- ‘The Night Manager’ Revived at BBC, Amazon With Two-Season Pickup Hollywood Reporter
- ‘The Night Manager’ Returns With Supercharged Two-Season Order At BBC & Amazon; Tom Hiddleston Back To Star With Hugh Laurie As EP Deadline
- 8 years after it debuted, Tom Hiddleston’s hit thriller series has been renewed for season 3, before season 2 has even aired Gamesradar
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Tag Archives: Revived
Could Mel Brooks’s ‘Blazing Saddles’ be revived today? The minds behind ‘History of the World, Part II’ weigh in – Yahoo Entertainment
- Could Mel Brooks’s ‘Blazing Saddles’ be revived today? The minds behind ‘History of the World, Part II’ weigh in Yahoo Entertainment
- ‘History of the World, Part II’ Review: Mel Brooks Blazes Back to the Past The Wall Street Journal
- ‘History of the World, Part II’: Ike Barinholtz on Mel Brooks’ Advice and a Potential Part III Hollywood Reporter
- Roush Review: ‘History of the World, Part II’ Is a Rollicking By-the-(Mel)-Brooks Romp TV Insider
- Could Mel Brooks’s ‘Blazing Saddles’ be revived today? The minds behind ‘History of the World, Part II’ weigh in. AOL
- View Full Coverage on Google News
‘King of the Hill’ Revived at Hulu – The Hollywood Reporter
Following years of rumors and speculation, King of the Hill is officially getting the reboot treatment at Hulu.
The Disney-backed streamer has handed out a straight-to-series order for a revival of the former Fox animated series from 20th Television Animation. Creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels are set to return and exec produce alongside showrunner Saladin Patterson (ABC’s The Wonder Years update) and original voice cast members Kathy Najimy, Stephen Root, Pamela Adlon, Johnny Hardwick and Lauren Tom. The reboot, which has been rumored for years, has been in the works since Judge and Daniels reunited with the King of the Hill cast in 2017 at Sketchfest in San Francisco for the 20th anniversary of the beloved comedy.
“We are all so excited to welcome back Hank, Peggy and Bobby, and to see what they have to say about the world we live in and continue the conversations we began years ago,” said Craig Erwich, president, ABC Entertainment, Hulu and Disney Branded Television streaming originals. “This show has all of the perfect ingredients to meet this moment in animation at Hulu, and we’re so thankful to be having those conversations alongside this talented group.”
King of the Hill ran for 13 seasons on Fox, starting in 1997. The series was among the assets included when Fox sold its studio, 20th Television, to Disney a few years ago. With Disney controlling the rights to the series, Hulu became a natural home for the show as the streamer remains a destination for adult-focused animated fare including repeats of King of the Hill and Family Guy. Hulu is also the home of the forthcoming Futurama revival.
Daniels and Judge’s recently launched animation banner Bandera Entertainment is also attached to exec produce the new King of the Hill alongside company president Dustin Davis. Original producers 3 Arts and the company’s Michael Rottenberg and Howard Klein will also exec produce.
In an interview with THR last January, Judge and Daniels said the seeds for what became Bandera were planted around a couple of reunion panels for King of the Hill over the past few years as the duo would often discuss people they’d worked with in the past and the explosion of interest in animation. At the time, Judge and Daniels confirmed the King of the Hill reboot was in the works but were not ready to discuss it publicly.
“Mostly what Bandera is doing is trying to get us in more of a supervisory role; that’s what we’ve been really concentrating on: using our taste and the people we’ve worked with and trying to help other people achieve their visions that we think are cool,” Daniels said at the time. Added Judge: “There’s one show that I might be a co-creator of, but the rest, it’s mentoring other people and getting people together and being a studio in that regard.”
During its run, King of the Hill earned six Emmy nominations (winning one) for outstanding animated program. Adlon, whose FX comedy Better Things wrapped its run last year, also took home Emmy gold for her voice work on the series.
