- Ryan Reynolds Confirms 6 Chilling Facts About Deadpool 3 Villain Cassandra Nova The Direct
- ‘Deadpool and Wolverine’ Doesn’t Require Prior MCU Knowledge Because ‘I’m Definitely Not Looking to Do Homework When I Go to the Movies,’ Says Shawn Levy Variety
- Deadpool & Wolverine’s Newest Power Reveal Makes Logan Even Sadder Screen Rant
- ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ is (almost) ready to shake up the Marvel Cinematic Universe The Associated Press
- Deadpool Fans Spot 7 Secret Marvel Characters in Deadpool and Wolverine Trailer Men’s Journal
Tag Archives: Nova
Huawei launches new Nova smartphones without giving details on chip – Better Life
- Huawei launches new Nova smartphones without giving details on chip Better Life
- Huawei’s Kirin 9000SL Is A Downgraded Version Of The Kirin 9000S With The Same GPU, But Different CPU Cluster Wccftech
- Huawei Nova 12 Pro And Ultra Boast Dual Front Cameras And Variable Aperture Rear Camera | SPARROWS NEWS Sparrows News
- Huawei nova 12 Pro and Ultra will have 50 MP main camera with variable aperture – GSMArena.com news GSMArena.com
- Huawei nova 12 unveiled with a 6.7″ 120Hz screen and 60MP selfie camera, nova 12 Lite tags along – GSMArena.com news GSMArena.com
Hamas terrorist chases and kills women near Nova music festival during October 7 attacks – The Telegraph
- Hamas terrorist chases and kills women near Nova music festival during October 7 attacks The Telegraph
- Watch: CCTV shows Hamas gunman executing festival-goer at point-blank range Yahoo News
- ‘Begged For Life But…’: Chilling Video Of Hamas Militant Chasing Israeli Woman | Watch Hindustan Times
- New video from Israels Oct 7 music fest shows Hamas terrorist killing woman point-blank as she begs for life Firstpost
- Watch: Shocking camera footage from October 7; Hamas gunman seen executing a woman from point-blank range Times of India
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Allison Holthoff dies after waiting in Nova Scotia ER
A Canadian mom of three died in agony at a Nova Scotia hospital after waiting for medical help in the emergency room for nearly seven hours on New Year’s Eve — and now her widowed husband is demanding answers.
Gunther Holthoff told reporters earlier this week that his 37-year-old wife, Allison, woke up on Dec. 31 complaining of what she thought was an upset stomach.
He said Allison had fallen off a horse back in September and had been suffering from pain ever since, according to reporting by CTV News.
Throughout the day, her condition deteriorated, and after taking a bath, the woman ended up writhing in pain on the floor.
Holthoff drove Allison to the Cumberland Regional Health Care Centre in Amherst, arriving there shortly after 11 a.m. and carrying her into the building on his back because she was unable to walk.
The husband then got a wheelchair and wheeled his wife into the emergency room. He said she was struggling to sit up because of the excruciating pain.
“I did tell the triage nurse and the lady behind the desk that it was getting worse,” he said. “She wasn’t doing good and was in pain.”
Hospital staff took samples of Allison’s blood and urine, which her husband said proved difficult because she was in so much pain by then.
Allison was instructed to sit in the waiting room, but her condition worsened to the point that she had to lie on the floor in a fetal position.
As they waited for a doctor to see Allison, security guards brought some blankets to cover her and a cup of water.
It was then that Holthoff said his wife started telling him she thought she was dying.
“She said, ‘I think I’m dying. Don’t let me die here,’” he said Monday.
At 3 p.m., the Holthoffs were finally led into an exam room, where more blood samples were taken from the patient.
Holthoff said he went to the nursing desk five times, telling staffers his wife was feeling worse. He said one of the nurses asked him if Allison was “always like this.”
Allison’s eyes then started rolling back in her head, prompting the nurse to inquire of her husband if the married mom was on drugs, to which he said, “No.”
Holthoff said Allison continued saying she felt like she was dying.
Around 6 p.m. — nearly seven hours after the Holthoffs first arrived at the hospital — Allison began screaming in pain and begging for help.
Another nurse came in to check her vitals and found that her pulse was elevated and her blood pressure low.
“Everything happened quickly after that, everyone started picking up the pace,” the husband said. “That was the first time I actually felt like someone was paying attention to us.”
At last, Allison was seen by a doctor for the first time that afternoon, given IV fluids and painkillers. She then had an EKG done and was taken to an X-ray room.
Holthoff briefly stepped away, and when he returned, he said, he found his wife screaming, “I can’t breathe. I’m in pain. Don’t move me.”
