Tag Archives: Puzzled

Sports

Peng Shuai: IOC member Dick Pound ‘puzzled’ by reaction to tennis player’s video call

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The video call comes after Peng, one of China’s most recognizable sports stars, publicly accused former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of coercing her into sex at his home, according to screenshots of a since-deleted social media post dated November 2.
Following the accusation, Peng disappeared from public view, prompting several fellow tennis players to express worry on social media, using the hashtag #WhereIsPengShuai.

The IOC has not made the video publicly available and did not explain how the call was organized. It instead released an image of the call and a statement saying Peng is “safe and well, living at her home in Beijing, but would like to have her privacy respected at this time.”

Earlier this week, Human Rights Watch China Director Sophie Richardson denounced the IOC’s role in collaborating with Chinese authorities on Peng’s reappearance, while the head of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), Steve Simon, said the IOC’s intervention is insufficient to allay concerns about Peng’s safety.

“I must say I’m really puzzled by that assessment of it,” Pound told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in response to the criticism.

“Basically, lots of people around the world were looking to see what happened to Peng Shuai and nobody was able to establish contact.

“Only the IOC was able to do so, and there was a conversation that was held by video with Thomas Bach, who’s an older Olympian, and two younger female IOC members. Nobody’s released the video because I guess that aspect of it was private.

“They found her in good health and in good spirits and they saw no evidence of confinement or anything like that.”

Pound added that he has not seen a recording of the video call, but is “simply relying on the combined judgment of the three IOC members who were on the call.”

Peng was joined on the call by a Chinese sports official who formerly served as the Communist Party secretary of the Chinese Tennis Administration Center.

Pound also denied that there is any potential conflict of interest between the IOC and the Chinese government with the Beijing Winter Olympics set to begin in February.

“We don’t really have links with the Chinese government,” said Pound.

“We’re pretty careful about compartmentalizing the organization of the Olympics. These are not government Games. These are IOC Games, and there’s an organizing committee that is responsible for that.”

The WTA and the United Nations have called for a full investigation into her allegations of sexual assault.

“The first thing you have to do is figure out what was she trying to accomplish with the post,” Pound said of Peng’s deleted social media post.

“Was it just to tell her story or did she want an investigation and [drop] consequences if she was able to establish the coercion?”

Last weekend, several people connected to Chinese state media and sport system tweeted photos and videos they say show Peng out to dinner on Saturday and at a tennis event for teenagers in Beijing on Sunday.

Throughout the videos Peng says very little but is seen smiling. CNN cannot independently verify the video clips or confirm when they were filmed.

On Tuesday, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the government hoped “malicious speculation” regarding Peng’s well-being and whereabouts would stop, adding that her case should not be politicized.

Chinese authorities have not acknowledged Peng’s allegations against Zhang, and there is no indication an investigation is underway. It remains unclear if Peng has reported her allegations to the police.

Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian reiterated that Peng’s accusation is not a diplomatic issue and declined to comment further. CNN has reached out to China’s State Council Information Office, which handles press inquiries for the central government.

Zhang has kept a low profile and faded from public life since his retirement in 2018, and there is no public information relating to his current whereabouts.

Before retiring as vice premier, Zhang was the head of a Chinese government working group for the Beijing Games. In the role he inspected venues, visited athletes, unveiled official emblems, and held meetings to coordinate preparation work.

Zhang previously met with Bach, the IOC president who held a video call with Peng, on at least one occasion, with the two being photographed together shaking hands in the Chinese capital in 2016.

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Science

Ultrahot, ultrafast explosion called ‘the Camel’ has astronomers puzzled

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In October 2020, astronomers detected an enormous, ancient explosion tearing through a galaxy several billion light-years from Earth. The blast appeared out of nowhere, reached peak brightness within a few days and then rapidly vanished again within a month — indicating that an extreme cosmic event, like the formation of a black hole or neutron star, had just occurred.

Astronomers call sudden, bright blasts like these fast blue optical transients (FBOTs),  named for their extreme “blue” heat and incredibly rapid evolution.

But, if you prefer, you can call this one “the Camel.”

That nickname (a play on the object’s technical name, ZTF20acigmel) may seem unbefitting a blast so fast and powerful, but such is the way of FBOTs. A similar explosion, detected in 2018 roughly 200 million light-years from Earth, earned the unlikely name “the Cow” (the result of a procedurally generated scientific name), while another 2020 FBOT was dubbed “the Koala” (also a play on its technical name).

These three cuddly-wuddly FBOTs are in a class of their own when it comes to stellar explosions. Unlike typical supernovas — the epic blasts that occur when stars run out of fuel and collapse in on themselves — FBOTs seem to appear and disappear in a matter of weeks, rather than years.

But even after their visible light fades, FBOTs continue to be radiation powerhouses. In a paper published Oct. 13 to the preprint database arXiv, astronomers studied the Camel in wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum, to get a glimpse of some of the invisible carnage playing out after the initial blast.

