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Aaron Carter REAL Cause of Death: Singer Did Not Drown But Suffered This Instead?

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Aaron Carter’s family does not believe he got drowned in the bathtub where he was found dead.

Months after Carter was found dead inside his Los Angeles home, his cause of death remains deferred as the authorities continue to look into the case. While waiting for new information, his loved ones broke their silence and insisted that they believe the singer did not die from drowning.

Carter’s fiancée, Melanie Martin, and his mother, Jane Carter, recently shared new information about the “I’m All About You” singer’s condition after he was found.

They told a news outlet that the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office informed them they found no water in his lungs. It rules out drowning as a possible cause of death.

Both Melanie and Jane added that they are still waiting for the toxicology results that would determine what was in the singer’s body and system at the time of his death and whether it contributed to his passing. In addition, the family wants the police to investigate the alleged drug deal that happened the night before his death.

Carter was found in his bathtub by his house helper on Nov. 5 when she tried to check on him and ask him if he wanted coffee. However, she found him in that condition, prompting him to call the authorities.

The Los Angeles Police Department and investigators responded to the scene. Upon seeing his body, police suspected he had been submerged in the bathtub for a long time because of the water’s color and his skin’s condition.

They, however, clarified that no foul play was involved despite receiving the report as a suspicious death.

The authorities collected multiple cans of compressed air in his bathroom and bedroom. Prescription pills were also retrieved from the scene.

Aaron Carter’s Death Was NOT Intentional

Melanie and Jane’s statement emerged after the family dismissed the claims that he had been planning to take his own life for a long time.

Rather than that, Carter was reportedly preparing for holidays as he wanted to spend time with Melanie and their son. He reportedly contacted his family counselor and social worker so he could make himself a better parent.

READ ALSO: Why Did Noel Gallagher, Sara MacDonald Split? Reported Reason That Triggered Divorce Revealed

There was also a rumor claiming Carter died by suicide.

One said, “CW: death, suicide. Just saw that Aaron Carter was found dead this morning, and it looks like it was probably suicide. He was openly bisexual, and the same age as I am now, and a big part of my childhood culture. It’s sad and strange, and I hope he and his family find peace.”

The same claim has since been dismissed.

READ MORE: Jeremy Renner Says He Misses THIS Amid Recovery Following Snowplow Accident

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Science

Stunning Image of Supernova Remnant Processed by New Australian Supercomputer

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Within 24 hours of accessing the first stage of Australia’s newest supercomputing system, researchers have processed a series of radio telescope observations, including a highly detailed image of a supernova remnant.

 

The very high data rates and the enormous data volumes from new-generation radio telescopes such as ASKAP (Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder) need highly capable software running on supercomputers.

This is where the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre comes into play, with a newly launched supercomputer called Setonix – named after Western Australia’s favorite animal, the quokka (Setonix brachyurus).

ASKAP, which consists of 36 dish antennas that work together as one telescope, is operated by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO; the observational data it gathers are transferred via high-speed optical fibers to the Pawsey Centre for processing and converting into science-ready images.

In a major milestone on the path to full deployment, we have now demonstrated the integration of our processing software ASKAPsoft on Setonix, complete with stunning visuals.

Traces of a dying star

An exciting outcome of this exercise has been a fantastic image of a cosmic object known as a supernova remnant, G261.9+5.5.

Estimated to be more than a million years old, and located 10,000-15,000 light-years away from us, this object in our galaxy was first classified as a supernova remnant by CSIRO radio astronomer Eric R. Hill in 1967, using observations from CSIRO’s Parkes Radio Telescope, Murriyang.

Supernova remnants (SNRs) are the remains of powerful explosions from dying stars. The ejected material from the explosion plows outwards into the surrounding interstellar medium at supersonic speeds, sweeping up gas and any material it encounters along the way, compressing and heating them up in the process.

