It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, March 14, 2021
Egyptian gov't: Fire at garment factory kills at least 20
The cause of the blaze, which ripped through the four-story plant in Obour, an outlying district of the greater area around the Egyptian capital, was not immediately known, according to a statement released by the government.
Fifteen firefighting vehicles were dispatched to the scene to put down the blaze while ambulances were ferrying the casualties to nearby hospitals, the statement said. It added that a team of experts was looking into the damage and trying to assess the impact the fire might have had on any of the adjacent buildings in the area.
As heavy gray smoke rose from the building, firefighters and police cars sealed off the site, making it inaccessible to television crews.
No further information was immediately available.
Factory fires, as well as blazes elsewhere, are common in Egypt, due to the lax enforcement of industrial and other safety measures.
Last month, a thirteen-story apartment building in Cairo caught fire after a blaze erupted at an unlicensed leather factory that occupied its first three floors. Fire fighters struggled for almost a day to extinguish the flames amid fear that the building might collapse over the Ring Road, the major freeway of the Greater Cairo metropolitan area.
The fire ended up damaging the building's foundations, which eventually forced municipal authorities to demolish it.
And last December, an intensive care unit at a private hospital, also in Obour, killed seven coronavirus patients. At the time, the state-run al-Ahram daily reported that an initial investigation blamed an electric short-circuit for the fire.
A similar blaze erupted at the coronavirus ward of a private hospital in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria last June, also leaving seven patients dead. There was another fire in May in a coronavirus isolation centre in Cairo that didn’t cause any casualties.
Noha Elhennawy, The Associated Press
Rochester mayor and top officials 'suppressed' information about Daniel Prude's death, independent report says
By Evan Simko-Bednarski, CNN
3/12/2021
An independent investigation commissioned by the Rochester, New York, City Council found that four key city officials -- including Mayor Lovely Warren -- suppressed information surrounding the death of Daniel Prude, the 41-year-old Black man who died last year in police custody.
According to the report, Warren, former Police Chief La'Ron Singletary, corporation counsel Timothy Curtin, and Rochester communications director Justin Roj were all aware by "mid-April 2020" that a medical examiner had determined that Prude died from "asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint" by Rochester police officers who were under criminal investigation for their conduct.
Nonetheless, the report states, that information was not made public until the Prude family held a press conference on September 2.
"In the final analysis, the decision not to publicly disclose these facts rested with Mayor Warren, as the elected Mayor of the City of Rochester," the report states. "But Mayor Warren alone is not responsible for the suppression of the circumstances of the Prude Arrest and Mr. Prude's death."
Investigators wrote that Warren was made aware of the Prude arrest the next day, and was given updates by Singletary after he viewed the body-worn camera footage. Singletary also informed Warren of Prude's death days later. According to the report, Warren did not view the footage herself until early August.
Singletary was fired in September for his handling of the case, and Curtin and Roj were temporarily suspended from their roles.
The report said Singletary "consistently deemphasized" the medical examiner's finding that police restraint was a cause of Prude's death, and for discouraging the release of body-worn camera footage.
Investigators also criticized Curtin, who "actively discouraged" Warren from releasing the body camera footage, "citing reasons that were factually incorrect, legally without basis, or both."
The report further alleges that Curtin incorrectly asserted that New York Attorney General Letitia James had told city officials to "stand down" and refrain from commenting on Prude's death.
Roj, "the very official responsible for communicating with the public through the media," was also aware of the facts of Prude's death for months before that information being made public, investigators said.
When the information surrounding Prude's death did become public, the report says, Warren characterized it as an "overdose," despite having had knowledge of the medical examiner's findings -- which listed "complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint" alongside PCP intoxication as a cause of death.
In a statement shared with CNN, Warren said she welcomed the report.
"Throughout City government, we have acknowledged our responsibility, recognized that changes are necessary and taken action," she said. "By creating our Person In Crisis teams, calling for the right to fire officers for cause, and reforming our FOIL and Body-Worn Camera processes, we are doing the work this moment demands."
"Now, we must go even further and honor Daniel Prude by fully addressing our challenges regarding policing, mental health treatment and systemic inequality," she added. "I remain committed to doing this work along with City Council."
