Major coins traded green on Sunday buoyed by renewed investor confidence that the Federal Reserve is managing inflation successfully without pushing the economy into recession.
Cryptocurrency
Gains (% in 24 hours)
Price (Recorded 8:32pm EST)
Bitcoin
+2%
$21,118.80
Ethereum
+2.7%
$1,564.75
Dogecoin
+2.4
$0.08
What Happened: Bitcoin BTC/USD, Ethereum ETH/USD and other major cryptos continue to surge in weekend trading, recorded at 8:32 p.m. EST.
Top Gainers (24 hours)
Gains
Price
Frax Share
+26.1%
$8.45
Decentraland
+20.2%
$0.70
Celo
+19.6%
$0.74
Bitcoin has been on a remarkable run this year, trading at $21,118 – up a staggering 25% over the course of the year, primarily due to its meteoric rise since last Tuesday, when it was just above the $17,400 mark. Ether followed a similar pattern to Bitcoin this weekend, surging to a two-month high of $1,550 before falling slightly. ETH was trading at $1,564, at the time of writing.
Meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin DOGE/USD was trading at $0.08, struggling to reach $0.10, up 2.38% in the last 24 hours.
US Equity Markets will be closed on Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day—a holiday honoring the late revered civil rights activist. Before trading closed on Friday, major indexes advanced slightly. Technology-heavy indices such as the Nasdaq and S&P 500, which has a strong technology component, recorded gains of over 5% and 4%, respectively.
See More: Best Crypto Day Trading Strategies
“Unless we hear some strong hawkish pushback from the Fed or if commodity prices surge, crypto traders should not be surprised if Bitcoin is able to extend its recent gains. The $18,500 level was critical resistance for Bitcoin and if it can stay above that level over the next few sessions, that could awaken some dormant long-term bulls,” said Edward Moya, Senior Market Analyst at OANDA, in a note seen by Benzinga on Friday.
Crypto analyst Michaël van de Poppe is patiently awaiting for BTC to reach $21,299 before dropping to $20,586. In a recent graph, Poppe tweeted, that the trend of the coming months is still up, with altcoins gathering more volume to be traded. He commented that when a further short squeeze occurs, it will be time for the longs to be punished.
Despite the naysayers, crypto analyst ‘Kaleo’ stands firm in his prediction that ETH will reach the $2500 level.
Read Next:Crypto Analyst Issues Bitcoin, Ethereum Warning After BTC Explodes Over $20K: ‘There’s A Problem For Bulls’
An ancient and dormant volcano is waking up after nearly 800 years. The volcano, known as Mt. Edgecumbe, is found just 15 miles west of Sitka, Alaska. Scientists believe that the massive volcano has been dormant for around 800 to 900 years. Now, though, it appears to be waking up, which could spell disaster for nearby towns.
Back in April 2022, Mt. Edgecumbe experienced a small swarm of earthquakes, according to the Alaskan reporting channel KTVF. Scientists were attracted to the activity and began to look into it, discovering that deformities at the surface level of the volcano had seen a change of around 10.6 inches. The changes, they say, can be attributed to magma rising, proof that this dormant volcano is waking up.
The data, which they found by using a new analysis system, showed that the magma had been rising since at least 2018, at a constant rate of 3.4 inches per year. It’s very rare for an inactive or extinct volcano like Mt. Edgecumbe to become active again. So, seeing activity return to the dormant volcano is intriguing. The volcano also rests upon a “transform fault,” which adds even more intrigue to the case.
Extinct volcano of Mount Edgecumbe rises above the harbor town of Sitka in Alaska Image source: steheap / Adobe
This is particularly intriguing because, normally, volcanos on these kinds of fault lines don’t see eruptions, and they’re unlikely to be active. So, the possibility that this dormant volcano is now waking up is even more of a mystery. Of course, there are currently no signs that the volcano is going to erupt anytime soon.
Volcanos are terrifying points of nature. Not only can they unleash massive earthquakes, but they can also create islands in the Pacific Ocean. When you consider how these natural occurrences have become a driving point for disaster movies, too, it’s intriguing to think of how much we could learn from a dormant volcano that may be waking up.
Further, researchers like Dr. Ronni Grapenthin, an associate professor of Geodesy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, told KTVF that if any eruptions come, there will be plenty of signs. As noted above, the last eruption of this dormant volcano appears to have happened around 800 to 900 years ago, based on history based down by Alaska natives. That eruption may have been very localized, though.
What is concerning, though, is that Grapenthin believes this volcano could be capable of erupting in different ways. Luckily, if the dormant volcano continues waking up, there should be plenty of smoke to let the townspeople in Sitka know what is going on.