Allison’s eyes rolled back in their sockets again and a “code blue” was called, alerting medics that a patient was experiencing a cardiac arrest.
According to Holthoff, Allison was resuscitated three times, but a decision was made not to operate on her because the odds of her surviving a surgery were determined to be minimal given her condition.
Holthoff said a doctor revealed to him that a CT scan showed bleeding inside his wife’s body, but its source could not be pinpointed.
“They had a 1 percent chance of keeping her alive with surgery, but at that point, there was not much chance of her ever having a normal or dignified life,” Holthoff said.
After the husband and his three children said their final goodbyes to Allison, she was officially pronounced dead around 11:30 p.m. — some 12 hours after she first set foot inside the emergency room.
More than a week later, Holthoff said he still does not know the cause of his wife’s death because her autopsy report has not been released, according to the news outlet CBC.ca.
“Unfortunately, I do feel like she was neglected and it was to a point where they couldn’t ignore us anymore,” the bereaved husband told reporters.
In the wake of the tragedy, the woman’s family and several Nova Scotia politicians have called on the province’s government to explain why the patient’s medical care was delayed for hours.
The Department of Health and Wellness said Monday that Nova Scotia Health Authority has launched an investigation to determine what happened in Allison’s case.
“We need change, the system is obviously broken. Or if it’s not broken yet, it’s not too far off,” Holthoff said. “Something needs to improve. I don’t want anybody else to go through this.”
Weird Star Produces the Fastest Nova on Record
This illustration shows an intermediate polar system, a type of two-star system that the research team thinks V1674 Hercules belongs to. A flow of gas from the large companion star impacts an accretion disk before flowing along magnetic field lines onto the white dwarf. Credit: Illustration by Mark Garlick
Most people are familiar with supernovas, the spectacular stellar explosions that occur at the end of a massive star’s life and often result in a
Now, astronomers are buzzing after observing the fastest nova ever recorded. The unusual event drew scientists’ attention to an even more unusual star. As they study it, they may find answers to not only the nova’s many baffling traits, but to larger questions about the chemistry of our solar system, the death of stars and the evolution of the universe.
The research team, led by Arizona State University Regents Professor Sumner Starrfield, Professor Charles Woodward from the University of Minnesota and Research Scientist Mark Wagner from The Ohio State University, co-authored a report published today (June 14, 2022) in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.
A nova is a sudden explosion of bright light from a two-star system. Every nova is created by a white dwarf — the very dense leftover core of a star — and a nearby companion star. Over time, the white dwarf draws matter from its companion, which falls onto the white dwarf. The white dwarf heats this material, causing an uncontrolled reaction that releases a burst of energy. The explosion shoots the matter away at high speeds, which we observe as visible light.
The bright nova usually fades over a couple of weeks or longer. On June 12, 2021, the nova V1674 Hercules burst so bright that it was visible to the naked eye — but in just over one day, it was faint once more. It was like someone flicked a flashlight on and off.
Nova events at this level of speed are rare, making this nova a precious study subject.
“It was only about one day, and the previous fastest nova was one we studied back in 1991, V838 Herculis, which declined in about two or three days,” says Starrfield, an astrophysicist in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.
As the astronomy world watched V1674 Hercules, other researchers found that its speed wasn’t its only unusual trait. The light and energy it sends out is also pulsing like the sound of a reverberating bell.
Every 501 seconds, there’s a wobble that observers can see in both visible light waves and X-rays. A year after its explosion, the nova is still showing this wobble, and it seems it’s been going on for even longer. Starrfield and his colleagues have continued to study this quirk.
“The most unusual thing is that this oscillation was seen before the outburst, but it was also evident when the nova was some 10 magnitudes brighter,” says Wagner, who is also the head of science at the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory being used to observe the nova. “A mystery that people are trying to wrestle with is what’s driving this periodicity that you would see it over that range of brightness in the system.”
The team also noticed something strange as they monitored the matter ejected by the nova explosion — some kind of wind, which may be dependent on the positions of the white dwarf and its companion star, is shaping the flow of material into space surrounding the system.
Though the fastest nova is (literally) flashy, the reason it’s worth further study is that novae can tell us important information about our solar system and even the universe as a whole.
A white dwarf collects and alters matter, then seasons the surrounding space with new material during a nova explosion. It’s an important part of the cycle of matter in space. The materials ejected by novae will eventually form new stellar systems. Such events helped form our solar system as well, ensuring that Earth is more than a lump of carbon.
“We’re always trying to figure out how the solar system formed, where the chemical elements in the solar system came from,” Starrfield says. “One of the things that we’re going to learn from this nova is, for example, how much lithium was produced by this explosion. We’re fairly sure now that a significant fraction of the lithium that we have on the Earth was produced by these kinds of explosions.”