Roj declined to comment on the report. Neither Curtin nor attorneys for Singletary responded immediately to a request for comment.
The landscape of digital art is being upended by NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, to the point where it's difficult not to have heard the term in passing. But what is an NFT? Why are people spending millions of dollars on JPEGs? And could it change how microtransactions in games work?
Just what is a Non-Fungible Token?
First and foremost, NFTs are intrinsically tied to the blockchain--an online ledger that is maintained by thousands of users globally through the process called mining. Transactions on the blockchain aren't centralized, so it's difficult (but not impossible) to edit the ledger to make fraudulent transactions. This is the same technology that powers cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin ($BTC), Dogecoin ($DOGE), and Ethereum ($ETH) around the world. NFTs exist on various blockchains, but most being sold are found on the Ethereum blockchain. Unlike the currency, however, they're non-fungible. That means that one NFT is entirely unique from the rest, unlike the fungible Ethereum, where one coin is identical to all others, thus allowing it to be used as a currency. NFTs, then, are one-of-a-kind in a way, which can explain why they're being used to verify purchases of digital goods. The goods themselves are specifically unique to the token (an image sold as an NFT can still find its way online for anyone to see) but the token itself is an indicator of the purchase.
So what does an NFT actually give me?
This is where things get a little strange. For example, an artist can choose to mint a piece of digital artwork with an NFT and then sell the token through multiple auction houses. The token itself does not determine who can view the artwork, but rather who holds the rights to it. There's some grey area here, where the artist can still govern overall ownership and distribution rights, but for the most part, the owner of the NFT is technically the owner of the artwork, even if the image is hosted on Google and available for anyone to right-click and save.
Although not a perfect analogy, you can think of it as someone owning the real Mona Lisa, or a cheap copy made at a novelty gift store. Both feature the same underlying work, but only one is the "real" Mona Lisa. With physical art, there's more to an original than just being the first of its kind, but with digital art, the difference is almost negligible. A copy of an image, a song, a gif, or anything of that kind can be shared in an unaltered state, diluting the relevance of owning a token to the original. Wait, why are NFTs valuable then?
Those who see value in NFTs might see the potential to make a profit in the future, as the exclusivity of the token takes on a collector's status. Others might just want the bragging rights that come with owning the only minted NFT associated with a digital asset, whether it's accessible to everyone else or not. Although it is technically possible to mint multiple unique NFTs for the same digital asset, it seems most artists aren't doing this to help preserve the value of the single token that is generated.
Artist Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days is the first NFT
sold by auction company Christie's, selling for $69 million.
Mike Winklemann, an artist known as Beeple, started minting NFTs for his artwork last year, making several sales for thousands of dollars before reaching into the millions. His latest piece, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, was the first NFT sold by Christie's, a major art auction house. It sold for $69 million, but if you want to save Everdays to your desktop, you can just copy the image tweeted out by Christie's and do so. Hopefully, that gives you an idea of the difference between purchasing an NFT for an asset, and the asset itself.
Winklemann isn't alone in the gold rush surrounding NFTs. Musician Steve Aoki sold an NFT to John Legere, the former CEO of T-Mobile, for $888,888.88. The asset was a 36-second music snippet accompanied by a gif, part of which has been shared online. For nearly a million dollars the ownership of the gif will remain on the blockchain as Legere's, even if the full gif eventually finds its way online and is experienced by millions of other people.
This is definitely finding its way into games, isn't it?
NFTs aren't exactly new, and their first big use case was actually in a game. Cryptokitties, which launched in 2017, allows players to purchase NFTs for specific digital cats, which they solely own. These cats can then breed with other digital cat purchases and produce entirely new cats that can then be sold as unique NFTs of their own. This market has generated millions since its inception, with some single cats costing well over a million dollars alone. A curious glance at the website shows that many cheaper cats are simply reskins of the same designs, but the ability to own one for yourself is part of the allure
.
CryptoKitties is a game about collecting and breeding weird cats, but uses Etherium and NFTs to create a marketplace for buying and selling them.
