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‘Old Smokers’ and ’Squalling Newborns’ among Hidden Stars Spotted for First Time

‘Hidden’ stars including a new type of elderly giant nicknamed an ‘old smoker’ have been spotted for the first time by astronomers.

The mystery objects exist at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy and can sit quietly for decades – fading almost to invisibility – before suddenly puffing out clouds of smoke, according to a new study published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

An international team of scientists led by Professor Philip Lucas, of the University of Hertfordshire, made their ground-breaking discovery after monitoring almost a billion stars in infrared light during a 10-year survey of the night sky.

Scientists Control Venus Flytrap With Implanted Computer Brain

It’s “Little Shop of Horrors” meets “Terminator.”

A team of scientists successfully took control over a Venus Flytrap, a type of cultivated carnivorous plant, by implanting a tiny microchip in it.

This “artificial neutron” was able to force the plants to open and close — conventionally a way for them to devour its prey — mimicking the brain’s methods of processing and transferring information.

First-ever images of heat ‘sloshing’ like sound waves captured by MIT in a superfluid

The researchers applied the higher resonant radio frequency, which prompted any normal, “hot” fermions in the liquid to ring in response. The researchers then could zero in on the resonating fermions and track them over time to create “movies” that revealed heat’s pure motion — a sloshing back and forth, similar to sound waves.

“For the first time, we can take pictures of this substance as we cool it through the critical temperature of superfluidity, and directly see how it transitions from being a normal fluid, where heat equilibrates boringly, to a superfluid where heat sloshes back and forth,” Zwierlein says.

The experiments mark the first time scientists have been able to image second sound directly and the pure motion of heat in a superfluid quantum gas. The researchers plan to extend their work to map heat’s behavior more precisely in other ultracold gases. Then, they say their findings can be scaled up to predict how heat flows in other strongly interacting materials, such as high-temperature superconductors and neutron stars.

China in Space

By illustrator, tagged space, comic, cartoon, character, china, chinese, guy, noodles, problem, rocket, nudeln, rakete„ raumschiff, rakete, raumshuttle, astronaut, china, sprache, kultur, raumfahrt, weltall, weltraum, universum, akzent, nudeln, kultur, chinapfanne, essen, nahrung, lebensmittel, schwerkraft, schwerelos, sandwich — Category Education & Tech — rated 3.50 / 5.

Gigantic Object on Surface of Sun Turns to Face the Earth

Last fall, NASA’s Mars rover spotted a massive spot on the surface of the Sun — and now, that ginormous maw is looking directly at the Earth.

First reported by SpaceWeather.com, the sunspot is expected to blast a coronal mass ejection (CME) out towards Earth and will be “not just a near miss, but an actual glancing blow.”

CMEs occur when storms on the surface of the Sun blast plasma out into the solar system, leaving planets in its path — including our own Earth — to handle the geomagnetic consequences.

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