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Tell-tale signs of an incipient counteroffensive Updated combat map: While keeping the Russian forces at bay in Bakhmut and Avdiivka, the Ukrainian army is gathering strength for a major reversal — Meduza – Meduza
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Warzone 2.0’s second season arrives on February 15th with a new map and features – Engadget
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Accurate New Map of All the Matter in the Universe Released
A team of scientists, comprising experts from the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, have made a game-changing announcement with their release of one of the most accurate measurements to date of the universe’s matter distribution.
Analysis combines Dark Energy Survey and South Pole Telescope data to understand evolution of universe.
Sometimes to know what the matter is, you have to find it first.
When the universe began, matter was flung outward and gradually formed the planets, stars, and galaxies that we know and love today. By carefully assembling a map of that matter today, scientists can try to understand the forces that shaped the evolution of the universe.
A group of scientists, including several with the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, have released one of the most precise measurements ever made of how matter is distributed across the universe today.
Combining data from two major telescope surveys of the universe, the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope, the analysis involved more than 150 researchers and is published as a set of three articles on January 31 in the journal Physical Review D.
Among other findings, the analysis indicates that matter is not as “clumpy” as we would expect based on our current best model of the universe, which adds to a body of evidence that there may be something missing from our existing standard model of the universe.
Scientists have released a new survey of all the matter in the universe, using data taken by the Dark Energy Survey in Chile and the South Pole Telescope. Credit: Photo by Andreas Papadopoulos
Cooling and clumps
After the
The South Pole Telescope is part of a collaboration between Argonne and a number of national labs and universities to measure the CMB, considered the oldest light in the universe. The high altitude and extremely dry conditions of the South Pole keep water vapor from absorbing select light wavelengths. Credit: Image by Argonne National Laboratory
Combining two different methods of looking at the sky reduces the chance that the results are thrown off by an error in one of the forms of measurement. “It functions like a cross-check, so it becomes a much more robust measurement than if you just used one or the other,” said UChicago astrophysicist Chihway Chang, one of the lead authors of the studies.
In both cases, the analysis looked at a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. As light travels across the universe, it can be slightly bent as it passes objects with lots of gravity, like galaxies.
This method catches both regular matter and dark matter—the mysterious form of matter that we have only detected due to its effects on regular matter—because both regular and dark matter exert gravity.
By rigorously analyzing these two sets of data, the scientists could infer where all the matter ended up in the universe. It is more precise than previous measurements—that is, it narrows down the possibilities for where this matter wound up—compared to previous analyses, the authors said.
By overlaying maps of the sky from the Dark Energy Survey telescope (at left) and the South Pole Telescope (at right), the team could assemble a map of how the matter is distributed—crucial to understand the forces that shape the universe. Credit: Image courtesy of Yuuki Omori
The majority of the results fit perfectly with the currently accepted best theory of the universe.
But there are also signs of a crack—one that has been suggested in the past by other analyses, too.
“It seems like there are slightly less fluctuations in the current universe, than we would predict assuming our standard cosmological model anchored to the early universe,” said analysis coauthor and University of Hawaii astrophysicist Eric Baxter (UChicago PhD’14).
That is, if you make a model incorporating all the currently accepted physical laws, then take the readings from the beginning of the universe and extrapolate it forward through time, the results look slightly different from what we actually measure around us today.
“There’s a lot of new things you can do when you combine these different angles of looking at the universe.”
— Chihway Chang, UChicago astrophysicist
Specifically, today’s readings find the universe is less “clumpy”—clustering in certain areas rather than evenly spread out—than the model would predict.
If other studies continue to find the same results, scientists say, it may mean there is something missing from our existing model of the universe, but the results are not yet to the statistical level that scientists consider to be ironclad. That will take further study.
However, the analysis is a landmark as it yielded useful information from two very different telescope surveys. This is a much-anticipated strategy for the future of astrophysics, as more large telescopes come online in the next decades, but few had actually been carried out yet.
“I think this exercise showed both the challenges and benefits of doing these kinds of analyses,” Chang said. “There’s a lot of new things you can do when you combine these different angles of looking at the universe.”
“Joint analysis of Dark Energy Survey Year 3 data and CMB lensing from SPT and Planck. I. Construction of CMB lensing maps and modeling choices” by Y. Omori et al. (DES and SPT Collaborations), 31 January 2023, Physical Review D.
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.107.023529
“Joint analysis of Dark Energy Survey Year 3 data and CMB lensing from SPT and Planck. II. Cross-correlation measurements and cosmological constraints” by C. Chang et al. (DES & SPT Collaborations), 31 January 2023, Physical Review D.
