Day: November 5, 2018

Adding a cosmic “Walking Dead” twist to the most morbid of all space objects, scientists have found that some black holes could bring dead “zombie” stars back to life — and then destroy them.

Black holes are invisible “objects” in space where the gravity is so strong that it sucks everything into it, even light. All of the black holes that astronomers have found so far are either superbig — as in hundreds of thousands and even billions of times the mass of our sun — or on the smallish side, as in, say, less than 100 times the mass of our sun. Astronomers haven’t spotted any of these matter-sucking beasts in the middle range yet, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California suspect that midsize black holes might be just the right size to provide enough gravitational force to reignite a dead white dwarf star — the stellar corpse of a star that’s about the mass of the sun and that’s used up its nuclear fuel. [Spaced Out! 101 Astronomy Images That Will Blow Your Mind]

To test their idea, the team members ran supercomputer simulations of dozens of different close-encounter scenarios between these dead stars and midsize black holes. Every time a white dwarf got close to the Goldilocks black hole, the star reignited. The gravitational force from the black hole would cause the stellar material to fuse into varying amounts of calcium and iron, producing more fusion and iron as the star got closer to the black hole. This so-called nucleosynthesis process would reignite the once-dead star. 

The team also found that the star’s revival would create powerful electromagnetic waves that could be picked up by detectors in near-Earth orbit — meaning we might be able to “see” where it happened and find the medium-size black hole that gave it a second life.

“If the stars align, so to speak, a zombie star could serve as a homing beacon for a never-before-detected class of black holes,” Peter Anninos, physicist and lead author on the study, said in a statement.

But the resurrected star wouldn’t stay bright forever. The necromancing black hole would bring the star back to life — only to rip it apart later.

“As [the spherical star] approaches the black hole, tidal forces begin to compress the star in a direction perpendicular to the orbital plane, reigniting it,” physicist Rob Hoffman, co-author on the study, said in the statement. “But within the orbital plane, these gravitational forces stretch the star and tear it apart.”

The team published its findings in the September issue of The Astrophysical Journal. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Overwatch has been such a phenomenon that it’s starting to take eek into everything. The latest example of Overwatch creep comes to the world of Lego. The company is releasing six Overwatch-themed building sets that feature vehicles, characters and weapons from the game. The Lego Overwatch collection will be available starting next year.

Gallery: Lego Overwatch sets | 12 Photos

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Most of the sets feature multiple Overwatch characters and highlight a specific map from the game. The Tracer vs. Widowmaker set recreates the drone satellite from the Watchpoint: Gibraltar map. Hanzo vs. Genji pits dragon brothers against one another at the Hanamura dojo. A set called Dorado Showdown places Soldier: 76, Reaper and McCree in buildings from the Dorado map. A D.Va and Reinhardt set comes with buildable mech suit and powered armor that the tank heroes rock into battle. The Bastion set comes with a buildable version of the character that can be configured for both recon mode and sentry mode. The sizable, 730-piece Watchpoint: Gibraltar set comes with Mercy, Reaper, Winston and Pharah.

Lego Overwatch sets will start at $14.99 and range all the way up to $89.99. You’ll be able to get your hands on them for the Overwatch fan in your life (even if that’s just yourself) starting January 1st, 2019.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

November 2, 2018 at 04:06PM

The RED Hydrogen One, a phone with a “holographic” display and what can only be described as a unique design, is now available for purchase from Verizon and AT&T. It’ll cost you around $1,300 if you want one.

We reviewed the RED Hydrogen One this week and weren’t exactly blown away by anything it offered. It came off as an unfinished product, with poorly tuned software, an average camera, and a display that gave us a headache in 4V (the holographic thing) and didn’t look great in 2D either. It’s huge, has a year-old processor, and may some day be a part of a modular ecosystem, but isn’t now. Hey, battery life was good, though!

If you are indeed still interested after reading that, Verizon will sell you a RED Hydrogen One in “Shadow” or “Titanium” at a cost of $53.95/mo for 24 months. AT&T would rather you spread the cost out over 30 months and would run you $43.17/mo.

Want one today or at least take a look in-person? Store availability is going to be hard to come by. Verizon’s site lists it as “available online only,” while AT&T’s site couldn’t find any stores near me (Portland) that have them. Verizon’s site also shows shipping dates of 11/13 (Black Aluminum) and 11/21 (Shadow).

On a related note, a weird story was floating around yesterday suggesting that Verizon units had been put in “quarantine” and were not going to be sold today. We reached out to Verizon who said that is not true at all and that launch today is still on.