The team found that the initial Camel explosion also shone brightly in radio frequencies, suggesting that the blast was tearing through its cosmic neighborhood extremely quickly — probably a few tenths of the speed of light (more than 100 million mph or 160 million kmh), the researchers wrote. Such bright radio emissions usually come from synchrotron radiation, which occurs when charged particles rocket through a magnetic field at a fraction of light speed.

Behind the blast, a powerful engine seethed for months. The team found that the blast glowed with X-ray emissions long after its visible light faded. As with the Cow, this stream of X-rays suggests that something powerful, like a black hole or a neutron star, was driving the Camel’s intense emissions, the team suggested.

It could be that FBOTs represent a rarely seen moment of cosmic creation — blasts that occur the instant an old star implodes, collapsing into a massive black hole or fast-spinning neutron star before our very eyes.

Astronomers have never seen these processes actually take place (as far as they know), so it’s hard to know for sure what the resulting flood of radiation would look like. But one thing is clear: The Cow, the Koala and the Camel are not your average mammals. There’s nothing average about them.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Science

Surprising Discovery of Dozens of Underground “Lakes” on Mars Leaves Scientists Puzzled

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The bright white region of this image shows the icy cap that covers Mars’ south pole, composed of frozen water and frozen carbon dioxide. ESA’s Mars Express imaged this area of Mars on December 17, 2012, in infrared, green, and blue light, using its High Resolution Stereo Camera. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Bill Dunford

A new paper finds more radar signals suggesting the presence of subsurface ‘lakes,’ but many are in areas too cold for water to remain liquid.

In 2018, scientists working with data from ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) Mars Express orbiter announced a surprising discovery: Signals from a radar instrument reflected off the Red Planet’s south pole appeared to reveal a liquid subsurface lake. Several more such reflections have been announced since then.

In a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, two scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California describe finding dozens of similar radar reflections around the south pole after analyzing a broader set of Mars Express data, but many are in areas that should be too cold for water to remain liquid.

“We’re not certain whether these signals are liquid water or not, but they appear to be much more widespread than what the original paper found,” said Jeffrey Plaut of JPL, co-principal investigator of the orbiter’s MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding) instrument, which was built jointly by the Italian Space Agency and JPL. “Either liquid water is common beneath Mars’ south pole or these signals are indicative of something else.”

ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) Mars Express flies over the Red Planet in this illustration. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory supplied the receiver for the mission’s Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) instrument. Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech

Frozen Time Capsule

The radar signals originally interpreted as liquid water were found in a region of Mars known as the South Polar Layered Deposits, named for the alternating layers of water ice, dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide), and dust that have settled there over millions of years. These layers are believed to provide a record of how the tilt in Mars’ axis has shifted over time, just as changes in Earth’s tilt have created ice ages and warmer periods throughout our planet’s history. When Mars had a lower axial tilt, snowfall and layers of dust accumulated in the region and eventually formed the thick layered ice sheet found there today.

By beaming radio waves at the surface, scientists can peer below these icy layers, mapping them in detail. Radio waves lose energy when they pass through material in the subsurface; as they reflect back to the spacecraft, they usually have a weaker signal. But in some cases, signals returning from this region’s subsurface were brighter than those at the surface. Some scientists have interpreted these signals to imply the presence of liquid water, which strongly reflects radio waves.

Plaut and Aditya Khuller, a doctoral student at Arizona State University who worked on the paper while interning at JPL, aren’t sure what the signals indicate. The areas hypothesized to contain liquid water span about 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 kilometers) in a relatively small region of the Martian south pole. Khuller and Plaut expanded the search for similar strong radio signals to 44,000 measurements spread across 15 years of MARSIS data over the entirety of the Martian south polar region.

The colored dots represent sites where bright radar reflections have been spotted by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter at Mars’ south polar cap. Such reflections were previously interpreted as subsurface liquid water. Their prevalence and proximity to the frigid surface suggests they may be something else. Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech

Unexpected ‘Lakes’

The analysis revealed dozens of additional bright radar reflections over a far greater range of area and depth than ever before. In some places, they were less than a mile from the surface, where temperatures are estimated to be minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 63 degrees Celsius) – so cold that water would be frozen, even if it contained salty minerals known as perchlorates, which can lower the freezing point of water.

Khuller noted a 2019 paper in which researchers calculated the heat needed to melt subsurface ice in this region, finding that only recent volcanism under the surface could explain the potential presence of liquid water under the south pole.

“They found that it would take double the estimated Martian geothermal heat flow to keep this water liquid,” Khuller said. “One possible way to get this amount of heat is through volcanism. However, we haven’t really seen any strong evidence for recent volcanism at the south pole, so it seems unlikely that volcanic activity would allow subsurface liquid water to be present throughout this region.”

What explains the bright reflections if they’re not liquid water? The authors can’t say for sure. But their paper does offer scientists a detailed map of the region that contains clues to the climate history of Mars, including the role of water in its various forms.

“Our mapping gets us a few steps closer to understanding both the extent and the cause of these puzzling radar reflections,” said Plaut.

Reference: “Characteristics of the Basal Interface of the Martian South Polar Layered Deposits” by Aditya R. Khuller and Jeffrey J. Plaut, 16 June 2021, Geophysical Research Letters.
DOI: 10.1029/2021GL093631



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