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.107.023530
“Joint analysis of Dark Energy Survey Year 3 data and CMB lensing from SPT and Planck. III. Combined cosmological constraints” by T. M. C. Abbott et al. (DES and SPT Collaborations), 31 January 2023, Physical Review D.
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.107.023531
The South Pole Telescope is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy and is operated by a collaboration led by the University of Chicago. The Dark Energy Survey was an international collaboration coordinated through Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and funded by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and many institutions around the world.
New Map Shows All the Matter in the Universe
Researchers used data from the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope to re-calculate the total amount and distribution of matter in the universe. They found that there’s about six times as much dark matter in the universe as there is regular matter, a finding consistent with previous measurements.
But the team also found that the matter was less clumped together than previously thought, a finding detailed in a set of three papers, all published this week in Physical Review D.
The Dark Energy Survey observes photons of light at visible wavelengths; the South Pole Telescope looks at light at microwave wavelengths. That means the South Pole Telescope observes the cosmic microwave background—the oldest radiation we can see, which dates back to about 300,000 years after the Big Bang.
The team presented the datasets from the respective surveys in two maps of the sky; they then overlaid the two maps to understand the full picture of how matter is distributed in the universe.
“It seems like there are slightly less fluctuations in the current universe than we would predict, assuming our standard cosmological model anchored to the early universe,” said Eric Baxter, an astronomer at the University of Hawai’i and a co-author of the research, in a university release. “The high precision and robustness to sources of bias of the new results present a particularly compelling case that we may be starting to uncover holes in our standard cosmological model.”
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Dark matter is something in the universe that we cannot observe directly. We know it’s there because of its gravitational effects, but otherwise we can’t see it. Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe, according to CERN. (Ordinary matter is about 5% of the universe’s total content.) The remaining 68% is made up of dark energy, a hitherto uncertain category that is evenly distributed throughout the universe and responsible for the universe’s accelerating expansion.
The Dark Energy Survey still has three years of data to be analyzed, and a new look at the cosmic microwave background is currently being undertaken by the South Pole Telescope. Meanwhile, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (high in the Chilean desert of the same name) is currently taking a high-sensitivity survey of the background. With newly precise data to probe, researchers may be able to put the standard cosmological model to a difficult test.
In 2021, the Atacama telescope helped scientists come up with a newly precise measurement for the age of the universe: 13.77 billion years. More querying of the cosmic microwave background could also help researchers deal with the Hubble tension, a disagreement between two of the best ways for measuring the expansion of the universe. (Depending on how it’s measured, researchers land on two different figures for the rate of that expansion.)
As means of observation get more precise, and more data is collected and analyzed, that information can be fed back into grand cosmological models to determine where we’ve been wrong in the past and lead us to new lines of investigation.
More: Antimatter Could Travel Through Our Galaxy With Ease, Physicists Say
New map of the universe’s matter reveals a possible hole in our understanding of the cosmos
Scientists have made one of the most precise maps of the universe’s matter, and it shows that something may be missing in our best model of the cosmos.
Created by pooling data from two telescopes that observe different types of light, the new map revealed that the universe is less “clumpy” than previous models predicted — a potential sign that the vast cosmic web that connects galaxies is less understood than scientists thought.
According to our current understanding, the cosmic web is a gigantic network of crisscrossing celestial superhighways paved with hydrogen gas and dark matter. Taking shape in the chaotic aftermath of the Big Bang, the web’s tendrils formed as clumps from the roiling broth of the young universe; where multiple strands of the web intersected, galaxies eventually formed. But the new map, published Jan. 31 as three (opens in new tab) separate (opens in new tab) studies (opens in new tab) in the journal Physical Review D, shows that in many parts of the universe, matter is less clumped together and more evenly spread out than theory predicts it should be.
Related: How dark is the cosmic web?
“It seems like there are slightly less fluctuations in the current universe than we would predict assuming our standard cosmological model anchored to the early universe,” co-author Eric Baxter, an astrophysicist at the University of Hawaii, said in a statement (opens in new tab).
Spinning the cosmic web
According to the standard model of cosmology, the universe began taking shape after the Big Bang, when the young cosmos swarmed with particles of both matter and antimatter, which popped into existence only to annihilate each other upon contact. Most of the universe’s building blocks wiped themselves out this way, but the rapidly expanding fabric of space-time, along with some quantum fluctuations, meant that some pockets of the primordial plasma survived here and there.