If that makes you think about the possibility of NFTs to merge with cosmetic microtransactions in games like Fortnite, Overwatch, or Dota 2, I think it's safe to bet that there is at least conversation being had over the potential around a system like that. There are already games using NFTs in novel ways, too. The Sandbox is a community-driven creative space that lets users create voxel-based assets or gaming experiences. You could say it's similar to Roblox, outside of the fact that these gaming experiences all exist on finite virtual land that users can buy using NFTs. The tokens correlate to a piece of land where you can host game creations for other users to visit, with the value of the size and position of the land determined by simple supply and demand.
Mythical Games is planning to use both NFTs and the blockchain in its upcoming PC and console title, Blankos. The studio is designing another game driven by user-generated content, but where items such as cosmetics can be sold in finite numbers. In-game items are transferred to players using NFTs, which can then be resold on a marketplace where the value is determined by the buyers. Think of it as Steam Trading Cards and Valve's Marketplace, except powered by blockchain transactions for items that come in finite waves. Can an NFT be minted against anything then? That sounds dangerous
Given that an NFT can be minted for almost anything digital (Twitter's Jack Dorsey is selling an NFT of the first tweet ever sent, for example) the ease of creating the token has helped give artists the ability to make money via a new platform. But it's also led to a lot of abuse, which has already started dominating the conversations around NFTs. Artists are finding tokens minted against their art without their consent, letting someone else reap the benefits of a sale without any of the work. It's also difficult to prevent this right now, given the way in which social media allows digital art of any kind to be shared. NFTs aren't solving the root problem of copyright online, but they are giving those who would abuse it a lot of freedom to do so.
An official merchandise creator for Among Us recently stumbled upon thousands of NFT sales based on artwork from the game, none of which had been authorized by the studio. This is just a glimpse at the issue thousands of artists are facing, leading to a divide on whether NFTs are the future of digital art collection or a new problem for creators to fight against.
There's also the environmental impact to consider, which isn't so much tied to NFTs but rather blockchain technology. Since the blockchain is essentially a ledger maintained by users around the world, requiring computer processing power to authenticate transactions, each one takes up some unit of energy. Combined, studies are showing that the consumption of the overall system is incredibly high, with the Bitcoin blockchain consuming more electricity in a year than the whole of Argentina.
Maintaining the blockchain and facilitating all of the transactions that take place requires incredible amounts of processing power, which incurs large electricity costs. Given that electricity and its generation is still one of the biggest environmental impactors, this has brought the cost of cryptocurrencies to the environment into focus. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has said he's appalled by the harm that cryptocurrencies present to the environment, but also notes that the push towards greener electricity could mitigate it. "If it's green electricity and it's not crowding out other uses, eventually, you know, maybe that's ok," Gates told the New York Times.
Ethereum is far more efficient than Bitcoin (one of Ethereum's founders similarly spoke out against the energy consumption of Bitcoin), which means that it's using less electricity overall on its blockchain than the most popular cryptocurrency on the market. That still does not make it emission-free, however, and it is no secret that popular tokens like NFTs lead to more transactions, which lead to more energy consumption. This also ties into the scarcity of hardware powerful enough for processing the blockchain, which is a big reason why you might have trouble buying a GPU or power supply for your next PC right now.
So where do NFTs go next?
That is the state of NFTs currently, and it's bound to grow even more now that it's reached a point of public consciousness that helped propel Bitcoin a few years ago. It's difficult to say what the future might hold for NFTs as a tangible collector's item, but for now it's a bit of a minefield, where you can either sell art to an entirely new, wealthy audience or have even more work illegally stolen from you. And there is no indication of how those problems might be solved just yet. Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com
Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, has just sold one of his pieces at a record-breaking $69 million. The piece, called Everydays – The First 5000 Days, is a mosaic representing an impressive artistic challenge in which Winkelmann created an entirely new piece of art every single day for the past 13 years. While they started as simple sketches on pen and paper, these daily projects have expanded into high-quality and often satirical images covering American politics, internet culture, world events, and more.
“I almost look at it now like I’m a political cartoonist,” explains Winkelmann. “Except instead of doing sketches, I’m using the most advanced tools to make comments on current events, almost in real-time.” These modern pieces of political satire have caused the artist to gain global attention as one of the most successful digital artists in the world.