King of the Hill becomes the latest beloved animated comedy to be revived for a new generation as animation continues remain in high demand as repeats perform extremely well on streaming platforms and, in success, can lead to billions in revenue from merchandising. Comedy Central revived Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head with a two-season order (and multiple movies) before the series moved to Paramount+. A revival of Daria in the form of a spinoff revolving around Jodi and voiced by Tracee Ellis Ross is also in the works as a series-turned-movie.
For their part, Judge and Daniels’ Bandera also has a number of animated projects in the works at outlets including Peacock, HBO Max, Netflix and Freeform, with others in various stages of development.
“I’m so lucky to have been a part of this show from the very beginning and couldn’t be more excited to visit Arlen, Texas, once again with Mike, Greg and Saladin, who together are bringing a whole new perspective to the original series. We all want to thank the fans for their overwhelming support because they helped make this happen, and I can’t wait to share this new iteration through the lens of 2023 America. In the words of our beloved Peggy Hill: ‘Ho yeah!’” said Marci Proietto, executive vp at 20th Television Animation.
48,500-year-old zombie virus revived by scientists in Russia : The Tribune India
ANI
Moscow, November 30
French scientists have revived a 48,500-year-old “zombie virus” buried under a frozen lake in Russia.
According to New York Post, the French scientists have sparked fears of yet another pandemic after the revival of the zombie virus.
The New York Post has quoted a viral study which is yet to be peer-reviewed. “The situation would be much more disastrous in the case of plant, animal, or human diseases caused by the revival of an ancient unknown virus,” reads the study.
According to the preliminary report, global warming is irrevocably thawing enormous swathes of permafrost — permanently frozen ground that covers a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere. This has had the unsettling effect of “releasing organic materials frozen for up to a million years” – possibly deadly germs included.
“Part of this organic matter also consists of revived cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that remained dormant since prehistorical times,” the researchers write.
According to the New York Post, scientists have, perhaps strangely, revived some of these so-called “zombie viruses” from the Siberian permafrost in order to investigate the awakening critters.
The oldest, Pandoravirus yedoma, was 48,500-year-old, a record age for a frozen virus returning to a form where it may infect other creatures. This breaks the previous record of a 30,000-year-old virus identified in Siberia by the same scientists in 2013.
The new strain is one of 13 viruses described in the study, each with its own genome, according to Science Alert.
While the Pandoravirus was discovered at the bottom of a lake in Yukechi Alas, Yakutia, Russia, others have been discovered everywhere from mammoth fur to Siberian wolf intestines.
Scientists discovered that all of the “zombie viruses” have the potential to be infectious and hence pose a “health danger” after researching the live cultures. They believe that coivd-style pandemics will become more common in the future as melting permafrost releases long-dormant viruses like a microbial Captain America, as per New York Post.
“It is therefore legitimate to ponder the risk of ancient viral particles remaining infectious and getting back into circulation by the thawing of ancient permafrost layers,” they write.
Unfortunately, it’s a vicious cycle as organic matter released by the thawing ice decomposes into carbon dioxide and methane, further enhancing the greenhouse effect and accelerating the melt.
New York Post reports that the newly-thawed virus might only be the tip of the epidemiological iceberg as there are likely more hibernating viruses yet to be discovered.
More research is needed to assess the level of infectiousness of these unknown viruses when exposed to light, heat, oxygen, and other outside environmental variables.
#Russia
What Could Go Wrong?! 48,500-Year-Old Siberian Virus is Revived
The world’s oldest known frozen and dormant virus has been revived in a French laboratory leading many to express concerns about the dangers of bringing to life ancient microbes. The virus was removed from the Siberian permafrost in Russia’s far east and is 48,500 years old, offering proof that viruses are incredibly hardy and capable of surviving indefinitely when they’re preserved in a frozen state.