The force of gravity soon compressed these plasma pockets in on themselves, heating the matter as it was squeezed closer together to such an extent that sound waves traveling at half the speed of light (called baryon acoustic oscillations) rippled outward from the plasma clumps. These ripples pushed away the matter that hadn’t already been drawn into the center of a clump, where it came to rest as a halo around it. At that point, most of the universe’s matter was distributed as a series of thin films surrounding countless cosmic voids, like a nest of soap bubbles in a sink.
Once this matter, primarily hydrogen and helium, had sufficiently cooled, it clotted further to birth the first stars, which, in turn, forged heavier and heavier elements through nuclear fusion.
To map out how the cosmic web was spun, the researchers combined observations taken with the Dark Energy Survey in Chile — which scanned the sky in the near-ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared frequencies from 2013 to 2019 — and the South Pole Telescope, which is located in Antarctica and studies the microwave emissions that make up the cosmic microwave background — the oldest light in the universe.
Though they look at different wavelengths of light, both telescopes use a technique called gravitational lensing to map the clumping of matter. Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive object sits between our telescopes and its source; the more that light coming from a given pocket of space appears warped, the more matter there is in that space. This makes gravitational lensing an excellent tool for tracking both normal matter and its mysterious cousin dark matter, which, despite making up 85% of the universe, doesn’t interact with light except by distorting it with gravity.
With this approach, the researchers used data from both telescopes to pinpoint the location of matter and weed out errors from one telescope’s data set by comparing it to the other’s.
“It functions like a cross-check, so it becomes a much more robust measurement than if you just used one or the other,” co-lead author Chihway Chang (opens in new tab), an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, said in the statement.
The cosmic matter map the researchers produced closely fitted our understanding of how the universe evolved, except for a key discrepancy: It was more evenly distributed and less clumped than the standard model of cosmology would suggest.
Two possibilities exist to explain this discrepancy. The first is that we’re simply looking at the universe too imprecisely, and that the apparent deviation from the model will disappear as we get better tools to peer at the cosmos with. The second, and more significant, possibility is that our cosmological model is missing some seriously big physics. Finding out which one is true will take more cross-surveys and mappings, as well as a deeper understanding of the cosmological constraints that bind the universe’s soap suds.
“There is no known physical explanation for this discrepancy,” the researchers wrote in one of the studies. “Cross-correlations between surveys … will enable significantly more powerful cross-correlation studies that will deliver some of the most precise and accurate cosmological constraints, and that will allow us to continue stress-testing the [standard cosmological] model.”
Scientists Reveal The Most Precise Map of All The Matter in The Universe : ScienceAlert
A gargantuan effort by a huge international team of scientists has just given us the most precise map of the all matter in the Universe obtained to date.
By combining data from two major surveys, the international collaboration has revealed where the Universe does and doesn’t keep all its junk – not just the normal matter that makes up the planets, stars, dust, black holes, galaxies, but the dark matter, too: the mysterious invisible mass generating more gravity than the normal matter can account for.
The resulting map, showing where the matter has congregated over the 13.8-billion-year lifespan of the Universe, will be a valuable reference for scientists looking to understand how the Universe evolved.
Indeed, the results already show that the matter isn’t distributed quite how we thought it was, suggesting there could be something missing from the current standard model of cosmology.
According to the current models, at the point of the Big Bang, all the matter in the Universe was condensed into a singularity: a single point of infinite density and extreme heat that suddenly burst and spewed forth quarks that rapidly combined to form a soup of protons, neutrons and nuclei. Hydrogen and helium atoms came a few hundred thousand years later; from these, the entire Universe was made.
How these early atoms spread out, cooled, clumped together, formed stars and rocks and dust, is detective work based on how the Universe around us appears today. And one of the major clues we’ve used is where all the matter is now – because scientists can then work backwards to figure out how it got there.
But we can’t see all of it. In fact, most of the matter in the Universe – around 75 percent – is completely invisible to our current detection methods.
We’ve only detected it indirectly, because it creates stronger gravitational fields than there should be just based on the amount of normal matter. This manifests in such phenomena as galaxies spinning faster than they should, and a little quirk of the Universe we call gravitational lensing.
When something in the Universe has enough mass – for example, a cluster of thousands of galaxies – the gravitational field around it becomes strong enough to influence the curvature of space-time itself.
That means that any light that travels through that region of space does so along a curved path, resulting in warped and magnified light. These lenses, too, are stronger than they should be if they were only being created by normal matter.