The galactic supernova remnant G261.9+5.5. (Wasim Raja/CSIRO; Pascal Elah/Pawsey)

Additionally, the shockwave would also compress the interstellar magnetic fields. The emissions we see in our radio image of G261.9+5.5 are from highly energetic electrons trapped in these compressed fields. They bear information about the history of the exploded star and aspects of the surrounding interstellar medium.

The structure of this remnant revealed in the deep ASKAP radio image opens up the possibility of studying this remnant and the physical properties (such as magnetic fields and high-energy electron densities) of the interstellar medium in unprecedented detail.

 

Putting a supercomputer through its paces

The image of SNR G261.9+05.5 might be beautiful to look at, but the processing of data from ASKAP’s astronomy surveys is also a great way to stress-test the supercomputer system, including the hardware and the processing software.

We included the supernova remnant’s dataset for our initial tests because its complex features would increase the processing challenges.

Data processing even with a supercomputer is a complex exercise, with different processing modes triggering various potential issues. For example, the image of the SNR was made by combining data gathered at hundreds of different frequencies (or colors, if you like), allowing us to get a composite view of the object.

But there is a treasure trove of information hidden in the individual frequencies as well. Extracting that information often requires making images at each frequency, requiring more computing resources and more digital space to store.

While Setonix has adequate resources for such intense processing, a key challenge would be to establish the stability of the supercomputer when lashed with such enormous amounts of data day in and day out.

 

Key to this quick first demonstration was the close collaboration between the Pawsey Centre and the ASKAP science data processing team members. Our teamwork enabled all of us to better understand these challenges and quickly find solutions.

These results mean we will be able to unearth more from the ASKAP data, for example.

More to come

But this is only the first of two installation stages for Setonix, with the second expected to be completed later this year.

This will allow data teams to process more of the vast amounts of data coming in from many projects in a fraction of the time. In turn, it will not only enable researchers to better understand our Universe but will undoubtedly uncover new objects hidden in the radio sky. The variety of scientific questions that Setonix will allow us to explore in shorter time frames opens up so many possibilities.

This increase in computational capacity benefits not just ASKAP, but all Australia-based researchers in all fields of science and engineering that can access Setonix.

While the supercomputer is ramping up to full operations, so is ASKAP, which is currently wrapping up a series of pilot surveys and will soon undertake even larger and deeper surveys of the sky.

The supernova remnant is just one of many features we’ve now revealed, and we can expect many more stunning images, and the discovery of many new celestial objects, to come soon.

Wasim Raja, Research scientist, CSIRO and Pascal Jahan Elahi, Supercomputing applications specialist, Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, CSIRO.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

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Science

Earth Just Had Its Shortest Day on Record, Thanks to a ‘Wobble’

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The Earth had its shortest ever day this summer, thanks to a wobble in its axis which meant it completed a single spin in a fraction of a second less than 24 hours.

June 29 was 1.59 milliseconds shorter than 86,400 seconds, or exactly 24 hours, according to the website timeanddate.com.

 

In recent decades the Earth has been more likely to slow down, giving marginally longer days. But in the last few years, that tendency reversed, and the days have been getting shorter and shorter.

If the Earth continues to speed up, this could lead to the first-ever requirement to subtract a second from atomic clocks.

The Earth is not perfect

It’s not uncommon for the Earth to wobble – the spinning which we experience as night and day does not always happen exactly in line with its axis, the line between the North and South Poles.

That’s because it is not a precise sphere.

The planet has a bulge at the equator, while the poles are slightly squashed, meaning Earth is slightly elliptical.  

Other factors can mess with the spinning too, including ocean tides and gravity from the Moon.

The “Chandler wobble”

Leonid Zotov, a professor of mathematics, believes that the Earth may be spinning faster because of a periodic movement called the “Chandler wobble”. 

The wobble was first spotted in the late 1880s, when astronomer Seth Carlo Chandler noticed the poles wobbled over a period of 14 months.