Winkelmann thinks that this particular piece and its recording-breaking sale has huge implications in the art world. He explains that since Blockchain allows for ownership and scarcity of digital art, we can expect a radical change in art as we know it.
But how exactly is this possible? How could a JPG that could easily be shared on Instagram sell at Christie’s, an auction house that has been selling traditional art since 1766? How could it sell for $69.3 million, making it the third-most expensive auction price of an artwork made by a living artist? The answer is that these pieces are sold as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, which gives each digital art piece a unique and permanent record, making it possible to authenticate a piece just like you could authenticate a traditional painting. This introduces scarcity and allows the piece to be owned by someone and gain a monetary value. This is how crypto art is made possible. NFTs allow art to be exchanged just like cryptocurrency through blockchain.
Christie’s auction house proved that crypto art had the potential to make real waves in the art world. “He showed us this collage, and that was my eureka moment when I knew this was going to be extremely important,” says Noah Davis, an art specialist at Christie’s. “It was just so monumental and so indicative of what NFTs can do.”
Judging by the success of Winkelmann’s first piece at Christie’s, we can expect to see more stories like this in the future. If you are interested in learning more about Blockchain and how artists are selling their work as NFTs, read our crypto art and Blockchain introduction to understand the basic principles and learn about how this could change the art world forever.
Digital artist Beeple has just broken a crypto art record with the sale of his piece titled Everydays – The First 5000 Days for $69 million at a Christie's auction.
All images via Beeple and Christie's. Related Articles:
Sam Pires is a Contributing Writer at My Modern Met and an architectural designer. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from NJIT. Sam has design experience at multiple renowned architecture firms such as Gensler and Bjarke Ingels Group. She believes architecture should be more accessible to everyone and uses writing to tell unexpected stories about the built environment.
Scientists sketch aged star system using over a century of observations
IMAGE: U MON'S PRIMARY STAR, AN ELDERLY YELLOW SUPERGIANT, HAS AROUND TWICE THE SUN'S MASS BUT HAS BILLOWED TO 100 TIMES THE SUN'S SIZE. SCIENTISTS KNOW LESS ABOUT THE COMPANION, THE... view more
CREDIT: CREDIT: NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER/CHRIS SMITH (USRA/GESTAR)
Astronomers have painted their best picture yet of an RV Tauri variable, a rare type of stellar binary where two stars - one approaching the end of its life - orbit within a sprawling disk of dust. Their 130-year dataset spans the widest range of light yet collected for one of these systems, from radio to X-rays.
"There are only about 300 known RV Tauri variables in the Milky Way galaxy," said Laura Vega, a recent doctoral recipient at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. "We focused our study on the second brightest, named U Monocerotis, which is now the first of these systems from which X-rays have been detected."
A paper describing the findings, led by Vega, was published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The system, called U Mon for short, lies around 3,600 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. Its two stars circle each other about every six and a half years on an orbit tipped about 75 degrees from our perspective.
The primary star, an elderly yellow supergiant, has around twice the Sun's mass but has billowed to 100 times the Sun's size. A tug of war between pressure and temperature in its atmosphere causes it to regularly expand and contract, and these pulsations create predictable brightness changes with alternating deep and shallow dips in light - a hallmark of RV Tauri systems. Scientists know less about the companion star, but they think it's of similar mass and much younger than the primary.
The cool disk around both stars is composed of gas and dust ejected by the primary star as it evolved. Using radio observations from the Submillimeter Array on Maunakea, Hawai'i, Vega's team estimated that the disk is around 51 billion miles (82 billion kilometers) across. The binary orbits inside a central gap that the scientists think is comparable to the distance between the two stars at their maximum separation, when they're about 540 million miles (870 million kilometers) apart.
When the stars are farthest from each other, they're roughly aligned with our line of sight. The disk partially obscures the primary and creates another predictable fluctuation in the system's light. Vega and her colleagues think this is when one or both stars interact with the disk's inner edge, siphoning off streams of gas and dust. They suggest that the companion star funnels the gas into its own disk, which heats up and generates an X-ray-emitting outflow of gas. This model could explain X-rays detected in 2016 by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite.