To map the matter in the Universe, researchers compared gravitational lens data collected by two different surveys – the Dark Energy Survey, which collected data in near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths; and the South Pole Telescope, which collects data on the cosmic microwave background, the faint traces of radiation left over from the Big Bang.
By cross-comparing these two datasets taken by two different instruments, the researchers can be much more certain of their results.
“It functions like a cross-check, so it becomes a much more robust measurement than if you just used one or the other,” says astrophysicist Chihway Chang of the University of Chicago, who was the lead author on one of three papers describing the work.
Lead authors on the two other papers are physicist Yuuki Omori of Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and the University of Chicago, and telescope scientist Tim Abbott of NOIRLab’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
The resulting map, based on galaxy positions, lensing of galaxies, and lensing of the cosmic microwave background, can then be extrapolated to infer the matter distribution in the Universe.
This map can then be compared to models and simulations of the evolution of the Universe to see if the observed matter distribution matches theory.
The researchers did run some comparisons, and found that their map mostly matched current models. But not quite. There were some very slight differences between observation and prediction; the matter distribution, the researchers found, is less clumpy, more evenly spaced out than models predict.
This suggests that our cosmological models could use a tweak.
That’s not really a surprise – there are a few mismatches between cosmological observation and theory that seem to suggest we’re missing a trick or two, somewhere; and the team’s findings are consistent with previous work – but the more accurate and complete our data is, the more likely we are to resolve these discrepancies.
There’s more work to be done; the findings aren’t certain, yet. Adding more surveys will help refine the map, and validate (or overturn) the team’s findings.
And, of course, the map itself will help other scientists conduct their own investigations into the mysterious, murky history of the Universe.
The research has been published in Physical Review D. The three papers are available on preprint server arXiv and can be found here, here, and here.
This map shows the latest state of control in Ukraine
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the supply of long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, “vital” in his nightly address Saturday.
“We will do everything we can to ensure that partners open up this vital supply, in particular, of ATACMS and other similar weapons,” Zelensky said. “Because it is necessary to protect life; protection of such cities as Kostyantynivka or, for example, Kharkiv.”
The surface-to-surface missiles can fly around 200 miles, about four times the distance of the rockets used by the HIMARS mobile systems the US began sending to Ukraine four months ago.
Zelensky said an attack on the city of Kostyantynivka in the Donetsk region earlier Saturday left three people dead and 14 others wounded. He called the shelling “a daily occurrence” on Ukraine’s territories and said, “there can be no taboos in the supply of weapons to protect against Russian terror.”
The US has refused to send ATACMS to Ukraine out of concern they could be used to attack targets inside Russia.
New sanctions: Zelensky also mentioned that he put into effect new sanctions on “185 legal entities and individuals that Russia uses to transport personnel and military equipment by railroad.”
“Their assets in Ukraine are blocked, and their existing property will be used for our defense. We will work to ensure that a similar blocking is applied by other countries,” Zelensky said.
Pressure on Olympic Committee: The Ukrainian president wrote a letter to the presidents of the International Sports Federations with a call to reconsider the decision of the International Olympic Committee to allow the return of Russian athletes at international competitions.
Once “Russian athletes appear at international competitions, it is only a matter of time before they start justifying Russia’s aggression and using the symbols of terror,” Zelensky argued.
He called the International Olympic Committee decision “an unprincipled flexibility.”
World’s fattest countries REVEALED in new interactive map
It’s one of the world’s most remote islands, home to picturesque beaches, golden sands and even an underground lake.
Yet the Pacific island of Nauru doesn’t just top the chart for being one of the most luxurious holiday destinations.
For data suggests it’s actually the fattest country in the world.
Almost nine in 10 people on the island, a four-and-a-half hour flight from Brisbane, are overweight.
In contrast, Vietnam holds the accolade for being the skinniest nation.
Just 18.3 per cent of the south-east Asian nation’s population were recorded to be overweight or obese during the most recent global study.
A fascinating interactive map published by Our World in Data — which MailOnline app users can see by clicking here — illustrates the huge divide in obesity rates.
The data comes from a compilation of figures from 195 countries around the globe in 2016.
It showed that over a third — or 39 per cent — of the world’s adults were overweight or obese.
Roughly 64 per cent of Brits and 68 per cent of Americans are also fat, figures show.
The stats come from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, which recorded worldwide trends of 128.9m people between 1975 and 2016.
It looked at data on body mass, specifically the amount of people who were underweight, overweight or obese.