Melting Siberian Permafrost in a Virus-Filled Pandora’s Box
This particular virus is actually one of nine different types of viruses that have been resuscitated from Siberian permafrost samples in recent years. That includes seven viruses resuscitated for this new study, and two other approximately 30,000-year-old viruses brought back to life by the same team of researchers from other samples taken in 2013. The youngest of these viruses was frozen 27,000 years ago.
As reported in the non-peer-reviewed journal bioRxiv, the 48,500-year-old virus has been named Pandoravirus yedoma , in reference to Pandora’s box. The virus was found in a sample of permafrost taken from 52 feet (16 m) below the bottom of a lake in Yukechi Alas in the Russian Republic of Yakutia.
The first-ever pandoravirus was one of the two viruses found in 2013, although that one was of a different type altogether. “48,500 years is a world record,” Jean-Michel Claverie, a virologist at Aix-Marseille University in France and the lead author of the permafrost viral study, told the New Scientist .
In addition to its age, the other remarkable feature of this pandoravirus is its size. Classified as a type of giant virus, Pandoravirus yedoma is approximately one micrometer long and .5 micrometers wide. This means they can be examined directly under a microscope. It contains approximately 2,500 genes, in contrast to the miniscule modern viruses that infect humans that possess no more than 10 to 20 genes.
Climate change and the resulting thawing of the permafrost could release a mass of new Siberian viruses into the atmosphere. ( Андрей Михайлов / Adobe Stock)
Climate Change and the Threat of Permafrost Viral Release
Given the disturbing coronavirus pandemic the world has just experienced, it might seem alarming that these scientists are intentionally reviving long-lost viruses previously hidden in the frozen wastelands of Siberia. But they say this research is necessary to evaluate the dangers associated with climate change.
“One quarter of the Northern Hemisphere is underlain by permanently frozen ground, referred to as permafrost,” they wrote in their newly published paper. With the thawing of the permafrost, organic matter which has been frozen for as many as a million years is thawing out. One of the effects of this is the release of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, amplifying the greenhouse effect.
The other is that “part of this organic matter also consists of revived cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that remained dormant since prehistorical times,” explained the authors in bioRxiv. Only by extracting viruses from permafrost samples and reviving them in controlled conditions, the scientists claim, will it be possible to evaluate the nature of the threat they might pose to human health and safety in a warmer, permafrost-free future.
Since permafrost covers more one-fourth of all land territory in the Northern Hemisphere, this is not an idle concern. The viral load currently locked up in permanently frozen ground is undoubtedly massive, and if it were all released over the course of a couple of decades it could conceivably set off an avalanche of new viral infections in a variety of host species.
None of these victims would be immune to the impact of viral agents that had been out of circulation for tens of thousands of years. Immune systems would eventually adjust, but that might happen too late to prevent a catastrophic loss of life that cuts across the microbial-, plant- and animal-life spectrums.
The 48,500-year-old Siberian virus is a pandoravirus, which infects single-cell organisms known as amoebas. (Claverie et. al / bioRxiv)
Immortal Viruses May Be Returning Soon, in Quantities too Astounding to Imagine
Concerns about permafrost melting are not only theoretical. The once-frozen ground has already started to thaw in some areas, and that has allowed scientists to recover frozen and well-preserved specimens of animals that lived during the Paleolithic period.
In recent years the remains of wooly rhinos that went extinct 14,000 years ago have been found, and in one instance scientists recovered a 40,000-year-old wolf’s head that was in almost pristine condition. Wooly mammoth remains have proven especially easy to find in the freshly-thawed soil, so much so that a black-market industry has arisen in which mammoth tusks removed from illicitly unearthed mammoth skeletons are being sold to ivory traders.
What concerns scientists about this development is that potent infectious agents may be hiding dormant inside these well-preserved ancient animal remains. It is notable that the 27,000-year-old virus found in this new study was not removed from the lake bottom sample, but was instead extracted from frozen mammoth excrement taken from a different permafrost core.
Needless to say, ancient viruses released from thawed animal hosts would be more likely to evolve into something threatening to humans than a virus that specifically attacks microbes like amoeba.