 

This wobble started to slow down in early 2000s, reaching historic minimums since 2017, per The Telegraph. 

And between 2017 to 2020, “it disappeared”, Zotov told timeanddate.com.

Zotov is due to present this hypothesis at the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society, per timeanddate.com. It has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Earth wobbles don’t change much in day-to-day life. But they are important to keep track of, so the atomic clock can remain accurate to precisely coordinate GPS and Earth-observing satellites.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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Science

The Length of a Day Oscillates Every 6 Years, And We May Finally Know Why

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How we think about our planet’s center may need to be seriously updated.

New evidence suggests that, instead of consistently rotating faster than Earth’s spin, the solid inner core oscillates – spinning first in one direction with respect to the surface far above, then the other, changing direction every six years.

 

This not only has implications for our understanding of the inner workings of our home world, it can also neatly explain a mystery that has perplexed scientists for some time: an oscillating variation in the length of Earth’s day, with a period of 5.8 years.

“From our findings, we can see the Earth’s surface shifts compared to its inner core, as people have asserted for 20 years,” said geophysicist John E. Vidale of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

“However, our latest observations show that the inner core spun slightly slower from 1969-71 and then moved the other direction from 1971-74. We also note that the length of a day grew and shrank as would be predicted. The coincidence of those two observations makes oscillation the likely interpretation.”

Although our understanding of Earth’s core has developed a lot in recent decades, there’s still a lot we don’t know. We can’t just go there and take a gander at it; everything we know, we’ve gleaned from indirect observations, such as seismic waves propagating and bouncing through the entire planet.

 

But this is still a very effective tool. Scientists have been able to ascertain that Earth’s inner core is probably a hot, dense ball of solid iron, measuring roughly 2,440 kilometers (1,516 miles) across, a little bigger than the size of Pluto. Evidence also suggests that it demonstrates superrotation, rotating faster than Earth itself.

Researchers first detailed this phenomenon in 1996, with an estimated superrotation rate of 1 degree per year. Vidale and his colleague, Wei Wang, also of UCLA, later revised the rate down to 0.29 degrees per year, using data from underground nuclear tests conducted at the Russian Novaya Zemlya testing site in the 1970s.

In the new research, they went back in time, adding two tests conducted below Amchitka Island in 1971 and 1969. And that revealed something odd. The data suggested that, rather than superrotating, Earth’s inner core was subrotating – that is, spinning more slowly than Earth’s rotation, by about 0.1 degrees per year.

A diagram illustrating Vidale and Wang’s model. (Edward Sotelo/USC)

This, the researchers said, was consistent with oscillation. When in the full swing of its spin, the inner core superrotates, but then it slows down before speeding up again.

“The idea the inner core oscillates was a model that was out there, but the community has been split on whether it was viable,” Vidale said.

 

“We went into this expecting to see the same rotation direction and rate in the earlier pair of atomic tests, but instead we saw the opposite. We were quite surprised to find that it was moving in the other direction.”

The six-year periodicity of the oscillation neatly matches other oscillations for which we don’t have a confirmed explanation.

Earth’s days undergo time variations of plus or minus 0.2 seconds every six years or so, too, and Earth’s magnetic field also oscillates with a six-year period. In amplitude and phase, they match the periodicity of the model Vidale and Wang derived for the oscillations of Earth’s inner core.

This all means will require more data to unravel, which could be tricky. The facility that recorded the data from the nuclear tests, the US Air Force’s Large Aperture Seismic Array, closed in 1978, and underground nuclear testing is nowhere near as prolific as it used to be.

But further advances in sensor technology could mean that the detailed data needed to probe Earth’s inner core isn’t so far into the future; the results so far offer a tantalizing hint that Earth’s insides are a bit more complex than we knew.

“The inner core is not fixed – it’s moving under our feet, and it seems to [be] going back and forth a couple of kilometers every six years,” Vidale said.