"The XMM observations make U Mon the first RV Tauri variable detected in X-rays," said Kim Weaver, the XMM U.S. project scientist and an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It's exciting to see ground- and space-based multiwavelength measurements come together to give us new insights into a long-studied system."
In their analysis of U Mon, Vega's team also incorporated 130 years of visible light observations.
The earliest available measurement of the system, collected on Dec. 25, 1888, came from the archives of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), an international network of amateur and professional astronomers headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. AAVSO provided additional historical measurements ranging from the mid-1940s to the present.
The researchers also used archived images cataloged by the Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard (DASCH), a program at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge dedicated to digitizing astronomical images from glass photographic plates made by ground-based telescopes between the 1880s and 1990s.
U Mon's light varies both because the primary star pulsates and because the disk partially obscures it every 6.5 years or so. The combined AAVSO and DASCH data allowed Vega and her colleagues to spot an even longer cycle, where the system's brightness rises and falls about every 60 years. They think a warp or clump in the disk, located about as far from the binary as Neptune is from the Sun, causes this extra variation as it orbits.
Vega completed her analysis of the U Mon system as a NASA Harriett G. Jenkins Predoctoral Fellow, a program funded by the NASA Office of STEM Engagement's Minority University Research and Education Project.
"For her doctoral dissertation, Laura used this historical dataset to detect a characteristic that
CAPTION
This infographic shows U Mon's components to scale.
CREDIT
Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA/GESTAR)
Astronomers detect a black hole on the move
Astronomers have detected a moving supermassive black hole
IMAGE: GALAXY J0437+2456 IS THOUGHT TO BE HOME TO A SUPERMASSIVE, MOVING BLACK HOLE. view more
CREDIT: SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY (SDSS).
Scientists have long theorized that supermassive black holes can wander through space--but catching them in the act has proven difficult.
Now, researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have identified the clearest case to date of a supermassive black hole in motion. Their results are published today in the Astrophysical Journal.
"We don't expect the majority of supermassive black holes to be moving; they're usually content to just sit around," says Dominic Pesce, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics who led the study. "They're just so heavy that it's tough to get them going. Consider how much more difficult it is to kick a bowling ball into motion than it is to kick a soccer ball -- realizing that in this case, the 'bowling ball' is several million times the mass of our Sun. That's going to require a pretty mighty kick."
Pesce and his collaborators have been working to observe this rare occurrence for the last five years by comparing the velocities of supermassive black holes and galaxies.
"We asked: Are the velocities of the black holes the same as the velocities of the galaxies they reside in?" he explains. "We expect them to have the same velocity. If they don't, that implies the black hole has been disturbed."
For their search, the team initially surveyed 10 distant galaxies and the supermassive black holes at their cores. They specifically studied black holes that contained water within their accretion disks -- the spiral structures that spin inward towards the black hole.
As the water orbits around the black hole, it produces a laser-like beam of radio light known as a maser. When studied with a combined network of radio antennas using a technique known as very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), masers can help measure a black hole's velocity very precisely, Pesce says.
The technique helped the team determine that nine of the 10 supermassive black holes were at rest--but one stood out and seemed to be in motion.
Located 230 million light-years away from Earth, the black hole sits at the center of a galaxy named J0437+2456. Its mass is about three million times that of our Sun.
Using follow-up observations with the Arecibo and Gemini Observatories, the team has now confirmed their initial findings. The supermassive black hole is moving with a speed of about 110,000 miles per hour inside the galaxy J0437+2456.
But what's causing the motion is not known. The team suspects there are two possibilities.
"We may be observing the aftermath of two supermassive black holes merging," says Jim Condon, a radio astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory who was involved in the study. "The result of such a merger can cause the newborn black hole to recoil, and we may be watching it in the act of recoiling or as it settles down again."
But there's another, perhaps even more exciting possibility: the black hole may be part of a binary system.
"Despite every expectation that they really ought to be out there in some abundance, scientists have had a hard time identifying clear examples of binary supermassive black holes," Pesce says. "What we could be seeing in the galaxy J0437+2456 is one of the black holes in such a pair, with the other remaining hidden to our radio observations because of its lack of maser emission."
Further observations, however, will ultimately be needed to pin down the true cause of this supermassive black hole's unusual motion.