Winter landscape and frozen lake in Yakutia, Siberia. ( Tatiana Gasich / Adobe Stock)
The Hidden Danger of Ancient Bacteria and Viruses in the Thawing Permafrost
In their research paper, Professor Claverie and his colleagues emphasized how dangerous ancient bacteria and viruses could be to present-day life forms of all types. Even if frozen in deeper levels of permafrost for millions of years, they could become active again should the permafrost disappear.
In comparison to outbreaks from modern viruses, “the situation would be much more disastrous in the case of plant, animal, or human diseases caused by the revival of an ancient unknown virus,” the French scientists wrote. “As unfortunately well documented by recent (and ongoing) pandemics, each new virus, even related to known families, almost always requires the development of highly specific medical responses, such as new antivirals or vaccines.”
The Arctic regions of the planet are largely free of permanent human settlers. But the researchers point out that more people are visiting the planet’s coldest regions than ever before, mainly to harvest valuable resources like oil, gold and diamonds that are present in abundance in these previously under-explored areas. In strip-mining operations the upper layers of the permafrost are actually torn out intentionally, meaning that viral exposures during such operations may be unavoidable.
“How long these viruses could remain infectious once exposed to outdoor conditions (UV light, oxygen, heat), and how likely they will be to encounter and infect a suitable host in the interval, is yet impossible to estimate,” the scientists concluded. “But the risk is bound to increase in the context of global warming when permafrost thawing will keep accelerating, and more people will be populating the Arctic in the wake of industrial ventures.”
Other scientists have warned of the dangers of viruses being released in the Arctic through the melting of glaciers, which is yet another possible side effect of global warming. This could expose animals and humans to flowing rivers of glacial meltwater that could carry pathogens to new areas further south.
Whether any of these worst-case scenarios come to fruition remains to be seen. But even a small amount of melting, regardless of the cause, could be enough to release some potentially hazardous viral agents into the global environment, where billions of vulnerable people live.
Top image: Colony of microbes, representational image. Source: iarhei / Adobe Stock
By Nathan Falde
Scientists Revived Ancient ‘Zombie Viruses’ Frozen For Eons in Siberia : ScienceAlert
As the world warms up, vast tranches of permafrost are melting, releasing material that’s been trapped in its icy grip for years. This includes a slew of microbes that have lain dormant for hundreds of millennia in some cases.
To study the emerging microbes, scientists have now revived a number of these “zombie viruses” from Siberian permafrost, including one thought to be nearly 50,000 years old – a record age for a frozen virus returning to a state capable of infecting other organisms.
The team behind the work, led by microbiologist Jean-Marie Alempic from the French National Centre for Scientific Research, says these reanimating viruses are potentially a significant threat to public health, and further study needs to be done to assess the danger that these infectious agents could pose as they awake from their icy slumber.
“One quarter of the Northern Hemisphere is underlain by permanently frozen ground, referred to as permafrost,” write the researchers in their paper.
“Due to climate warming, irreversibly thawing permafrost is releasing organic matter frozen for up to a million years, most of which decompose into carbon dioxide and methane, further enhancing the greenhouse effect.”
The 48,500-year-old amoeba virus is actually one of 13 outlined in a new study currently in preprint, with nine of them thought to be tens of thousands of years old. The researchers established that each one was distinct from all other known viruses in terms of their genome.
While the record-breaking virus was found beneath a lake, other extraction locations included mammoth wool and the intestines of a Siberian wolf – all buried beneath permafrost. Using live single-cell amoeba cultures, the team proved that the viruses still had the potential to be infectious pathogens.
We’re also seeing huge numbers of bacteria released into the environment as the world warms up, but given the antibiotics at our disposal it might be argued they would prove less threatening. A novel virus – as with SARS-CoV-2 – could be much more problematic for public health, especially as the Arctic becomes more populated.
“The situation would be much more disastrous in the case of plant, animal, or human diseases caused by the revival of an ancient unknown virus,” write the researchers.