Sometimes a white dwarf star doesn’t lose all of its collected matter during a nova explosion, so with each cycle, it gains mass. This would eventually make it unstable, and the white dwarf could generate a type 1a supernova, which is one of the brightest events in the universe. Each type 1a supernova reaches the same level of brightness, so they are known as standard candles.
“Standard candles are so bright that we can see them at great distances across the universe. By looking at how the brightness of light changes, we can ask questions about how the universe is accelerating or about the overall three-dimensional structure of the universe,” Woodward says. “This is one of the interesting reasons that we study some of these systems.”
Additionally, novae can tell us more about how stars in binary systems evolve to their death, a process that is not well understood. They also act as living laboratories where scientists can see nuclear physics in action and test theoretical concepts.
The nova took the astronomy world by surprise. It wasn’t on scientists’ radar until an amateur astronomer from Japan, Seidji Ueda, discovered and reported it.
Citizen scientists play an increasingly important role in the field of astronomy, as does modern technology. Even though it is now too faint for other types of telescopes to see, the team is still able to monitor the nova thanks to the Large Binocular Telescope’s wide aperture and its observatory’s other equipment, including its pair of multi-object double spectrographs and exceptional PEPSI high resolution spectrograph.
They plan to investigate the cause of the outburst and the processes that led to it, the reason for its record-breaking decline, the forces behind the observed wind, and the cause of its pulsing brightness.
Reference: 14 June 2022, Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.
DOI: 10.3847/2515-5172/ac779d
Fastest nova ever recorded burns out in just one day
The fastest nova star explosion ever seen has been recorded by astronomers.
They watched as a white dwarf star ‘stole’ gas from a nearby red giant and triggered a blast bright enough to be witnessed from Earth with binoculars.
Named V1674 Hercules, the nova explosion occurred 100 light-years away on June 12 last year but lasted for just a day — up to three times quicker than any previously observed.
A nova is a sudden explosion of bright light from a two-star system. Every nova is created by a white dwarf – the very dense leftover core of a star – and a nearby companion star.
Experts from Arizona State University hope their observation will help answer larger questions about the chemistry of our solar system, the death of stars and the evolution of the universe.
The fastest nova star explosion ever seen has been recorded by astronomers. This illustration shows the type of two-star system that the research team thinks V1674 Hercules belongs to
Material shot into space at speeds of millions of miles an hour — which was visible from Earth for just over 24 hours before fizzling out.
Lead author Professor Sumner Starrfield, of Arizona State University, said: ‘It was like someone flicked a flashlight on and off.’
Novas differ from supernovas. They occur in binary systems where there is a small, incredibly dense star and a much bigger sun-like companion.
Over time, the former draws matter from the latter, which falls onto the white dwarf.
The white dwarf then heats this material, causing an uncontrolled reaction that releases a burst of energy and shoots the matter away at high speeds, which we observe as visible light.
The bright nova usually fades over a couple of weeks or longer but V1674 Hercules was over in a day.
Professor Starrfield said: ‘It was only about one day, and the previous fastest nova was one we studied back in 1991, V838 Herculis, which declined in about two or three days.’
Nova events at this level of speed are rare, making this nova a precious study subject.
Its speed wasn’t its only unusual trait — the light and energy sent out also pulses like the sound of a reverberating bell.
Every 501 seconds, there is a wobble detectable in visible light waves and X-rays. It is still there a year on — and is set to continue for even longer.
Mark Wagner, head of science at the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory on Mount Graham, southern Arizona, said: ‘The most unusual thing is this oscillation was seen before the outburst.
‘But it was also evident when the nova was some 10 magnitudes brighter. A mystery that people are trying to wrestle with is what’s driving this periodicity that you would see it over that range of brightness in the system.’
The US team also noticed a strange wind as they monitored the matter ejected by the nova, which they think may be dependent on the positions of the white dwarf and its companion star.
They appear to be shaping the flow of material into space surrounding the system which lay in the constellation of Hercules.
It is very conveniently placed, being in a dark sky in the east as twilight fades after sunset.
As this places it less than 17° north of the celestial equator, it could be seen from all over the world — and be photographed with an exposure of just a few seconds.
Novae can tell us important information about our solar system and even the universe as a whole.
About 30 to 60 are thought to occur each year in the Milky Way, although only about 10 are discovered during that time. Most are obscured by interstellar dust.
A white dwarf collects and alters matter, then seasons the surrounding space with new material when it goes nova.
It is an important part of the cycle of matter in space as the materials ejected by novae will eventually form new stellar systems.
Such events helped form our solar system as well, ensuring that Earth is more than a lump of carbon.