“One of the questions we tried to answer is, does the inner core progressively move, or is it mostly locked compared to everything else in the long term? We’re trying to understand how the inner core formed and how it moves over time – this is an important step in better understanding this process.”

The research has been published in Science Advances.

 

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Science

Earth’s Magnetic Poles Probably Won’t Flip After All, Scientists Predict

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Our planet’s protective shell isn’t quite what it used to be. Over the past two centuries its magnetic strength has taken a nosedive, and nobody has the foggiest idea why. 

At the same time, a concerning soft-spot in the field called the South Atlantic Anomaly has blistered over the Atlantic ocean, and has already proven problematic for delicate circuitry on orbital satellites.

 

Both of these troubling observations fuel concerns that we might be seeing signs of an imminent reconfiguration that would turn the compass points all topsy-turvy in what’s known as a magnetic pole reversal.

But researchers behind a new investigation modelling the planet’s magnetic field in the recent past warn that we shouldn’t be too hasty in assuming that’s going to happen.

“Based on similarities with the recreated anomalies, we predict that the South Atlantic Anomaly will probably disappear within the next 300 years, and that Earth is not heading towards a polarity reversal,” says geologist Andreas Nilsson from Lund University in Sweden.

Not any time soon, at least. So for now we can breathe easy.

Still, if our geological history is anything to go by, it’s likely the flowing lines of our planetary magnetic field will eventually point the other way around.

What such a reversal would mean for humanity isn’t clear. The last time such a monumental event occurred, a mere 42,000 years ago, life on Earth seemed to go through a rough period as a rain of high-speed charged particles ripped through our atmosphere.

 

Whether we humans noticed – perhaps responding by spending a bit more time sheltering – is a matter of speculation.

However, given today’s reliance on electronic technology that could be vulnerable without the protection of a magnetic umbrella, even the most rapid of field reversals in the foreseeable future would leave us exposed.

So geologists are keen to know which wiggles, wobbles, and wanderings in the field herald catastrophe, and which imply business as usual.

Much of what we know of the magnetic field’s history comes from the way its orientation forces particles in molten materials to line up before being locked in place as they solidify. Digging through layers of mineralized arrows provides a fairly clear record of which way the compass pointed throughout the millennia.

Similarly, pottery artifacts from archaeological sites can also provide a snapshot of the field in more recent times, capturing its direction in clay before firing.

In the new study, researchers from Lund University and Oregon State University reconstructed a detailed timeline of our planet’s magnetic shell stretching back towards the last ice age, by analyzing samples of volcanic rocks, sediments, and artifacts from around the world.

 

“We have mapped changes in the Earth’s magnetic field over the past 9,000 years, and anomalies like the one in the South Atlantic are probably recurring phenomena linked to corresponding variations in the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field,” says Nilsson.

With thousands of years of perspective, it quickly becomes clear the South Atlantic soft-spot isn’t completely out of the ordinary. Starting around 1600 BCE, a similar geological change took place, lasting some 1,300 years before evening out once more.

Assuming the same basic mechanics are at work, it’s likely the current patch of weakening will soon regain strength and fade away without ending in global reconfiguration. It’s even likely the magnetic field as a whole will bounce back to a vigor we haven’t seen since the early 19th century.

This isn’t proof against a reversal occurring soon, however – just new evidence suggesting we shouldn’t interpret present anomalies of diminishing strength as strong signs of a polar flip.

In some ways, that’s good news. But it leaves us in the dark on exactly what such a massive geological process will look like in the scale of a human lifetime.

Having detailed records like this one goes a long way towards building a clearer picture, so maybe if the worst happens, we’ll be prepared for it.

This research was published in PNAS.

 

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Science

Here’s Why Hibernation in Space May Not Be Possible For Humans After All

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Sending humans virtually anywhere in space beyond the Moon pushes logistics of health, food, and psychology to limits we’re only just beginning to grasp.  