“It is therefore legitimate to ponder the risk of ancient viral particles remaining infectious and getting back into circulation by the thawing of ancient permafrost layers.”
This team has form for diligently digging up viruses in Siberia, with a previous study detailing the discovery of a 30,000-year-old virus. Like the new record holder, that was also a pandoravirus, a giant big enough to be visible using light microscopy.
The revived virus has been given the name Pandoravirus yedoma, which acknowledges its size and the type of permafrost soil that it was found in. The researchers think there are many more viruses to find too, beyond those that only target amoebas.
Many of the viruses that will be released as the ice thaws will be completely unknown to us – although it remains to be seen how infectious these viruses will be once they’re exposed to the light, heat and oxygen of the outdoor environment. These are all areas that could be investigated in future studies.
Virologist Eric Delwart from the University of California, San Francisco, agrees that these giant viruses are just the start when it comes to exploring what lies hidden beneath the permafrost. Though Delwart wasn’t involved in the current study, he has plenty of experience resuscitating ancient plant viruses.
“If the authors are indeed isolating live viruses from ancient permafrost, it is likely that the even smaller, simpler mammalian viruses would also survive frozen for eons,” Delwart told New Scientist.
The research has not yet been peer-reviewed but is available on bioRxiv.
1 in 5 people recall ‘lucid dying’ after being revived by CPR
A clearer picture of life after death — albeit short-lived — is coming into focus
A new study has shown that 20% of people on the brink of death have experienced “lucid dying.” The phenomenon is said to occur in the moments between undergoing cardiac arrest, when they are unconscious or dying, and receiving lifesaving cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
One in five survivors reported feeling separated from their body and observing events without pain or distress — which researchers have differentiated from hallucinations, delusions, dreams or living consciousness.
“These lucid experiences cannot be considered a trick of a disordered or dying brain, but rather a unique human experience that emerges on the brink of death,” said lead researcher Dr. Sam Parnia. His team at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City presented their findings Sunday at a symposium as part of the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions in Chicago.
Parnia said the results indicate evidence that some people have a “unique inner conscious experience, including awareness without distress,” after physical death. These extraordinary experiences, as well as heightened brain activity at time of death, suggests that consciousness may carry on in some capacity after death.
Researchers analyzed data from 567 hospital patients who had gone into cardiac arrest and received CPR between May 2017 and March 2020, in both US and UK hospitals. They furthermore included self-reported testimonies from 126 non-hospital survivors of cardiac arrest.
Patients were also tested for hidden brain activity during this time, revealing spikes up to an hour into CPR, including gamma, delta, theta, alpha and beta waves — the same that may occur in the living while performing high-level thought processes.
Upon death, the brain is known to fire off a series of “disinhibition” signals, that open new pathways to memory and imagination. Scientists don’t understand the evolutionary purpose of this process, but it does raise “intriguing questions about human consciousness, even at death,” said Parnia.
Scientists have only begun to reckon with the notion of consciousness as more than just a side effect of having a functional brain. In a statement, Parnia urged for further study into the specific biomarkers of “clinical” consciousness.
Elon Musk’s Revived Twitter Deal Could Saddle Banks With Big Losses
Banks that agreed to fund
Elon Musk’s
takeover of
Twitter Inc.
TWTR -3.72%
are facing the possibility of big losses now that the billionaire has shifted course and indicated a willingness to follow through with the deal, in the latest sign of trouble for debt markets that are crucial for funding takeovers.
As is typical in leveraged buyouts, the banks planned to unload the debt rather than hold it on their books, but a decline in markets since April means that if they did so now they would be on the hook for losses that could run into the hundreds of millions, according to people familiar with the matter.
Banks are presently looking at an estimated $500 million in losses if they tried to unload all the debt to third-party investors, according to 9fin, a leveraged-finance analytics firm.
