate meat. This ability to diversify their diets early in their evolution likely explains their evolutionary and ecological success.

The earliest dinosaurs are enigmatic: they were much smaller than their later relatives and for most of the Triassic they were in the shadow of the crocodile-like reptiles. It is unknown how diverse they were in terms of diets and ecology, but scientists know something must have happened in the Triassic that allowed dinosaurs to endure the Triassic–Jurassic mass extinction and adapt in its aftermath, becoming the for the rest of the Mesozoic.