A staple solution to these problems in science fiction is to simply put the void-travelers to bed for a while. In a sleep-like state akin to hibernation or torpor, metabolism drops, and the mind is spared the boredom of waiting out endless empty hours.

 

Unlike faster-than-light travel and wormholes, the premise of putting astronauts into a form of hibernation feels like it’s within grasp. Enough so that even the European Space Agency is seriously looking into the science behind it.

Implications of a new study by a trio of researchers from Chile now reveal a mathematical hurdle to turning the potential of long-term human stasis into reality, one that might mean it’s as forever beyond our reach.

Roberto F. Nespolo and Carlos Mejias from the Millennium Institute for Integrative Biology and Francisco Bozinovic from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile set out to unravel the relationship between body mass and energy expenditure in animals that hibernate.

They discovered a minimum level of metabolism that allows cells to persist under cold, low-oxygen conditions. For relatively heavy animals like us, the energy savings we might expect from entering a deep, hibernation-like state would be negligible.

In fact, we’d probably be better off just napping our days away the old-fashioned way.

The word hibernation often invokes images of a bear tucked away in a den for a long winter’s rest.

 

While bears do shut down for several long, cold months, their dormancy isn’t quite like the true hibernation among smaller critters like ground squirrels and bats.

In these animals, body temperature plummets, metabolism shrinks, and heart rate and breathing slow. This process can reduce energy expenditure by as much as 98 percent in some cases, removing the need to waste effort hunting or foraging.

However, even in this state, the animal can still lose more than a quarter of its body weight as it burns through its fuel reserves.

If we applied the same basic mathematics to a hibernating adult human, a daily food intake of around 12,000 kilojoules would be replaced by a need for just a couple hundred kilojoules of body fat.

Keeping with this scenario, we might imagine our intrepid space tourist tucked up in their specially-kitted bed would lose just over six grams of fat a day. Over a year, this would add up to around two kilograms of weight.

This might be fine for a rapid journey to the Jovian moons, but if the average adult wants to survive decades floating through interstellar space to a nearby star, they’d need to pack on an additional few hundred kilograms of fat. That, or routinely wake to throw back a lard milkshake or three.

 

These back-of-the-envelope calculations rely on many assumptions, not least of which is how hibernation might scale. After all, there’s probably a good reason behind the scarcity of massive hibernating mammals our size (or larger).

So the researchers carried out a statistical analysis across a variety of hibernating species, as detailed in previous studies.

From this, they concluded the daily energy expenditure of hibernating animals scales in a fairly balanced way, so a gram of tissue from a tiny mammal, like the 25-gram leaf-eared bat, consumes as much energy as a gram of tissue from an 820-gram hibernating ground squirrel.

We could assume that if we ever worked out how to hibernate as efficiently as a dormouse, every gram of our tissue would require the same energy as every gram of theirs. 

It’s a different story when mammals are active, however. The scaling of the relationship between active metabolism and mass produces a slightly different graph that reveals a point at which hibernating doesn’t really save a great deal of energy for bigger beasts.

That point is near our own mass, implying our total energy needs while hibernating aren’t going to be significantly different from those while we’re merely at rest.

 

This could be why bears don’t really hibernate in the same way smaller animals do. And it also means for us humans, going to all the risk and trouble of cooling our bodies, dropping our heart rate and breathing, and artificially depressing our metabolism just might not give us the results we’d hope for.

If we want to save our boredom and keep from munching through the ship’s supply of freeze-dried ice cream, we might as well binge The Expanse, take a bunch of sedatives, and doze our way to Mars.

Forcing humans to hibernate just isn’t going to be worth the hassle.

This research was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

 

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Science

New Theory Suggests That Dark Matter Could Be an Extra-Dimensional Cosmic Refugee

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Dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for the majority of the mass in the Universe, may be made up of massive particles called gravitons that first popped into existence in the first moment after the Big Bang.

 

And these hypothetical particles might be cosmic refugees from extra dimensions, a new theory suggests. 