Representatives of Mr. Musk and Twitter had been trying to hash out terms of a settlement that would enable the stalled deal to proceed, grappling with issues including whether it would be contingent on Mr. Musk receiving the necessary debt financing, as he is now requesting. On Thursday, a judge put an impending trial over the deal on hold, effectively ending those talks and giving Mr. Musk until Oct. 28 to close the transaction.
The debt package includes $6.5 billion in term loans, a $500 million revolving line of credit, $3 billion in secured bonds and $3 billion in unsecured bonds, according to public disclosures. To pay for the deal, Mr. Musk also needs to come up with roughly $34 billion in equity. To help with that, he received commitment letters in May for over $7 billion in financing from 19 investors including
Oracle Corp.
co-founder and
Tesla Inc.
then-board member
Larry Ellison
and venture firm Sequoia Capital Fund LP.
The Twitter debt would be the latest to hit the market while high-yield credit is effectively unavailable to many borrowers, as buyers of corporate debt are demanding better terms and bargain prices over concerns about an economic slowdown.
That has dealt a significant blow to a business that represents an important source of revenue for Wall Street banks and has already suffered more than $1 billion in collective losses this year.
The biggest chunk of that came last month, when banks including Bank of America,
Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
and
Credit Suisse Group AG
sold debt associated with the $16.5 billion leveraged buyout of Citrix Systems Inc. Banks collectively lost more than $500 million on the purchase, the Journal reported.
Banks had to buy around $6 billion of Citrix’s debt themselves after it became clear that investors’ interest in the total debt package was muted.
“The recent Citrix deal suggests the market would struggle to digest the billions of loans and bonds contemplated by the original Twitter financing plan,” said Steven Hunter, chief executive at 9fin.
People familiar with Twitter’s debt-financing package said the banks built “flex” into the deal, which can help them reduce their losses. It enables them to raise the interest rates on the debt, meaning the company would be on the hook for higher interest costs, to try to attract more investors to buy it.
However, that flex is usually capped, and if investors still aren’t interested in the debt at higher interest rates, banks could eventually have to sell at a discount and absorb losses, or choose to hold the borrowings on their books.
Elon Musk has offered to close his acquisition of Twitter on the terms he originally agreed to.
Photo:
Mike Blake/REUTERS
The leveraged loans and bonds for Twitter are part of $46 billion of debt still waiting to be split up and sold by banks for buyout deals, according to Goldman data. That includes debt associated with deals including the roughly $16 billion purchase of
Nielsen Holdings
PLC, the $7 billion acquisition of automotive-products company
Tenneco
and the $8.6 billion takeover of media company
Tegna Inc.
Private-equity firms rely on leveraged loans and high-yield bonds to help pay for their largest deals. Banks generally parcel out leveraged loans to institutional investors such as mutual funds and collateralized-loan-obligation managers.
When banks can’t sell debt, that usually winds up costing them even if they choose not to sell at a loss. Holding loans and bonds can force them to add more regulatory capital to protect their balance sheets and limit the credit banks are willing to provide to others.
In past downturns, losses from leveraged finance have led to layoffs, and banks took years to rebuild their high-yield departments. Leveraged-loan and high-yield-bond volumes plummeted after the 2008 financial crisis as banks weren’t willing to add on more risk.
Indeed, many of Wall Street’s major banks are expected to trim the ranks of their leveraged-finance groups in the coming months, according to people familiar with the matter.
Still, experts say that banks look much better positioned to weather a downturn now, thanks to postcrisis regulations requiring more capital on balance sheets and better liquidity.
“Overall, the level of risk within the banking system now is just not the same as it was pre-financial crisis,” said Greg Hertrich, head of U.S. depository strategy at Nomura.
Last year was a banner year for private-equity deal making, with some $146 billion of loans issued for buyouts—the most since 2007.
However, continued losses from deals such as Citrix and potentially Twitter may continue to cool bank lending for M&A, as well as for companies that have low credit ratings in general.