White dwarfs are the incredibly dense remains of sun-sized stars after they exhaust their nuclear fuel, shrunk down to roughly the size of Earth (artist’s impression)
Professor Starrfield said: ‘We are always trying to figure out how the solar system formed, where the chemical elements in the solar system came from.
‘One of the things we are going to learn from this nova is, for example, how much lithium was produced by this explosion.
‘We are fairly sure now that a significant fraction of the lithium that we have on the Earth was produced by these kinds of explosions.’
Sometimes a white dwarf star doesn’t lose all of its collected matter during a nova explosion, so with each cycle, it gains mass.
This would eventually make it unstable, and the white dwarf could generate a type 1a supernova, which is one of the brightest events in the universe.
Each type 1a supernova reaches the same level of brightness, so they are known as standard candles.
Co-author Professor Charles Woodward, of the University of Minnesota, said: ‘Standard candles are so bright we can see them at great distances across the universe.
‘By looking at how the brightness of light changes, we can ask questions about how the universe is accelerating or about the overall three-dimensional structure of the universe. This is one of the interesting reasons that we study some of these systems.’
Additionally, novae can tell us more about how stars in binary systems evolve to their death, a process that is not well understood.
They also act as living laboratories where scientists can see nuclear physics in action and test theoretical concepts.
The observed nova is now too faint for other types of telescopes to see, but it can still be monitored by the Large Binocular Telescope thanks to its wide aperture and state of the art scanners.
Professor Starrfield and colleagues now plan to investigate the cause, the processes that led to it, the reason for its record-breaking decline, the forces behind the observed wind, and the pulsing brightness.
The observation was published in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.
Biden Invokes Emergency Power in Bid to Resolve Solar Import Dispute
President Biden used emergency authority Monday in a bid to resolve a supply logjam that threatened the solar power industry, but the action drew complaints from U.S. manufacturers who say it will impede their efforts to build domestic production.
The four Southeast Asian countries account for roughly 80% of U.S. solar panel imports. The Commerce investigation had led importers to halt shipments, putting in jeopardy more than half of the 27 gigawatts of new solar-power capacity developers had been expected to install this year, according to the energy consulting firm Rystad Energy.
The White House acted as part of a larger package intended to resolve a conflict pitting solar power developers and utilities that rely on cheap imported components against manufacturers who want to reshore solar parts manufacturing to the U.S.
Mr. Biden invoked the Defense Production Act among other measures to help U.S. suppliers compete with Asian rivals and spur more U.S. manufacturing long-term.
The developers and utilities who import solar panels cheered the decision as a way to avoid a slowdown in new installations. But advocates for U.S. manufacturers said it undermines efforts to help U.S. companies catch up to Chinese rivals that dominate the industry.
“President Biden is significantly interfering in Commerce’s quasi-judicial process,” said Mamun Rashid, chief executive of California-based Auxin Solar Inc., a small maker of solar panels whose complaint triggered the Commerce investigation.
“By taking this unprecedented—and potentially illegal—action, he has opened the door wide for Chinese-funded special interests to defeat the fair application of U.S. trade law,” Mr. Rashid said in a statement.
A solar panel in production at the San Jose, Calif., factory of Auxin Solar.
Photo:
Ian Bates for Wall Street Journal
Some trade lawyers and analysts question whether Mr. Biden has overstepped authority meant for use in wartime.
“It is highly problematic that the Administration is apparently declaring a war or similar national emergency as the basis for negating a continuing trade law investigation on solar,” said
Timothy Brightbill,
a trade lawyer at Wiley Rein LLP. “This emergency authority is used extremely rarely and it’s a dangerous precedent to use it to negate a continuing trade investigation.”
Mr. Biden cited disruptions in global energy markets caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—along with extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change—as justification for his emergency declaration.
When asked about challenges to the decision’s legality, a senior administration official said the president is acting under his emergency authority under the Tariff Act of 1930 to waive import duties. The changes will not interfere in the Commerce investigation, the official said.
Administration officials said the plan creates a bridge period to keep developers supplied for now while U.S. panel-makers build up their limited capacity.
“The Federal Government is working with the private sector to promote the expansion of domestic solar manufacturing capacity, including our capacity to manufacture modules and other inputs in the solar supply chain, but building that capacity will take time,” Mr. Biden said in his declaration.
Solar developers and installers, who vastly outnumber manufacturers in the U.S. and have lobbied for protection, said the decisions could jump-start projects that have been delayed.
Executives at SOLV Energy LLC, the biggest installer of large-scale solar farms in the U.S., are now reconsidering decisions on nearly a dozen projects that were halted or delayed by fallout from the Commerce probe and would have eliminated or postponed thousands of new jobs, said George Hershman, the company’s chief executive.