The researchers’ calculations hint that these particles could have been created in just the right quantities to explain dark matter, which can only be “seen” through its gravitational pull on ordinary matter.

“Massive gravitons are produced by collisions of ordinary particles in the early Universe.

This process was believed to be too rare for the massive gravitons to be dark matter candidates,” study co-author Giacomo Cacciapaglia, a physicist at the University of Lyon in France, told Live Science.

But in a new study published in February in the journal Physical Review Letters, Cacciapaglia, along with Korea University physicists Haiying Cai and Seung J. Lee, found that enough of these gravitons would have been made in the early Universe to account for all of the dark matter we currently detect in the Universe.

The gravitons, if they exist, would have a mass of less than 1 megaelectronvolt (MeV), so no more than twice the mass of an electron, the study found.

This mass level is well below the scale at which the Higgs boson generates mass for ordinary matter – which is key for the model to produce enough of them to account for all the dark matter in the Universe. (For comparison, the lightest known particle, the neutrino, weighs less than 2 electronvolts, while a proton weighs roughly 940 MeV, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.)

 

The team found these hypothetical gravitons while hunting for evidence of extra dimensions, which some physicists suspect exist alongside the observed three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension, time.

In the team’s theory, when gravity propagates through extra dimensions, it materializes in our Universe as massive gravitons. 

But these particles would interact only weakly with ordinary matter, and only via the force of gravity.

This description is eerily similar to what we know about dark matter, which does not interact with light yet has a gravitational influence felt everywhere in the Universe. This gravitational influence, for instance, is what prevents galaxies from flying apart.

“The main advantage of massive gravitons as dark matter particles is that they only interact gravitationally, hence they can escape attempts to detect their presence,” Cacciapaglia said.

In contrast, other proposed dark matter candidates – such as weakly interacting massive particles, axions, and neutrinos – might also be felt by their very subtle interactions with other forces and fields.

The fact that massive gravitons barely interact via gravity with the other particles and forces in the Universe offers another advantage.

 

“Due to their very weak interactions, they decay so slowly that they remain stable over the lifetime of the Universe,” Cacciapaglia said, “For the same reason, they are slowly produced during the expansion of the Universe and accumulate there until today.”

In the past, physicists thought gravitons were unlikely dark matter candidates because the processes that create them are extremely rare. As a result, gravitons would be created at much lower rates than other particles.

But the team found that in the picosecond (trillionth of a second) after the Big Bang, more of these gravitons would have been created than past theories suggested.

This enhancement was enough for massive gravitons to completely explain the amount of dark matter we detect in the Universe, the study found. 

“The enhancement did come as a shock,” Cacciapaglia said. “We had to perform many checks to make sure that the result was correct, as it results in a paradigm shift in the way we consider massive gravitons as potential dark matter candidates.”

Because massive gravitons form below the energy scale of the Higgs boson, they are freed from uncertainties related to higher energy scales, which current particle physics doesn’t describe very well.

 

The team’s theory connects physics studied at particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider with the physics of gravity.

This means that powerful particle accelerators like the Future Circular Collider at CERN, which should begin operating in 2035, could hunt for evidence of these potential dark matter particles.

“Probably the best shot we have is at future high-precision particle colliders,” Cacciapaglia said. “This is something we are currently investigating.”

This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.

 

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Technology

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D gets benchmarked ahead of embargo lift (updated)

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While this is not a comprehensive review, it provides a preliminary look ahead of the official testing, including comparisons to rival CPUs.

XanxoGaming obtained a sample of the 5800X3D CPU over two weeks before its official release (April 20th). As it turns out, this CPU is rather easy to obtain in Peru, despite the fact that AMD has banned XanxoGaming and they are not even supplied a sample through official means.