New York (Knewz) — A United States volcano that’s been dormant for more than 800 years is seeing some action.
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Researchers with the Alaska Volcano Observatory and Alaska Satellite Facility recently shared research that revealed that magma beneath Mount Edgecumbe, a volcano in Alaska, has been moving upward through the earth’s crust.
The discovery came from new technology the facilities employed that uses computer modeling on satellite imagery. The data showed that magma is rising in a United States volcano that’s been long dormant about 6 miles from a depth of about 12 miles.
It has caused significant surface deformation, according to researchers.
“That’s the fastest rate of volcanic deformation that we currently have in Alaska,” said the research paper’s lead author, Ronni Grapenthin, a University of Alaska Fairbanks associate professor of geodesy.
“And while it is not uncommon for volcanoes to deform, the activity at Edgecumbe is unusual because reactivation of dormant volcanic systems is rarely observed,” he added.
However, a United States volcano that’s been long dormant is not expected to erupt any time soon, Grapethin said.
The University of Alaska Fairbanks published the findings on its website on Oct. 20. The findings were originally published Oct. 10 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The research collaborators processed the data in a cloud, which they say is a first for the volcano team. The cloud computing sped up the process as researchers were not required to download and sort data, which can take weeks or months.
The researchers began looking into Mount Edgecumbe when a swarm of earthquakes were detected there on April 11, 2022. Four days later, the researchers detected the magma moving upward.
“We’ve done these kinds of analyses before, but new streamlined cloud-based workflows cut weeks or months of analysis down to just days,” said David Fee, the Alaska Volcano Observatory’s coordinating scientist at the Geophysical Institute.
A United States volcano, Mount Edgecumbe sits at 3,200 feet and is on the Kruzof Island on the west side of the Sitka Sound.
The new deformation-based data will help researchers detect volcanic unrest quicker because ground deformation is one the earliest indicators, researchers said.
“This magma intrusion has been going on for three-plus years now,” he said. “Prior to an eruption we expect more signs of unrest: more seismicity, more deformation, and — importantly — changes in the patterns of seismicity and deformation.”
Dormant stellar-mass black holes, which form when massive stars reach the end of their lives, are particularly hard to spot since they do not interact much with their surroundings. This is because, unlike most black holes, dormant ones don’t emit high levels of X-ray radiation.
While thought to be fairly common cosmic phenomenon, this type of black hole previouslyhad not been “unambiguously detected outside our galaxy,” according to the team of US and European researchers involved in the study.
The newly detected black hole, called VFTS 243, is at least nine times the mass of our sun, and itorbits a hot, blue star weighing 25 times the sun’s mass, making it part of a binary system.
“It is incredible that we hardly know of any dormant black holes, given how common astronomers believe them to be,” said study coauthor Pablo Marchant, an astronomer at KU Leuven, a university in Belgium, in a news release.
The research was published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy on Monday.
Process of elimination
To find the black hole, which can’t be observed directly, the astronomers looked at 1,000 massive stars (each weighing at least eight times the mass of the sun) in the Tarantula Nebula region of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy near the Milky Way.
The discovery was made by a process of elimination, said coauthor Tomer Shenar, who was working at KU Leuven in Belgium when the study began and is now a Marie-Curie Fellow at Amsterdam University, in the Netherlands.
First the researchers identified the stars that were part of binary systems — stars moving around a cosmic companion. Then, they looked for binary systems where the companion was not visible,and careful analysis ultimately revealed that VFTS 243 was a dormant black hole, he explained via email.
“What we see here is a star, weighing about 25 times the mass of our Sun, moving periodically (every 10 days or so) around something ‘invisible,’ that we cannot see in the data,” Shenar said.
“The analysis tells us that this other ‘thing’ must be at least 9 times more massive than our Sun. The main part of the analysis is elimination: what can weigh nine solar masses, and not emit any light? A black hole is the only possibility we have got left (this, or a fat invisible alien…).”
“There might be more in there, but only for this one we could show the presence of a black hole unambiguously,” Shenar said.
The black hole was found using six years of observations by the Fibre Large Array Multi Element Spectrograph (FLAMES) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. FLAMES allows astronomers to observe more than a hundred objects at once.
Black hole police
Some of the 40 study authors are known in astronomy circles as the black hole police, according to the news release, because they have debunked several other discoveries of other black holes.
The paper said that more than 10 discoveries of black hole binary systems in the past two years were disputed. However, they were confident that their discovery was not a “false alarm.”
“We know what the challenges are, and we did everything in our capacity to rule out all other options,” Shenar said.
The research team said they invited scrutiny of their latest findings.