“We’re starting to work with our customers and determine which projects we can restart and how quickly we can restart them,” he said.
Companies that build or support solar projects such as
Sunrun Inc.,
SunPower Corp.
and
Enphase Energy Inc.
all posted gains Monday, with
Sunnova Energy International Inc.
NOVA 6.45%
leading the group, up nearly 6.5%.
Shares of
NextEra Energy Inc.,
a utility and one of the world’s largest renewables companies, added almost 2%. Monday’s advance pares some of the sector’s recent losses.
“A big part of the tariff uncertainty and a lot of the other supply chain disruption just creates uncertainty,” said
Rebecca Kujawa,
president and CEO of NextEra Energy Resources, the company’s competitive power business. “To remove this as a point of concern, at least for a period of time, is going to be hugely helpful.”
But
First Solar Inc.,
a U.S. manufacturer based in Tempe, Az. said the administration’s actions “only benefits China’s state-subsidized solar industry.”
“The use of the Defense Production Act to boost solar manufacturing is an ineffective use of taxpayer dollars and falls well short of a durable solar industrial policy,” the company said in a statement. “Quite simply, the administration cannot stick a Band-Aid on the issue and hope that it goes away.”
First Solar manufactures solar panels using a different technology that is not affected by industry tariffs.
Washington has been central in the solar dispute in part because Mr. Biden has promised that addressing climate change with support for clean energy would grow working-class jobs in solar, wind, battery and other manufacturing businesses. In recent months a fight over tariffs has illustrated how those goals can clash rather than complement one another.
The White House has tried to help build up a U.S. supply chain by maintaining Trump-era solar tariffs on China and Taiwan. Utilities and developers—fearful the reach of those tariffs was expanding to other Asian partners—warned that threat was causing what could become a drastic slowdown in solar growth.
In Monday’s declaration, Mr. Biden accepted those industry claims that a slowdown was caused in part by import bottlenecks, and that ultimately it was threatening the reliability of the country’s electricity supply.
“The United States has been unable to import solar modules in sufficient quantities to ensure solar capacity additions necessary to achieve our climate and clean energy goals, ensure electricity grid resource adequacy, and help combat rising energy prices,” Mr. Biden said in the declaration.
Abigail Ross Hopper,
president and chief executive officer of the Solar Energy Industries Association, applauded the decision.
“While the Department of Commerce investigation will continue as required by statute, and we remain confident that a review of the facts will result in a negative determination, the president’s action is a much-needed reprieve from this industry-crushing probe,” she said in a statement.
—Anthony DeBarros and Katherine Blunt contributed to this article.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Onyx Boox Nova Air C review: color E Ink on an ambitious tablet
Some people use camomile tea, others use breathing exercises, but, for me, the most reliable tactic for getting to sleep quickly is to avoid screens before bed. Yet, actually doing so requires some creativity if I want to keep up with news online. My current system involves saving articles to the read-later app Instapaper, which sends a daily digest to my Kindle each evening. But it’s a hacky approach where articles often aren’t formatted properly and sometimes don’t appear at all.
I could switch to a Kobo, which offers native integration with rival read-later app Pocket, but the Onyx Boox Nova Air C offers a much more tantalizing alternative. Unlike either a Kindle or Kobo, its E Ink display is capable of showing colors, and it’s running a modified version of Android that allows you to download and run a variety of apps that go far beyond reading ebooks. It opens the door to numerous read-later apps as well as full-on word processors and third-party note-taking software. It even includes a stylus for handwritten notes.
At $420, it’s pricey compared to Amazon’s Kindles, which often cost well under the $200 mark. But that price gets you something closer to a full-on Android tablet than an e-reader. It’s just a shame that the total package doesn’t fully deliver on the promise.
The Onyx Boox Nova Air C is an unassuming device, with big bezels around its 7.8-inch screen and a generally plastic-feeling construction. Its power button is on the top left, while a USB-C port is on the bottom alongside a pair of downward-firing speakers. They’re roughly as bad as I expected them to be, but it’s better than nothing. (Amazon’s Kindles haven’t included them for years.) Internally, the Nova Air C is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.
The main attraction here is the color E Ink display. The Nova Air C is equipped with E Ink’s Kaleido Plus screen, which uses a color filter layer on top of a more typical E Ink panel to offer 4,096 colors. The approach comes with some obvious drawbacks. For starters, the screen can’t display color content with the same resolution as black and white, so while the display reaches 1404 x 1872 in black and white (300ppi), it’s limited to a paltry 468 x 624 (100ppi) when showing color. And even then, the colors are far more muted than what you’d get from even a cheap LCD panel, whose range of colors can be counted in the millions — not the thousands. My former colleague Sam Byford described the colors on the similar Kaleido-equipped PocketBook Color as like “a newspaper that’s faded over a few days,” which felt like a very apt description of the Nova Air C.