The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a new 8-core CPU based on Zen3 architecture and unique 3D V-Cache technology, which adds a 64MB layer of L3 cache directly on top of the computing chiplet. With such a huge cache, gaming performance is supposed to improve by 15% on average (at least officially), although it shouldn’t show substantial differences in synthetic testing like the ones presented by XanxoGaming.

In most single and multi-core tests, the forthcoming CPU performs as well as a Ryzen 7 5700X. This should be due to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D’s decreased clock rates compared to the earlier Ryzen 7 5800X. For Blender, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D outperforms the 5800X by a slight margin. However, neither Cinebench R23 nor CPU-Z or Geekbench 5 results are very noteworthy. This isn’t surprising, given AMD has said that the 3D V-Cache doesn’t provide much speed to most apps. In regular software, the slower clocks seem weird, but XanxoGaming says they think a better UEFI/AGESA may enhance performance over time.

In Geekbench 5.4.4, the CPU got 1639 points for single-core and 10498 points for multi-core. This is lower than the average Geekbench R7 5800X score (1671/10339 points). It also gets 617 and 6506 points on the CPU-Z benchmark, lower than the i9-12900K reference data.

Further results, including 1080p gaming testing are too be posted later.

Update: The Ryzen 7 5800X3D performs admirably in the initial gaming benchmarks. So yet, the website has only tested Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 720p with customized extreme settings (ultra shadows). As the resolution increases, the disparities between the CPUs become fewer. The 5800X3D with RTX 3080 Ti GPU is actually quicker than the i9-12900KF processor with RTX 3090 Ti, indicating this is a CPU-bound test. XanxoGaming is presently testing 11 games at 1080p. The testing are done, but the data must be compared to an Intel system, which may take time. But we should see more findings soon.

The Core i9-12900K averages roughly 190 FPS in the test, which they use as their benchmark. The Core i9-12900KS achieves roughly 200 FPS, which is a little more than a 5% gain. Ryzen 7 5800X3D an average FPS of 230. That’s a 20% boost over the Core i9-12900K and a 15% increase over the Core i9-12900KS. According to the leaker, additional benchmarks will get posted, at 1080p at Ultra settings. 


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Science

Gaze in Awe at This Breathtaking Hubble Image of an Outburst From a Baby Star

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An epic outburst from a baby star still in the process of forming has been captured in a spectacular Hubble image.

Roughly 1,250 light-years away, in the Orion molecular cloud star-forming region, jets from a protostar are punching through the cloud at supersonic speeds, heating the gas and causing it to glow brightly. The result of this cosmic interaction is a short-lived, beautiful, and luminous structure known as a Herbig-Haro object.

 

This particular Herbig-Haro object is called HH 34, among the most spectacular phenomena we can observe in the Milky Way. But that’s not all it is. These fleeting outbursts, which can be observed changing on a scale of Earth years, contain clues that can help us figure out how baby stars are born.

Baby star outburst HH 34. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, B. Nisini)

For a Herbig-Haro object to form, there needs to be a specific set of circumstances. It starts with a baby star, known as a protostar. Protostars form from dense clumps of gas and dust in a molecular cloud that collapses under its own gravity. As this celestial cradle spins, protostars start accreting material from the cloud around them.

During this process, the protostar can blast out powerful jets of plasma from its poles. It’s thought that some of the material that is swirling around the protostar gets funneled along its magnetic field lines.

These magnetic field lines accelerate particles so that, when the material reaches the poles, it is launched at considerable speeds into space as very tight collimated jets. The insane temperatures involved ionize the material, turning it into plasma.

Earlier Hubble images of HH 34. (NASA, ESA, and P. Hartigan/Rice University)

For a Herbig-Haro object, these jets, traveling at hundreds of kilometers per hour, then slam, hard, into the surrounding molecular cloud. Where these interactions occur, hot temperatures cause the material to glow brightly.

This makes it easier for us to track and observe the jets. As the protostar grows, it also starts to produce a powerful stellar wind. Together, the wind and jets are referred to as protostellar feedback, which is very important for the star’s evolution.

