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Astronomers Have Discovered a Star That Survived Being Swallowed by a Black Hole

I don’t think that star is the same after that one night stand.

When black holes swallow down massive amounts of matter from the space around them, they’re not exactly subtle about it. They belch out tremendous flares of X-rays, generated by the material heating to intense temperatures as it’s sucked towards the black hole, so bright we can detect them from Earth.

This is normal black hole behaviour. What isn’t normal is for those X-ray flares to spew forth with clockwork regularity, a puzzling behaviour reported in 2019 from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy 250 million light-years away. Every nine hours, boom — X-ray flare.

After careful study, astronomer Andrew King of the University of Leicester in the UK identified a potential cause — a dead star that’s endured its brush with a black hole, trapped on a nine-hour, elliptical orbit around it. Every close pass, or periastron, the black hole slurps up more of the star’s material.

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Discovery makes the invisible visible

Australian scientists have discovered a new way to analyze microscopic cells, tissues and other transparent specimens, through the improvement of an almost 100-year-old imaging technique.

La Trobe University researchers have led a four-year collaboration to make “the invisible visible” by using custom-designed nanomaterials to enhance the sensitivity of , an commonly used by scientists to study biological specimens.

The discovery, detailed in Nature Photonics, will benefit a broad range of researchers and has the potential to advance research into the understanding and detection of disease.

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A technique to estimate emotional valence and arousal

In recent years, countless computer scientists worldwide have been developing deep neural network-based models that can predict people’s emotions based on their facial expressions. Most of the models developed so far, however, merely detect primary emotional states such as anger, happiness and sadness, rather than more subtle aspects of human emotion.

Past psychology research, on the other hand, has delineated numerous dimensions of emotion, for instance, introducing measures such as valence (i.e., how positive an emotional display is) and arousal (i.e., how calm or excited someone is while expressing an emotion). While estimating valence and arousal simply by looking at people’s faces is easy for most humans, it can be challenging for machines.

Researchers at Samsung AI and Imperial College London have recently developed a deep-neural-network-based system that can estimate emotional valence and arousal with high levels of accuracy simply by analyzing images of human faces taken in everyday settings. This model, presented in a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, can make predictions fairly quickly, which means that it could be used to detect subtle qualities of emotion in real time (e.g., from snapshots of CCTV cameras).

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SpaceX may finally launch its newest Starship rocket prototype Tuesday afternoon. With any luck, it won’t explode

On Tuesday, SpaceX plans to launch the latest prototype of its Starship spacecraft — a system that could one day carry humans to Mars. The prototype, called.

The first time SpaceX attempted such an ambitious Starship flight, the 16-story vehicle blew up. Seven weeks later, Elon Musk’s company is trying again.

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A Physicist Has Worked Out The Math That Makes ‘Paradox-Free’ Time Travel Plausible

No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.

As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?

It’s a monumental head-scratcher known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, but in September last year a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, said he has worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.

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Stomach Implant Tells Your Brain You’re Not Hungry

A tiny implant offers a new weight loss option, and a gastric bypass alternative, for people suffering from obesity.

The device uses light to stimulate the nerve responsible for regulating food intake. A tiny glow from the implant and users don’t feel as hungry — instead, they feel full.

Researchers at Texas A&M say that this dime-sized device could provide a far less invasive surgical option than the so-called stomach stapling surgery — which is currently a last resort surgery for obese patients. This could be a viable option for a gastric bypass alternative.

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Sophia Robot Makers’ Mass Rollout Plan Signals Rise in Robotics

Automation ‘to keep people safe’

Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics said four models, including Sophia will start to be mass produced in the first half of 2021.

This coincides with a rise in automation documented worldwide as robotics technologies are used to allow everyday tasks to be carried out amidst social distancing restrictions.… See More.

Hanson Robotics plans to sell its famous robot amidst increased automation linked to the pandemic.

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Worm Regeneration May Lend A Hand in Human Healing

Circa 2012

Livescience.com | By LIVESCIENCE

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

About the size of toenail clippings, planarians are freshwater flatworms that can re-form from tiny slivers. This feature not only lets them repair themselves, but it lets them reproduce by breaking apart and then creating new worms.

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