And yet, even basic color is better than no color at all. The Nova Air C’s colors might look washed out and low resolution, but the essence of the image remains — unlike on a Kindle, where color imagery just looks broken. I’d almost liken using the Kaleido screen to watching a foreign movie with subtitles; you miss out on a lot of the subtlety, but you can still fundamentally understand what you’re looking at.
I briefly tried watching video on the Nova Air C’s screen via YouTube, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Content looks incredibly juddery thanks to the screen’s low refresh rate, colors look washed out, and there’s a huge amount of ghosting. You can see what’s going on in a pinch, but I’d rather watch video on literally any other screen.
Despite the color, the tablet retains the benefits of an E Ink display. I had no issue reading the Nova Air C in bright sunlight, and, with a small boost to its screen illumination feature, I was also able to read it in low light before bed with no eye strain. Battery life is also as impressive as any other e-reader. I’ve been using the tablet on and off for the better part of two months, and its battery level is still sitting at 55 percent.
That said, part of the reason for this impressive life is likely to be the Nova Air C’s aggressive power management settings, which, by default, see the tablet fully shut down if you don’t use it for just 15 minutes. This can mean waiting around 27 seconds for the tablet to boot up every time you want to use it. I’d suggest adjusting the “Power-off timeout” in settings to one or even two days, which will allow the laptop to wake in a couple of seconds when you want to use it. But be prepared to sacrifice a little battery life for this increase in responsiveness.
The highlight of the Onyx Boox Nova Air C is its built-in note-taking app. Handwriting notes feels great with the included stylus, with pen strokes appearing on the screen near-instantaneously and 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity that offer a lot of versatility. There are a variety of different brush styles and colors, and the software can attempt to transcribe your handwriting into typed text and even emoji.
This character recognition worked okay in limited cases but struggled with lengthy passages. Once written, it’s easy to export notes to a PDF or PNG file by simply scanning a QR code with your smartphone or sharing them to another app on the tablet. It all makes the Nova Air C a great device for taking notes by hand.
But trying to use the tablet like a traditional e-reader is more complicated, and you’ll have to jump through more hoops than on competing devices like the Kindle. Although the Nova Air C technically comes with a built-in “Store,” in practice it seemed to be filled mainly with public domain works, and I couldn’t find any of the modern books I was hoping to read.
That leaves you with a couple of other options. You can download ebooks from elsewhere on the internet and then transfer them to the tablet, and it supports a good range of filetypes, including PDF, ePub, TXT, RTF, and MOBI. But, when I actually purchased an ePUB from eBooks.com and tried to load it onto the Nova Air C, I discovered that it doesn’t support the Adobe DRM the store uses. (The only DRM the e-reader supports is the Chinese-focused JD DRM.)
Thankfully, Onyx is using a heavily modified version of Android 11 as software on the Nova Air C, which means you’re not limited to using its built-in software. You can download and install most apps from the Play Store as though you were using any other Android tablet, including, crucially, Amazon’s Kindle app. Getting Google Play Services set up on the device is a bit of a weird process that requires you to hop through a couple of strange hoops. But, once I was set up, it was relatively easy to benefit from my preexisting Kindle library. While I was there, I downloaded a couple of other Android apps: Instapaper for reading all the web articles I bookmark for reading later throughout the course of my day; Obsidian for note-taking; and Comixology for reading comics.
This is what I was hoping would be the Nova Air C’s superpower: the ability to download and install whatever Android apps I wanted.
Take note-taking. The Nova Air 2 comes with a decent note-taking app that works very well with the stylus. But it works less well for typed notes, which you might want to do if you have a Bluetooth keyboard to pair with the tablet.
So, instead, I downloaded the note-taking app Obsidian. It worked well, allowing me to type up notes far faster than I could ever handwrite them. And, unlike when using a laptop or my phone, I could happily do so late at night without having to look at a bright screen. You could use whatever word processing or note-taking software takes your fancy — so long as it has an Android app. It’s also possible to download alternative stylus-compatible apps, but my experience was a bit hit and miss. OneNote worked well, but INKredible felt laggy with Onyx’s stylus.
I was also able to get Instapaper up and running with minimal hassle. I had full access to all my saved articles ready for me to read without having to go through the clunky sync process that Instapaper’s Kindle integration requires. Comixology worked okay for reading comics, but the screen was just slightly too low in resolution and small for it to feel like I was getting the most of the experience.