“In science, you’re always right until someone proves you wrong, and I cannot know that this would never happen — I only know that none of us can spot a flaw in the analysis,” Shenar said.
A dormant black hole at least nine times the mass of the Sun has been discovered just 160,000 light years from Earth, orbiting a star.
A team of researchers – known as the ‘black hole police’ because they have debunked so many black hole discoveries – searched nearly 1,000 stars of the Tarantula Nebula in the constellation Dorado before locating it.
They claim this is the first dormant ‘stellar-mass’ black hole to have been detected outside of the Milky Way galaxy.
Stellar-mass black holes are formed when massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse under their own gravity.
The black hole is described as ‘dormant’ if it is not actively devouring matter and, as a result, does not give off any light or other radiation.
The discovery has been likened to finding a ‘needle in a haystack’, as dormant black holes are notoriously hard to spot because they do not interact with their surroundings.
Co-author Dr Pablo Marchant of KU Leuven in Belgium, said: ‘It’s incredible, we hardly know of any dormant black holes given how common astronomers believe them to be.’
An artist’s impression of the binary system VFTS 243. The system, which is located in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, is composed of a hot, blue star with 25 times the Sun’s mass and a black hole, which is at least nine times the mass of the Sun
Artist’s impression of the VFTS 243 binary system. The background image shows a Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) image of a segment of the Large Magellanic Cloud, marking the region in which VFTS 243 resides. The sizes of the star, black hole and orbits are not to scale
WHAT IS A ‘BINARY SYSTEM’?
A binary star is a system of two stars that are bound via gravity and in orbit around each other.
Either or both of the stars in the system could be a black hole.
When this is the case they are often identified by the presence of bright X-ray emissions.
The X-rays are produced by matter falling from one component, called the donor (usually a relatively normal star), to the other component, called the accretor (the black hole).
The matter forms into a glowing accretion disk swirling around the black hole.
However observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope reveal VFTS 243 to be X-ray faint.
The newly discovered black hole lies in the Large Magellanic Cloud – a satellite galaxy that neighbours the Milky Way.
The Large Magellanic Cloud orbits a hot, blue star that is almost three times as big as our galaxy.
Thousands of stellar-mass black holes are believed to exist in the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds.
They are much smaller than the supermassive black hole 27,000 light years from Earth that is powering the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A*.
The black hole is part of a ‘binary’ with a luminous companion star, where they revolve around each other in a system known as VFTS 243.
Co-author Dr Julia Bodensteiner, of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Germany, said: ‘For more than two years now we’ve been looking for such black-hole-binary systems.
‘I was very excited when I heard about VFTS 243, which in my opinion is the most convincing candidate reported to date.’
It took six years worth of data from the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to officially identify VFTS 243.
The FLAMES (Fibre Large Array Multi Element Spectrograph) scanner on the VLT allows more than a hundred objects to be observed at once.
Historically, binaries hosting stellar mass black holes have been identified through the presence of bright X-ray emissions from the accretion disk.
The glowing accretion disc is formed of gases from the living star’s atmosphere that flow towards and surround the black hole.
However observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope reveal VFTS 243 to be X-ray faint.
This image from VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile shows the Tarantula Nebula and its surroundings within the Large Magellanic Cloud. It shows star clusters, glowing gas clouds and the scattered remains of supernova explosions
Historically, binaries hosting stellar mass black holes have been identified through the presence of bright X-ray emissions from the accretion disk (pictured). The glowing accretion disc is formed of gases from the living star’s atmosphere that flow towards and surround the black hole (stock illustration)
The study, published today in Nature Astronomy, also sheds light on how black holes are created from the cores of dying stars.
The star that gave rise to VFTS 243 appears to have collapsed entirely, without leaving any trace of a powerful supernova explosion.
Dr Shenar explained: ‘Evidence for this ‘direct-collapse’ scenario has been emerging recently – but our study arguably provides one of the most direct indications.
‘This has enormous implications for the origin of black-hole mergers in the cosmos.’
It took six years worth of data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (pictured) to identify VFTS 243
The FLAMES instrument, mounted at the Nasmyth A platform at ESO’s Very Large Telescope. FLAMES is a high resolution spectrograph of the VLT and can access targets over a large corrected field of view. It allows more than a hundred objects to be observed at once
Artist rendering of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory space telescope
Despite the nickname ‘black hole police,’ the international team of researchers actively encourages scrutiny of their work.
Lead author Dr Tomer Shenar, of Amsterdam University, said: ‘As a researcher who has debunked potential black holes in recent years, I was extremely sceptical regarding this discovery.
‘For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery – instead of rejecting one.’