“There’s going to be a period of risk aversion as the industry thinks through what are acceptable terms for new deals,” said Richard Ramsden, an analyst at Goldman covering the banking industry. “Until there’s clarity over that, there won’t be many new debt commitments.”
—Cara Lombardo contributed to this article.
Write to Alexander Saeedy at alexander.saeedy@wsj.com, Laura Cooper at laura.cooper@wsj.com and Ben Dummett at ben.dummett@wsj.com
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19th century art form revived to make tactile science graphics for blind people
Enlarge / 3D-printed lithophanes can help optically impaired scientists “see” data, such as from protein separation gels, with their fingertips.
ordan Koone/Bryan Shaw
In the 19th century, an art form known as lithophanes was all the rage in Western Europe. These thin engravings were usually made from translucent materials like porcelain or wax. When backlit, a glowing 3D image would appear that would change its features in response to variations in the light source. Now researchers have revived this art form to create tactile graphics to illustrate scientific data that glow with high resolution. According to a recent paper published in the journal Science Advances, these lithophanes are accessible to sighted and visually impaired people, making them a universal visualization tool for scientific data.
“This research is an example of art making science more accessible and inclusive. Art is rescuing science from itself,” said co-author Bryan Shaw, a biochemist at Baylor. “The data and imagery of science—for example, the stunning images coming out from the new Webb telescope—are inaccessible to people who are blind. We show, however, that thin translucent tactile graphics, called lithophanes, can make all of this imagery accessible to everyone regardless of eyesight. As we like to say, ‘data for all.'”
The word “lithophane” derives from the Greek litho (stone or rock) and phainein (to cause to appear), popularly translated as “light in stone.” The art form’s roots may date back to ancient China, as many as 1,000 years before the Tang Dynasty. (Historical sources describe paper-thin bowls with hidden decorations.) But to date, no actual lithophanes are known to have been in China before 1800.
Exactly who perfected the process of making lithophanes is still debated among historians. The common 19th century process involved etching a 3D design into a thin sheet of translucent wax or porcelain using traditional relief and intaglio printmaking techniques. More light would shine through the parts of the carving where the wax was thinnest.
-
Old Japanese cups, showing lithophanes of ladies
-
3D printed lithophanes of popular imagery created between 1926 and 1977.
NASA/Public domain
These lithophanes were between one-sixteenth of an inch to a quarter-inch thick. They were displayed as plaques, hung in windows or in front of shields with lit candles behind them as a light source. Lithophanes could also serve as night lights, fireplace screens, tea warmers, or ornaments engraved with erotic images. American industrialist Samuel Colt filled his Hartford, Connecticut, home with more than 100 lithophanes and commissioned 111 lithophane versions of a photograph of himself to give to friends and associates.
The technique fell out of favor after the invention of photography, but the advent of 3D printing has revived interest. Today, lithophanes are typically made with plastic, 3D printed from any 2D image that’s been converted to a 3D topograph, according to Shaw and his co-authors, which they did with free online software. Four of those co-authors have been blind since birth or childhood, yet still successfully completed their Ph.Ds. But they are rare examples. Finding a way to create universal tactile science graphics that both blind and sighted individuals can use would remove a longstanding barrier that has kept many visually impaired people out of the sciences.
Unusual ‘revived’ pulsars could detect gravitational waves
Paul M. Sutter (opens in new tab) is an astrophysicist at SUNY (opens in new tab) Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of “Ask a Spaceman (opens in new tab)“ and “Space Radio (opens in new tab),” and author of “How t (opens in new tab)o Die in Space.”
Astronomers hope to use pulsars scattered around the galaxy as a giant gravitational wave detector. But why do we need them, and how do they work?
Gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time, from all sorts of sources constantly slosh throughout the universe. Right now, you are being slightly stretched and squeezed as wave after wave passes through you. Those waves come from merging black holes, the explosions of giant stars and even the earliest moments of the Big Bang.