This is because they blow away the material around the star, which is thought to cut off its growth. That means that protostellar feedback plays a direct role in the final mass of the fully grown star.

Hubble’s 2015 image of HH 34. (ESA/Hubble & NASA)

HH 34 is a particularly interesting case, with its multiple bow shocks defining the extent of the jets. The Hubble Space Telescope imaged it numerous times: in 1994, 1998, and 2007, and again in 2015. This new image is the most recent.

Because of how rapidly Herbig-Haro objects evolve, scientists can track the changes in the series and observe how the jet expands over time. This can also help map the cloud around the young protostar.

The recently launched James Webb Space Telescope will revolutionize our understanding of these jets. The infrared capability will allow it to peer into the densely dusty region around a protostar to shed more light on how these jets are launched.

You can download the above images in wallpaper sizes from the ESA Hubble website.

 

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Science

Spiders Use Electric Fields to Fly, And We May Finally Know How

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Having never evolved wings, many species of spider instead evolved an uncanny ability to take to the skies using nothing more than a few short threads of gossamer dangling from their dainty butts.

 

Just how this invertebrate answer to paragliding works has never been entirely clear, though historically biologists have assumed it probably has something to do with swirling eddies of warming air close to Earth’s surface.

An alternative suggestion is gaining attention, however, as evidence piles up in support of a rather steampunk mechanism. Instead of riding thermals, spiders might instead sail into the sky on tides of electricity.

Studies conducted by researchers from the University of Bristol in 2018 showed electric fields generated by weather activity could sufficiently drag a single electrostatically-charged strand of web and its aeronautical arachnid off the ground.

Now, a new study modeling the mathematics behind the electromagnetic interactions on multiple dangling spider threads has contributed important new details to the discussion.

This isn’t to say electric charges are necessarily responsible for the phenomenon scientists refer to as ballooning, either wholly or partially. But it does answer a bunch of questions on the actual physics at work.

The fact spiders can add a slight charge to their webs in order to catch prey (and potentially pick up pollutants) has been a focus of experimental studies for some time now.

 

Unfortunately, measuring the electrostatic activity of a short drift of thread is a lot harder to do under laboratory conditions.

So researchers kept things simple, by using simple modeling to determine how a single electrostatically charged thread spun from a spider’s bum might interact with an atmosphere’s own weakly charged field.

In reality, ballooning spiders can spin two, three, or even dozens of fine strands to get them up, up, and away. Just how each thread, coated in negatively-charged material, might interact with other threads is an open question.

To explore that question, physicists Charbel Habchi from Notre Dame University-Louaize in Lebanon, and Mohammad K. Jawed from the University of California, Los Angeles, combined measurements from previous studies with an algorithm commonly used in computerized graphics to trace hair.

Attaching between two and eight virtual hairs to a 2-millimeter-wide sphere that represented a tiny species of spider, they could tweak a range of variables such as the distribution of charge, atmospheric electric fields, and air resistance, and watch it fly.

At first, the threads all remained more or less vertical. But as the simulations unfolded, the negative charges along the threads pushed apart, expanding the collection of strands into an inverted cone-shape.

 

This in turn slowed their ascent, causing them to drop and the strands to collect together again, making tension between electrostatic repulsion and atmospheric drag an important factor in determining the thread-count of a spider balloon.

“We think that, at least for small spiders, the electric field, without any help from upward air currents, can cause ballooning,” Habchi told Rachel Berkowitz at Physics.

As for larger spiders, it’s possible a good kick from a rising air current might be necessary, implying the competing hypotheses behind spider-flight might not be so mutually exclusive after all.

Having a sound model is one thing. Backing it up experimentally will be more of a challenge.

On the other hand, if the mathematics works, it could be grounds for a new avenue of spider-inspired flight technology, used to send nanoscale drones out on Earth’s air currents or on far distant worlds.

This research was published in Physical Review E.

 

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