Dr Kareem El-Badry of Harvard University in Boston is nicknamed the ‘black hole destroyer’ due to his notoriety for debunking discoveries.
Dr El-Badry said: ‘When Tomer asked me to double-check his findings, I had my doubts.
‘But I could not find a plausible explanation for the data that did not involve a black hole.
‘Of course I expect others in the field to pore over our analysis carefully, and to try to cook up alternative models.
‘It’s a very exciting project to be involved in.’
WHAT’S INSIDE A BLACK HOLE?
Black holes are strange objects in the universe that get their name from the fact that nothing can escape their gravity, not even light.
If you venture too close and cross the so-called event horizon, the point from which no light can escape, you will also be trapped or destroyed.
For small black holes, you would never survive such a close approach anyway.
The tidal forces close to the event horizon are enough to stretch any matter until it’s just a string of atoms, in a process physicists call ‘spaghettification’.
But for large black holes, like the supermassive objects at the cores of galaxies like the Milky Way, which weigh tens of millions if not billions of times the mass of a star, crossing the event horizon would be uneventful.
Because it should be possible to survive the transition from our world to the black hole world, physicists and mathematicians have long wondered what that world would look like.
They have turned to Einstein’s equations of general relativity to predict the world inside a black hole.
These equations work well until an observer reaches the centre or singularity, where, in theoretical calculations, the curvature of space-time becomes infinite.
Tumor cells can be seen in a matrix of a certain kind of collagen that allows them to proliferate. (Image credit: Bravo Cordero Annenberg)
Cancer cells may suddenly “reawaken” and spread throughout the body after years of lying dormant. Now, scientists may be closer to understanding why.
In a new study published Monday (Dec. 13) in Nature Cancer, scientists found that in mice, dormant cancer cells were surrounded by larger amounts of a specific type of collagen, the main protein that makes up connective tissue, than active cancer cells.
The team also examined this collagen, known as type III collagen, in samples from human patients with head and neck cancer. Patients whose cancer had spread to their lymph nodes tended to have primary tumors with less type III collagen nearby than patients with no cancer in their lymph nodes, suggesting that cancer with less type III collagen might spread more easily to other parts of the body.
Related: 7 odd things that raise your risk of cancer (and 1 that doesn’t)
In their mouse models, the scientists found that the type III collagen surrounding dormant cancer cells seems to decrease over time, and the cancer cells become active again. The collagen changes its structure during this process, becoming less wavy and more linear. The researchers also identified a specific process, called a signaling pathway, through which this collagen from the tumor changes the body’s chemistry and keeps the nearby cancer cells dormant. They discovered that disrupting this process causes cancer cells to “reactivate.”
These distinct changes in type III collagen could be a useful marker for determining if cancer is more likely to spread, or metastasize, said study senior author Jose Javier Bravo-Cordero, an associate professor of medicine, hematology and medical oncology at the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai in New York. The researchers also found that in mice, replacing the tumors with scaffolds made of this collagen could prevent metastatic tumor growth, which, if it were effective in humans, could serve as a future cancer treatment.
When placed in another type of collagen matrix, however, the cancer cells stop dividing.= (Image credit: Bravo Cordero Annenberg)
In the new research, the team used mouse models of head and neck cancer and breast cancer to study both active and dormant cancer cells. When introduced to the mice, the active cells formed tumors and the cancer spread, while the dormant cancer cells formed small clumps that remained in isolated areas and did not grow or spread. Among other tools, the researchers used a specialized form of microscopy to observe cancer cells inside live mice in real time. Bravo-Cordero compared the method to using a security camera in a store. Looking at still images taken by a security camera individually or out of sequence wouldn’t necessarily catch a thief, he said, but a video recording would tell a more complete story.
“That’s what we’re trying to do with the cancer cells,” Bravo-Cordero told Live Science. “We want to film them in real time so we can understand their process and their behavior.” In this way, the team spotted the differences in collagen between the tumor types.
“If you have a tumor that has a tendency to lose collagen expression, over time the cells that disseminate may be more efficient in restoring growth and forming metastases than the ones that overexpress collagen,” Bravo-Cordero said.
To test whether type III collagen could prevent cancer metastases and lessen cancer growth in mice, the researchers introduced type III collagen into the mice in several ways, including by injecting both cancer cells and the collagen into the animals at the same time. The resulting tumors grew more slowly than tumors in mice injected with only cancer cells. In a different experiment, the researchers also placed a tiny, bioengineered scaffold loaded with type III collagen into an area where they had removed a tumor from the mice. Only 20% of the mice with the scaffolds had the cancer return in that area, versus 80% in the control group.