On Earth, we’ve developed incredibly sensitive gravitational wave detectors that have been able to sense brief-but-loud events, such as black hole mergers, which last only a few seconds but generate such enormous signals that we can detect them. (“Enormous” is a relative term here; the distortion resulting from the passing wave is less than the width of an atomic nucleus.)
Related: The first telescope of its kind will hunt for sources of gravitational waves
But ground-based detectors have a much harder time finding low-frequency gravitational waves, since those take weeks, months or even years to pass through Earth. Those kinds of low-frequency waves come from mergers of giant black holes, which take a lot longer to merge than their smaller cousins do. Our detectors simply don’t have the sensitivity to measure those small differences over such long time spans. For that, we need a much, much larger detector.
So, instead of using instruments on the ground, we can use distant pulsars to help us measure gravitational waves. This is the idea behind so-called pulsar timing arrays.
Powering up the pulsars
Pulsars are already fantastic objects, and that’s especially true for the kinds of pulsars used as gravitational wave detectors.
Pulsars are the leftover cores of giant stars and are among the most exotic objects ever known to inhabit the cosmos. They are ultradense balls made almost purely of neutrons, with some electrons and protons thrown in for good measure. Those spinning charges power up incredibly strong magnetic fields — in some cases, the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe.
Those intense magnetic fields also whip up strong electric fields. Together, they power beams of radiation (if you’re getting Death Star vibes here, you’re not far off) that blast out from the magnetic poles in each direction. Those magnetic poles don’t always line up with the rotational axis of the pulsar, in much the same way Earth’s North and South magnetic poles don’t line up with our planet’s rotational axis.
This forces the beams of radiation to sweep out circles in the sky. When those beams cross over Earth, we see them as periodic flashes of radio emission, putting the “pulse” in “pulsar.”
Related: Gravitational waves play with fast spinning stars, study suggests
Pulsars are incredibly regular. They are so heavy, and spin so quickly, that we can use their flashes as extremely precise clocks. But most pulsars are susceptible to random starquakes (when the star’s contents shift around, disturbing the pulsar’s rotation), glitches and slowdowns that change their regularity. That means most pulsars aren’t good for studying gravitational waves.
So instead, timing arrays rely on a subset of pulsars known as millisecond pulsars, which, as the name suggests, have rotational periods of a few milliseconds. Astronomers think millisecond pulsars are “revived” pulsars, spun up to incredible speeds after infalling material from a companion star accelerates them like a grown-up pushing a kid on a schoolyard merry-go-round.
Because of their ludicrous speed, millisecond pulsars can maintain fantastic precision over very long timescales. For example, one pulsar, PSR B1937+21, has a rotational period of 1.5578064688197945 +/- 0.0000000000000004 seconds. That’s the same level of precision as our best atomic clocks.
And those millisecond pulsars are perfect gravitational wave detectors.
Timing the array
Here’s how it works. First, astronomers observe the rotational periods of as many millisecond pulsars as possible. If a gravitational wave passes over Earth, over a pulsar or even between us, then as it passes, it will change the distance between Earth and the pulsar. As the wave moves, the pulsar will appear slightly closer, then slightly farther, then slightly closer, and so on until the wave has moved on.
That change in distance will appear to us as changes in the rotational period. One flash from the pulsar may arrive a bit too soon; then another may arrive a little too late. For a typical gravitational wave, the shift in the timings is incredibly tiny — a change of just 10 or 20 nanoseconds every few months. But the measurements of the millisecond pulsars are sensitive enough that those changes can be detected — at least in principle.
The “array” part of “pulsar timing array” comes from studying many pulsars at once and looking for correlated movements: If a gravitational wave passes over one region of space, then all the timings from the pulsars in that direction will shift in unison.
Many collaborations across the world have used radio telescopes to study pulsar timing arrays for decades. So far, they’ve had limited success, finding shifts in timings from various pulsars but no hints of correlations. But every year, the techniques get better, and the hope is that soon, these arrays will unlock a huge part of the gravitational wave universe.
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