Buy RED Hydrogen One: Verizon | AT&T

China has built a staggeringly large radio telescope in a remote part of the country, and although it is the largest and most advanced instrument of its kind in the world, the country continues to have a difficult time staffing up the observatory.

Not only has the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST instrument, still failed to attract a chief scientist, according to the South China Morning Post the facility is also struggling to attract two dozen researchers to work on site to maintain the instrument and analyze data collected there.

One problem is pay. According to the Post, astronomers interested in joining working there should speak fluent English, and expect to work in the remote location on a long-term basis. (The telescope is located southwest China’s mountainous Guizhou province.) Compensation for the job is meager, at least by Western standards—about 100,000 yuan, or $14,400 annually.

“It’s not surprising they have had difficulties hiring people, given the low pay compared with similar international institutes,” an unnamed Chinese chemical physics researcher told the paper. “They are looking for contract workers instead of permanent employees, as the National Astronomical Observatory doesn’t have that [many] permanent posts.”

Chief scientist, still wanted

International astronomers say there are simply not that many radio astronomers in China qualified to work with the technical data collected by the radio telescope, and process it for research purposes. Given the contract nature of the position, it seems possible that foreign astronomers brought to China on a contract basis may be training their replacements, and will not see their contracts renewed.

Meanwhile, the observatory is still having difficulty attracting a chief scientist to oversee scientific operations. Only a few dozen people in the world have the qualifications that China is seeking for this position, a US astronomer told Ars last year.

The proffered compensation may seem generous, at about $1.2 million. But it seems that this pay package entails a one-time start-up grant, after which the annual salary will be considerably less. So far Chinese officials have yet to announce any results from their job search.

Another concern international astronomers have about the chief scientist position, as well as that of the research associates, is that their activities will be controlled by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This seems likely to limit the academic freedom that western observers generally enjoy.

The Nigerian army reportedly used the words of President Trump to defend fatal shootings of Muslim protesters last weekend and Monday.

In a tweet, which appears to have been taken down, the army posted a video of Trump’s anti-migrant speech in which he said rocks would be considered firearms if thrown toward soldiers at the U.S. border, according to the BBC and The New York Times.

In a Nov. 1 speech on immigration, when asked by a reporter if active duty soldiers being sent to the U.S. border with Mexico would fire on migrants seeking asylum, Trump said he hoped not.

“But I will tell you this,” he continued, “anybody throwing stones, rocks, like they did to Mexico — the Mexican military, Mexican police — where they badly hurt police and soldiers of Mexico, we will consider that a firearm, because there’s not much difference when you get hit in the face with a rock.”

“They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back,” Trump told another reporter at the news conference. “We’re going to consider it, I told them, consider it a rifle.”

The Nigerian government came under harsh criticism after Amnesty International reported the killing of Shiite Muslim protesters by Nigerian security forces.

A spokesman for the Nigerian army told the BBC “this is what Trump was talking about,” and said their decision to fire live rounds at protesters was justified because they were armed.

Earlier this week, Amnesty International reported that Nigerian soldiers killed more than 40 protesters in the Islamic Movement of Nigeria while they were peacefully demonstrating against the imprisonment of their leader Ibrahim Zakzaky. The human rights group said the protesters were killed by security forces using automatic weapons on Saturday and Monday in Abuja, the capital, and the neighboring state of Nasarawa.

The group said soldiers fired on the Islamic Movement of Nigeria protesters in a “horrific use of excessive force.” At least six people were killed Saturday, Amnesty said. On Monday the death toll was at least another 39, and 122 people were injured with gunshot wounds, according to the group.

The Financial Times reported that Nigeria’s military said Monday that “three protesters had been killed while four soldiers were wounded in what it said was an ‘attack’ by ‘massive numbers’ of the sect.”

Nigeria’s government said its soldiers were acting in self-defense, according to The Guardian. “They met the soldiers in the call of their duty, and the soldiers tried to defend themselves,” The Guardian quoted army spokesman John Agim as saying.

Nigeria’s Embassy in Washington, D.C., has not replied to NPR’s phone and email requests for comment.

Several activists and former U.S. officials condemned the Nigerian army’s behavior.

Samantha Power, who served as ambassador to the United Nations under President Barack Obama, tweeted an image of the now-deleted Twitter post by the Nigerian military.