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Co-authors of the new study are Anil Seth of the University of Utah; Jenny Greene of Princeton University; Jim Braatz, Jim Condon, and Brian Kent of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory; and Davor Krajnovi? of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, Germany.
About the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is a collaboration between Harvard and the Smithsonian designed to ask--and ultimately answer--humanity's greatest unresolved questions about the nature of the universe. The Center for Astrophysics is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with research facilities across the U.S. and around the world.
Gigantic jet spied from black hole in early universe
IMAGE: THE MAIN PANEL OF THIS GRAPHIC IS AN ARTIST'S ILLUSTRATION OF A CLOSE-UP VIEW OF A QUASAR AND ITS JET, LIKE THE ONE IN PJ352-52. THE INSET CONTAINS X-RAY DATA FROM CHANDRA... view more
Astronomers have discovered evidence for an extraordinarily long jet of particles coming from a supermassive black hole in the early universe, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
If confirmed, it would be the most distant supermassive black hole with a jet detected in X-rays. Coming from a galaxy about 12.7 billion light-years from Earth, the jet may help explain how the biggest black holes formed at a very early time in the universe's history.
The source of the jet is a quasar - a rapidly growing supermassive black hole - named PSO J352.4034-15.3373 (PJ352-15 for short), which sits at the center of a young galaxy. It is one of the two most powerful quasars detected in radio waves in the first billion years after the big bang, and is about a billion times more massive than the Sun.
How were supermassive black holes able to grow so quickly to reach such an enormous mass in this early epoch of the universe? This is one of the key questions in astronomy today.
Despite their powerful gravity and fearsome reputation, black holes do not inevitably pull in everything that approaches close to them. Material orbiting around a black hole in a disk needs to lose speed and energy before it can fall farther inwards to cross the so-called event horizon, the point of no return. Magnetic fields can cause a braking effect on the disk as they power a jet, which is one key way for material in the disk to lose energy and, therefore, enhance the rate of growth of black holes.
"If a playground merry-go-round is moving too fast, it's hard for a child to move towards the center, so someone or something needs to slow the ride down," said Thomas Connor of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, who led the study. "Around supermassive black holes, we think jets can take enough energy away so material can fall inward and the black hole can grow."
Astronomers needed to observe PJ352-15 for a total of three days using the sharp vision of Chandra to detect evidence for the X-ray jet. X-ray emission was detected about 160,000 light-years away from the quasar along the same direction as much shorter jets previously seen in radio waves by the Very Long Baseline Array. By comparison, the entire Milky Way spans about 100,000 light-years.
PJ352-15 breaks a couple of different astronomical records. First, the longest jet previously observed from the first billion years after the big bang was only about 5,000 light-years in length, corresponding to the radio observations of PJ352-15. Second, PJ352-15 is about 300 million light-years farther away than the most distant X-ray jet recorded before it..
"The length of this jet is significant because it means that the supermassive black hole powering it has been growing for a considerable period of time," said co-author Eduardo Bañados of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany. "This result underscores how X-ray studies of distant quasars provide a critical way to study the growth of the most distant supermassive black holes."
The light detected from this jet was emitted when the universe was only 0.98 billion years old, less than a tenth of its present age. At this point, the intensity of the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the big bang was much greater than it is today.
As the electrons in the jet fly away from the black hole at close to the speed of light, they move through and collide with photons making up the cosmic microwave background radiation, boosting the energy of the photons up into the X-ray range to be detected by Chandra. In this scenario, the X-rays are significantly boosted in brightness compared to radio waves. This agrees with the observation that the large X-ray jet feature has no associated radio emission.
"Our result shows that X-ray observations can be one of the best ways to study quasars with jets in the early Universe," said co-author Daniel Stern, also of JPL. "Or to put it another way, X-ray observations in the future may be the key to unlocking the secrets of our cosmic past."
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A paper describing these results has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. The other co-authors of the paper are Chris Carilli (NRAO, Socorro, New Mexico); Andrew Fabian (University of Cambridge, UK); Emmanuel Momjian (NRAO); Sofía Rojas-Ruiz (MPIA); Roberto Decarli (INAF, Bologna, Italy); Emanuele Paolo Farina (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany); Chiara Mazzucchelli (ESO, Chile); Hannah P. Earnshaw (Caltech, Pasadena, California).