But, very quickly, I started encountering issues with these apps that had obviously never been designed with E Ink screens in mind. You control apps on the Nova Air C with a combination of taps and swipes, same as you would on any other Android tablet. But its E Ink screen is so much less responsive than the 60Hz LCD or OLED panels found in most other Android devices that it’s hard to “feel” your way around each app. You can’t half-swipe to check what a full swipe might do; you have to fully commit and hope you got it right.
Things feel a lot better when you start using physical buttons to control the tablet, which is made possible via Onyx’s magnetic Nova Air case. This not only adds a protective cover to the tablet but also includes a pair of physical volume buttons, which many reading-focused Android apps will let you remap into page-turning controls. If you’re going to pick up a Nova Air C, I’d strongly recommend getting this case for it. It’s sold separately from the tablet for $59.99, which feels expensive given how necessary it is.
I had very high hopes for the Onyx Boox Nova Air C. I wanted it to be able to do it all: read books; read online articles; and act as a repository for all my notes — all in a form factor that I could happily use late at night without eye strain.
And, yes, it can absolutely do all of these things. But the more I asked of the tablet, the more I could feel its E Ink screen creaking under the pressure. E Ink panels are more than responsive enough for reading books using software designed specifically with them in mind. But throw in an app designed for a 60Hz touchscreen, and it can be a struggle to use. And packing in this much functionality means that the Nova Air C struggles to match a simple Kindle when it comes to simply being able to flip it open and immediately start reading. You have to choose the app, and possibly even the book, first.
I wanted a lot from the Nova Air C, and at $450, I think it’s reasonable to expect it. Amazon’s Kindles cost roughly half of what Onyx is asking, and you can even get an alternative e-reader with a color screen from PocketBook for $234. Or, if your priorities are less about having an E Ink screen and more about having the functionality of a tablet, you could get an iPad Mini with an 8.3-inch screen for $499 or a base level iPad with a 10.2-inch screen for $329. None of these devices will tick all the boxes. But, then again, neither does the Nova Air C.
Photography by Jon Porter / The Verge
Astronomers Witness The X-Ray ‘Fireball’ of a Stellar Nova For The First Time
The brief, yet colossal eruption of a dead star undergoing a nova explosion has been captured by one of the most powerful X-ray instruments in space.
The joint German-Russian eROSITA telescope, aboard the Spektr-RG space observatory in the L2 Lagrange point (yes, Webb’s home), caught for the first time what is known as the ‘fireball’ phase of a classical nova. This X-ray data has finally confirmed via observation a 1990 prediction about the physics of novae.
The nova in question is known as YZ Reticuli, discovered on 15 July 2020, at a distance of around 8,250 light-years, near the southern constellation of Reticulum. Analysis revealed that this transient brightening was likely the result of what we call a classical nova – an eruption from a white dwarf star.
Here’s how it works. A white dwarf star is what we think of as a “dead” star – the collapsed core of a star that was up to around 8 times the mass of the Sun after it reached the end of its atomic fusion (main sequence) lifespan, and ejected its outer material. Other objects of this kind include neutron stars (between 8 and 30 solar masses) and black holes (anything bigger than that).
White dwarfs are small and dense: between the size of Earth and the Moon, roughly, and up to as massive as 1.4 Suns. That mass limit is known as the Chandrasekhar limit: if a white dwarf exceeds that limit, it becomes so unstable that it blows up in a spectacular supernova.
White dwarfs can also – frequently – be in binary systems with larger (albeit less massive) stars. If they’re in a close-enough mutual orbit, the white dwarf can siphon material from its binary companion.
That material is primarily hydrogen; it accumulates on the white dwarf’s surface, where it heats up. Eventually, the mass becomes so great that pressure and temperature at the bottom of the hydrogen layer are sufficient to ignite atomic fusion on the white dwarf’s surface; this triggers a thermonuclear explosion, violently expelling the excess material into space. Hello, nova.
During its second all-sky survey from June to December 2020, eROSITA repeatedly swept the region of sky containing the white dwarf. On its first 22 passes, everything looked just normal, hunky-as-dory could be. On the 23rd pass, however, beginning on 7 July 2020, an extremely bright, soft X-ray source appeared at what was later to be identified as YZ Reticuli – only to disappear again at the next pass, meaning the entire flash couldn’t have lasted more than eight hours.
This was 11 hours prior to the optical brightening of the source. This, astronomers say, was entirely consistent with theoretical modeling of the ‘fireball’ phase of a nova. (Previous observations of a nova fireball were taken in optical wavelengths, and concern the expanding ejecta as the star erupts – a different stage of the nova entirely.)