Amnesty International reported some victims suffered multiple gunshot wounds, and were shot in the chest and head. “This pattern clearly shows soldiers and police approached IMN processions not to restore public order, but to kill,” said Osai Ojigho, director of Amnesty International Nigeria, using the initials for the Shiite protesters.

“It seems the Nigerian military are deliberately using tactics designed to kill when dealing with IMN gatherings. Many of these shootings clearly amount to extrajudicial executions,” Ojigho continued.

Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, is split between a mostly Muslim north and a largely Christian south.

Most of the Muslims in the country are Sunni, but Zakzaky has attracted increasing numbers of followers to Shiite Islam. Zakzaky has been under arrest since 2015, when the Nigerian army raided his Shiite Muslim sect, reportedly killing hundreds of people.

Regarding the deaths on Saturday and Monday, the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria said it is concerned and is urging “restraint on all sides.”

The embassy called for Nigerian authorities to “conduct a thorough investigation” and “take appropriate action to hold accountable those responsible for violations of Nigerian law.”

Packaging designer Ryan Gaither believes in the power of cardboard.

At the Swedish-owned BillerudKorsnäs design lab in Portland, Oregon, he’s laid down a massive sheet of it, as big as a king-size bed.

He flips the switch on a machine that zips around the cardboard, stabbing and cutting it like a robotic exact-o knife.

“Basically anything we create, any design we’re looking to validate, we cut out with this machine,” he says. “This lets us know if we’re on the right track or on a fool’s errand.”

When it’s done, he folds the resulting cut-out into a three-dimensional shape that’s designed to replace the plastic foam end caps companies use to ship laptop computers. Gaither says inventions like this are helping the company build a growing customer list.

“I think now people are more concerned about the impact plastics are having on the environment,” he says. “Paper packaging is a much more renewable resource. It biodegrades.”

The growing number of campaigns to ban plastic waste are putting pressure on companies to find alternatives – not just for straws, but for all kinds of plastic packaging. So BillerudKorsnäs tests out products they hope to sell in the budding market for plastic replacements.

Some of their customers now use cardboard instead of clear plastic packaging for camping gear, and paper bags instead of plastic ones for food like pasta. The lab is even working on a paper soda bottle, which Tor Lundqvist, head of the company’s Americas division, calls a “fly to the moon kind of thing.”

BillerudKorsnäs is primarily a paper company that prides itself on its sustainably managed forests. It also has a process — the details of which it won’t divulge — that it says produces super strong paper.

“We can use these products in solutions where they can actually push out plastic for plastic bags, for instance, or plastic trays,” Lundqvist says.

And any time you replace plastic with paper, he says, it does more than reduce plastic pollution. It also helps climate change since plastic is made from fossil fuels.

But making a beverage bottle out of paper may be the company’s biggest challenge so far.

“Our CEO wanted us to do something really difficult with our raw material that people thought was not possible to do,” says Lundqvist. “It’s going very well. It looks like we are going to have a product on the market in the near future.”

Conrad MacKerron isn’t convinced. He’s with the non-profit As You Sow, which teams up with investors to push big manufacturers to change their plastic packaging. He’s heard about the BillerudKorsnas paper bottle project, but he doubts a leak-proof bottle can be made purely out of paper. Even paper cups, he says, generally include plastic to keep the liquid from leaking.

“We think of them as recyclable,” he says, “but because of the thin plastic lining a lot of paper mills cannot process them. So they reject the cups, and they go to landfills.”

Still, MacKerron is heartened to see many big companies finally take this problem seriously.

“I think most companies were hoping this concern about plastic pollution would blow over,” he says. “That tune has changed because people are so appalled and offended at how bits of plastic are now just everywhere.”

Scientists say the world is dumping 8 million tons of plastic into the oceans every year, and it never really goes away. It’s choking fish, filling the bellies of seabirds and turtles, and even showing up in our drinking water.

“I think the sense that it’s become pervasive is what can turn the tide, and come up with perhaps radical solutions that were not thinkable three, four, five years ago,” MacKerron says.

In the past few years, BillerudKorsnäs has seen 25 percent revenue growth year after year. Future success may depend on how its products perform.

At the company’s lab in Portland, designers slide a laptop with their paper end caps into a box. They’re testing to see if the paper can match the protective power of plastic.

First, a mechanical arm drops the laptop 3 feet. Then, a shaking machine mimics the bumps on a delivery truck. Finally, another machine squeezes it between two metal arms.

After all that, there are no dents in the box and no damage to the laptop. That could one day mean more customers for the company, and more laptops getting packaged and shipped plastic-free.