Not one single nation saw a decrease in obesity rates during the time period, the data published by Our World in Data revealed.
All ten of the world’s fattest nations were found in the Pacific, with the island of Palau reporting the second highest share of adults that are overweight or obese, at 85.1 per cent.
This was followed by the Cook Islands, Marshall Islands and Tuvalu who recorded rates of 84.7 per cent, 83.5 per cent and 81.9 per cent, respectively.
Outside of the pacific, Kuwait reported a rate of 73.4 per cent, placing it in eleventh position.
The US was 15th, Australia 25th and Britain 30th in the league table of 195 nations.
The world’s third smallest country Nauru recorded the highest rate of adults who are either obese or overweight at 88.5 per cent. Pictured above, the Buada Lagoon in Nauru
Vietnam recorded the lowest levels worldwide of obesity and adults who are overweight at just 18.3 per cent. Pictured above, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Being overweight is defined as have a body mass index (BMI) measure of equal to or greater than 25, while obesity is recorded as an adult having a BMI of 30 or over.
A healthy person’s BMI — calculated by dividing weight in kg by height in metres, and the answer by the height again — is between 18.5 and 24.9.
Obesity is a risk factor for several of the world’s leading causes of death, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes and various types of cancer.
Type 2 diabetes, which is linked to obesity, can also lead to complications like heart disease, vision loss and kidney problems.
According to The Lancet’s 2017 Global Burden of Disease study, 4.7 million people died prematurely in 2017 as a result of obesity.
In the UK, obesity and illnesses related to it cost the NHS an estimated £6.1billion a year, with it set to rise to over £9.7 billion each year by 2050.
It is also believed to be responsible for more than 30,000 deaths each year in the UK.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that obesity costs the US healthcare system nearly $173billion a year.
According to Our World in Data, globally, 13 per cent of adults aged 18 years and older were recorded to be obese in 2016.
In comparison, alongside Vietnam who recorded the lowest levels of people who were overweight or obese, India reported the second lowest share at 19.7 per cent.
Bangladesh scored third least overweight nation in the world at 20.0 per cent exactly.
In most high-income countries, around two-thirds of adults were overweight or obese.
Halo Devs Use Fan’s Pokémon Map To Fix Game’s Aiming Issues
Halo has a long tradition of community-made maps and game modes that range everywhere from serious to silly. Recently, one map and mode combo that’s more on the playful and fun side of things caught the attention of 343 Industries as an opportunity to fix long-standing shooting issues. Named after a certain Pokémon notorious for digging and jumping out of holes, this community creation is now being used to pinpoint and fix aiming and shot registration woes, as they’ve plagued Halo Infinite since it launched just over a year ago.
Halo Infinite, the latest entry in the long-running and often critically acclaimed first person shooter series, only recently received an update that included a beta version of its in-game map creator: Forge. First premiering in Halo 3, Forge has been a staple of the series ever since 2007, allowing anyone to create a map of their own design with the tools necessary to create custom games for it, be those party and minigames or more traditional takes on the franchise’s well-known modes, like Slayer or Capture the Flag. One such community-created game, that takes its name from the Diglett Pokémon, seems to have caught 343’s eye as an opportunity to test drive fixes to the game’s core mechanics.
Read More: Someone Recreated The Entire Halo 1 Warthog Finale In Halo Infinite
With community Forge maps popping up on a regular basis these days, 343 Industries’ senior community manager John Junyszek put out a tweet asking for the community’s favorite Forge minigames so far. When competitive Halo player Linz shouted out Digletts, a game where players pop out of holes to take sniper shots at one another, Junyszek followed up with an interesting bit of behind-the-scenes trivia:
Kotaku has reached out to 343 Industries for more information.
As many Halo fans have known, while Infinite’s core mechanics are solid and work well, there have been issues around aiming, with many players suspecting that the game seems particularly off when trying to line up precision shots with a sniper rifle, either descoped or while aiming down sights. Whether this is due to the game’s auto-aim function that eases controller aim (and exists on most modern shooters that take controller inputs), bullet magnetism, or the notorious desync issues many players have had with Infinite isn’t totally certain. Since Diglet is a game that only features aiming and shooting, it’s a pretty perfect test environment for studying aiming behavior. Junyszek said that the “minigame has recently helped our team further test and investigate various shot registration situations, especially in regards to latency and networking. Since it’s a curated environment without many variables, it’s helped us investigate specific scenarios.”
Check out the the Diglett game mode in action here:
Who knew RPing as a Diglet armed with a legendary anti-materiel rifle could be so productive?