“In that condition, what we see is that we can prevent the recurrence of those tumors,” said Bravo-Cordero, by “forcing the cells into the dormant state.” If the same thing held true in humans, a method like this could potentially be used as a cancer treatment, he said.
Of course, there is no guarantee the same would hold true in humans. There’s also no guarantee that type III collagen would have the same role for multiple types of cancer, or even for different types of dormant cancer cells.
Just as “human cancers are very different from one patient to the other, it’s almost certainly the case that there will be great heterogeneity in the mechanisms of dormancy,” said Dr. Lewis Chodosh, the chairman of the department of cancer biology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study. In other words, cancer cells likely have several ways of remaining dormant, and this may only be one of them.
Chodosh said a major strength of the study is the many methods the researchers used to collect data, incorporating data from mice and human samples. But a challenge of this type of cancer research is “understanding which of the things discovered in experimental systems are applicable to humans and in which clinical contexts,” he said.
Future research will help answer these questions, as well as others, such as how long such collagen treatments could keep the cancer cells dormant. Still, the new research brings us closer to understanding one of the most mysterious and deadly aspects of cancer growth.
‘This is an understudied area in cancer biology that has critical relevance to cancer patients,” Chodosh said.
The Fagradals Mountain volcano in southwest Iceland had been dormant for 6,000 years. But on Friday night, following weeks of earthquakes in the area, the volcano came to life.
The eruption is the first that the Reykjanes Peninsula, where the volcano is located, has experienced in 781 years.
Video of the eruption show the bright lava oozing out of the earth, lighting up an otherwise stark dark night. The glow from the lava could be seen up to 20 miles away from Reykjavík, Iceland’s capital, according to the Associated Press and photos of the glow.
This is Fagradalsfjall. It’s about 15 miles south of Reykjavik and just erupted. You can start practicing your pronunciation:
Foie-gras-thals-fiat-ill Have fun#iceland #volcano pic.twitter.com/IYFHQMzWsx
— Ragnar Fjölnisson (@rfjolnisson) March 19, 2021
Icelandic Police tweeted on Friday that people were to stay indoors and keep their windows closed to prevent gas pollution. When volcanoes erupt, the lava spews several potentially hazardous gases, including sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen fluoride, according to the United State Environmental Protection Agency.
The Icelandic Meteorological Office said on Saturday morning that the pollution from this eruption, however, “is not expected to cause much discomfort for people except close up to the source of the eruption.”
On its website, the office said “no volcanic ash is detected but high level of volcanic gases has been measured close to the eruption site.” Scientists and officials are monitoring the emissions closely.
A new video of the eruption at Geldingardalur valley in Reykjanes peninsula. Taken from the Coast Guard helicopter. #Reykjanes #Eruption #Fagradalsfjall pic.twitter.com/B862heMzQL
— Icelandic Meteorological Office – IMO (@Vedurstofan) March 19, 2021
By Saturday morning, the Icelandic Meteorological Office reported that volcanic activity had “somewhat decreased” since Friday evening. Scientists at the department have not cited major concern for people in the area, as the lava area is less than 1 square kilometer. Eruptive fissures — cracks in the earth’s surface from which lava comes out — are approximately 500 to 700 meters long, according to the office.
“Lava fountains are small and lava flows are currently a very local hazard,” the office tweeted.
The Scientific Council for Civil Protection said on Saturday morning that they do not believe the eruption is a threat to structures.
The eruption is small and the volcanic activity has somewhat decreased since yesterday evening. The eruptive fissure is appr. 500 – 700 m long. The lava area is less than 1 km2. Lava fountains are small and lava flows are currently a very local hazard. #Reykjanes #eruption pic.twitter.com/2YsSbGtIuZ
— Icelandic Meteorological Office – IMO (@Vedurstofan) March 20, 2021
A small earthquake happened just hours before the volcano erupted.
A screenshot from the seismograph showing the hours before the eruption. A very low tremor is current to the right of the image and only on those monitors next to the eruption site, (bottom lines). The eruption starts at ca 20:45, time stamp is at the bottom. #Reykjanes #Eruption pic.twitter.com/OKMNBlthxX
— Icelandic Meteorological Office – IMO (@Vedurstofan) March 20, 2021
Southwest Iceland has been hit with a “swarm” of thousands of earthquakes since February 24. Dozens of them had a magnitude of 3 or higher, meaning they could be felt. On Thursday, just one day before the eruption, the IMO reported that there had been 400 earthquakes in a span of about seven hours. Despite the extent, it was “somewhat less” seismic activity compared to other mornings where there have been roughly 1,000 earthquakes.