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science from Cambridge Massachusetts and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
There are now 19 forms of ice, thanks to this discovery Cheryl Santa Maria
3/12/2021
A recent study published in Nature Communications by researchers at the University of Innsbruck has identified the 19th form of water ice. A second paper by researchers in Japan has also been published, verifying the study.
It's no surprise that ice and water are versatile, and the way atoms and molecules are oriented create different forms. There were previously 18 known crystalline forms of water and they have different properties, depending on the temperature and pressure that created them.
The new discovery, dubbed ice XIX, hasn't been found in nature. The lab-created ice is 'exotic', the study's authors say, and important because it provides insight into the properties of previously-known forms.
"While conventional ice and snow are abundant on Earth, no other forms are found on the surface of our planet - except in research laboratories," the authors say in a statement.
"Many varieties of water ice are formed in the vastness of space under special pressure and temperature conditions. They are found, for example, on celestial bodies such as Jupiter's moon Ganymede, which is covered by layers of different ice varieties."
But one can't simply declare a new form of ice. There's a process involved, lead researcher Thomas Loerting, a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, told LiveScience.
It begins with clearly defining the crystal structure, a technical hurdle solved by Ph.D. student Tobias Gasser, who thought to add a percent of normal water to the heavy water - a strategy that substantially sped up ordering.
To define the crystal, Loerting's team had to determine the most basic repeating structure that had all of the atoms located within it. They also had to clarify the symmetry of the structure.
"Only if all of these are known, you are allowed to name your ice … Ice XIX is now the name for the new ice phase discovered in our work," Loerting told LiveScience.
SIBLING PAIRS
Provided by The Weather NetworkIllustration showing the relationship between the ice VI and XIX unit cells viewed down their c-axes, and the differences in their diffraction patterns, with colour coding red for ice XIX and blue for ice VI. Caption and photo: Uni Innsbruck
More than a decade ago, a variant of the new ice was discovered and named ice XV. Three years ago, Loerting's team changed XV's "manufacturing" by slowing down the cooling process and increasing the pressure, allowing them to arrange the hydrogen atoms in a way that produced XIX.
"Ice XV and ice XIX represents the first sibling pair in ice physics in which the oxygen lattice is the same, but the pattern how hydrogen atoms are ordered is different," the authors say in a statement.
"This also means that for the first time it will now be possible to realize the transition between two ordered ice forms in experiments," Loreting added.
Perseverance's first focus on Mars is a rock named using Navajo language
The Máaz rock takes its name from the Navajo word for Mars.
The Perseverance Mars rover has its eyes set on its first area of interest, a rock that's been given the Navajo-inspired name Máaz, NASA shared Thursday.
Working with the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President, the Perseverance team has been naming different areas of Mars and points of interest relevant to the mission using the Navajo language. Aaron Yazzie, a Navajo (Diné) engineer on the mission team helped the crew get permission and collaborate with the Navajo Nation.
Before the rover's successful landing in Jezero Crater, a spot now named after acclaimed sci-fi author Octavia E. Butler, the mission team divided up the area into zones named after national parks and preserves. Perseverance landed in Tséyi', the zone named for Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona, an area in Navajo Nation that has geology reminiscent of the red planet.
The team has around 50 Navajo names to be used for findings. Yazzie put forward a handful of naming ideas for features including "bidziil" meaning "strength," "hoł nilį́" meaning "respect," and "tséwózí bee hazhmeezh" meaning "rolling rows of pebbles, like waves." The translation for Perseverance is Ha'ahóni.
"This fateful landing on Mars has created a special opportunity to inspire Navajo youth not just through amazing scientific and engineering feats, but also through the inclusion of our language in such a meaningful way," Yazzie said in the press release.
The names that have come out of the mission thus far aren't official ones, just informal nomenclature used by NASA and the general public. Official names must be designated by the International Astronomical Union.
Due to the limitations of Perseverance's programming language, the rover can't quite store or read many of these exact Navajo words because of the accent marks needed to convey intonations. For now, the rover is keeping track without any accent marks.
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