According to a prediction advanced in 1990, a very brief ‘fireball’ phase should take place between the runaway fusion that triggers the explosion and the brightening of the star in optical wavelengths. This phase should appear as a soft, short, and bright flash of X-radiation before the star brightens in optical wavelengths.
This, according to theory, happens because the expanding material reaches the white dwarf’s photosphere, or ‘surface’. For a brief period of time, the outward acceleration of that material matches the inward acceleration due to the star’s gravity, causing the white dwarf to heat up and shine with maximum luminosity, known as Eddington luminosity.
As the explosion continues to expand, it cools down, causing the light emitted to shift from the more energetic X-ray wavelengths into the optical. That’s usually when we see a nova brighten.
The results have allowed the team to make a few key measurements of the white dwarf in question. These include the precise timing of the thermonuclear reaction, and the temperature evolution of the white dwarf during the entire duration of the nova event. Theoretical work also suggests that the duration of the fireball phase corresponds to the mass of the white dwarf. Using this information, the team derived a mass of 0.98 times the mass of the Sun.
The observation, the team said, was a very lucky one. Over its four-year mission, eROSITA is expected to detect just one or two such fireballs, given the rate of novas in our galaxy.
“With the successful detection of the flash of YZ Reticuli by eROSITA, the existence of X-ray flashes has now been observationally confirmed,” the researchers write in their paper.
“Our detection also adds the missing piece to measure the total nova energetics and completes the whole picture of the photospheric evolution of the thermonuclear runaway.”
The research has been published in Nature.
This One Tiny Animal Has Found a Way to Give Up Sex Completely, And Still Do Fine
Let’s face it. Sex isn’t always worth the effort. For many animals, the whole mating game is so inconvenient, going it alone and reproducing asexually is the best option.
As appealing as it might sound, however, evolution puts a heavy price on a population that gives up sex for too long. Sooner or later, a eukaryotic species will either need to swap chromosomes in a DNA shake-up that increases genetic variation, or risk fading into extinction.
That’s the rule, at least – but the beetle mite (Oppiella nova) is having none of it.
By comparing its genome with that of its sexually active cousin, O. subpectinata, a team of researchers from across Europe has found that this micrometer-sized arthropod has been doing quite all right living a chaste lifestyle for… millions of years.
Like us, these tiny mites have a copy for every chromosome making up their genome, which makes them a diploid organism.
Swapping chromosomes and subjecting them to a bit of mix-and-match every now and then helps give a population a diverse choice in genetic combinations, meaning when catastrophe strikes – be it a plague, a temperature change, or introduction of a new predator – there’s bound to be at least a few individuals that will cope.
Strip away all the bells and whistles, and that’s sex all summed up. Unfortunately, those bells and whistles (searching out mates, competing with them, producing all that sperm, the whole pregnancy thing) impose a toll on maximizing genetic diversity.
There are other ways to maintain a degree of variation that don’t rely on sexual reproduction. These processes cause mutations to build up differently in types of the same gene (or allele), creating a unique signature among the genes of asexual organisms.
Known as the Meselson effect, named after Harvard geneticist Matthew Meselson, this mutation pattern could in theory be used to identify a diploid organism as a bona fide, long-term asexual species.
The only problem is none of the evidence for this effect has been clear-cut, leaving too much room for doubt. Some ancient lineages of species thought to be asexual have since been found to have only recent converts, or – scandalous as it is to suggest – have peppered their genes with the occasional licentious tryst over the eons.
What researchers needed was a strong, unambiguous signal of variation in genes in an animal suspected of having given up sex long, long ago, and never looked back.
Which brings us back to O. nova – a little mite with sublineages that went their separate ways between 6 and 16 million years ago, suggesting it’s a species that’s been around for quite a while.
More importantly, it’s a species known to be asexual, in contrast with others on its branch of the family tree, making it a prime specimen to study for evidence of the Meselson effect.
As one might imagine of an animal that could form a conga-line inside a single millimeter, the task of collecting them and analyzing their DNA wasn’t exactly easy.
“These mites are only one-fifth of a millimeter in size and difficult to identify,” says reproductive biologist Jens Bast from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.
The team even required specialized computer programs to decipher the genomes, but it was all worth it in the end.
“Our results clearly show that O. nova reproduces exclusively asexually,” says Bast.
“When it comes to understanding how evolution works without sex, these beetle mites could still provide a surprise or two.”
This isn’t to say asexual reproduction isn’t without its problems. The beetle mite appears to be an exception to an otherwise fairly consistent rule in biology.
But the discovery of an animal that’s managed to leave sex millions of years in the past does demonstrate it’s possible to thrive without it.
This research was published in PNAS.