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Explanation: Despite their resemblance to R2D2, these three are not the droids you're looking for. Instead, the enclosures house 1.8 meter Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) at Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert region of Chile. The ATs are designed to be used for interferometry, a technique for achieving extremely high resolution observations, in concert with the observatory's 8 meter Very Large Telescope units. A total of four ATs are operational, each fitted with a transporter that moves the telescope along a track allowing different arrays with the large unit telescopes. To work as an interferometer, the light from each telescope is...

A rare dye made from snails for the robes of the Roman elite almost 2,000 years ago has been unearthed at a cricket club. The chunk of Tyrian purple, roughly the size of a ping pong ball, was dug up at Carlisle Cricket Club as part of ongoing yearly excavations. A Roman bathhouse was discovered at the site in 2017 and in the last three years 2,000 items including pottery, weapons, coins and semi-precious stones have been found. Lead archaeologist Frank Giecco said the find was of "international significance" and the first time the precious pigment had been discovered in...

Observing consciousness as physical allows insights not available to most. Ever since my NDE over 35 years ago, I've been observing and learning how consciousness flows in the human soul, and how it changes as it grows toward the Higher Consciousness many call God. Human consciousness, and the stored memories in people's souls became physical to me after the NDE. My comments below are a result of direct observation and experience, some involving exorcisms dealing directly with evil over the past 35+ years. I've been following the research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) since it began, beginning in the 1970's when...

Human intelligence scores are dropping across the US for the first time, research suggests, and experts warn technology could be to blame. Since 1905, there's been a 30-point increase based on scores in logic, vocabulary, spatial reasoning and visual and mathematical problem-solving skills. But there are signs that IQ may have dipped, according to a study last year. It found the average IQ score in the US fell from 100 to 98 last year - the first time rates have fallen since we began tracking them. Now, separate data shows there is a gap of about eight points between states,...

Flintlock, ignition system for firearms, developed in the early 16th century.

Approximately half of the health care workers in a Polish study were found to be averse to taking COVID-19 booster shots, with one of the reasons for this hesitancy being their negative experiences with previous vaccinations.The peer-reviewed study, published in the Vaccines journal on April 29, examined factors underlying “hesitancy to receive COVID-19 booster vaccine doses” among health care workers (HCW) in Poland. Almost 50 percent of the participants were identified as being wary of the boosters. “Our study found that 42 percent of the HCWs were hesitant about the second booster dose, while 7 percent reported no intent to...

Explanation: A mere 280 light-years from Earth, tidally locked, Jupiter-sized exoplanet WASP-43b orbits its parent star once every 0.8 Earth days. That puts it about 2 million kilometers (less than 1/25th the orbital distance of Mercury) from a small, cool sun. Still, on a dayside always facing its parent star, temperatures approach a torrid 2,500 degrees F as measured at infrared wavelengths by the MIRI instrument on board the James Webb Space Telescope. In this illustration of the hot exoplanet's orbit, Webb measurements also show nightside temperatures remain above 1,000 degrees F. That suggests that strong equatorial winds circulate the...

In 2018, a female Neanderthal was discovered in the Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. Now, archaeologists from The University of Cambridge have unveiled the reconstructed face of the 75,000-year-old woman, based on the assembly of hundreds of individual bone fragments recovered during excavations. “Neanderthals have had a bad press ever since the first ones were found over 150 years ago,” said Professor Graeme Barker from Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, who led the excavation at the cave where the woman’s remains were discovered. Neanderthals are believed to have become extinct around 40,000 years ago, and discoveries of their remains...

There is a famous story about Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman walking down the street with a friend. The friend stopped and said, “Hey, there is a $20 bill on the sidewalk.” The economist turned to him and replied, “There can’t be. If there were a $20 bill on the sidewalk, somebody would have picked it up.” Friedman often taught that if something were in people’s best interest, they would discover and put it to use without having to be told or forced to do so. A Forbes economic writer named Tilak Doshi, a long-time energy economics analyst, wrote a...

Three and a half years into the Biden Administration, and to an ordinary citizen on the ground it might seem like not that much has changed as to energy. Despite hundreds of government actions and initiative in an all-of-government regulatory onslaught to transform the energy economy, the important things have been remarkable stable. Production of oil and gas are actually up, and prices increases have been relatively modest — far less than one might have anticipated from the extreme regulatory hostility to production. The percentage of what is called “primary energy” (that is, energy for everything, not just electricity) coming...

Cities, towns and vacation spots across the American South are 'drowning' under rapidly rising tides that could soon put them underwater. Ocean levels are at least six inches higher than they were a decade ago along a swathe of the country from Texas to North Carolina. An overall rising ocean is coupled with vicious tidal events that wreak havoc and kill locals, especially when they coincide with storms. The problem is already affecting thousands of Americans living along the coast, and millions more across the US will feel it in the coming decades. Climate change is steadily raising sea levels...

Everything crumbled within the first few months. I couldn’t keep up with pandemic e-schooling, solo parenting, full-time remote work, and cancer treatment. I monitored meds, negotiated claims with the insurance company, filled out assistance paperwork, ignored the dishes in the sink, but every time I checked one line off my list a dozen more filled its place. By the time an alert for a cheap flight to Ireland hit my inbox, we’d spent hundreds of days in the hospital.

Explanation: Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. The large galaxy of over 100 billion stars has well-defined spiral arms, similar to our own Milky Way. One of the brightest members of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, M100, also known as NGC 4321 is 56 million light-years distant toward the well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. In this telescopic image, the face-on grand design spiral shares a nearly 1 degree wide field-of-view with slightly less conspicuous edge-on spiral NGC 4312 (at upper right). The 21 hour long equivalent exposure from a dark sky...

(NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Scientists using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have successfully mapped the weather on a planet 280 light years away. Earlier detections made by older space telescopes had hinted at the presence of an atmosphere on WASP-43b, however, the instruments aboard the JWST are the first to measure the actual weather in the planet’s atmosphere. “With Hubble, we could clearly see that there is water vapor on the dayside. Both Hubble and Spitzer suggested there might be clouds on the nightside,” explained Taylor Bell, a researcher from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute...

Explanation: To some, this nebula looks like the head of a fish. However, this colorful cosmic portrait really features glowing gas and obscuring dust clouds in IC 1795, a star forming region in the northern constellation Cassiopeia. The nebula's colors were created by adopting the Hubble color palette for mapping narrowband emissions from oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur atoms to blue, green and red colors, and further blending the data with images of the region recorded through broadband filters. Not far on the sky from the famous Double Star Cluster in Perseus, IC 1795 is itself located next to IC 1805,...

Ford, Chevy, and other major new entrants into the (formerly) lucrative electric vehicle business have — or perhaps had — a secret weapon in their arsenal for making EVs more attractive to buyers.If you want to know what that secret weapon is, I can tell you with just one word: Tesla.The Austin-based EV maker was first and fastest in building out the charging infrastructure necessary to make EVs anything more than urban curiosities. Tesla has more than 6,000 Supercharger stations with nearly 55,000 chargers in the U.S. alone, and exclusive access to them was one of the perks of owning...

The solar flare is the most powerful eruption from sunspot region R3654 yet. Last night (April 30), the sun released an extremely powerful solar flare triggering widespread radio blackouts across the Pacific region. The flare peaked at 7:46 p.m. EDT (2346 GMT) and ended shortly after at 7:58 p.m. EDT (2358). Solar flares are eruptions from the sun's surface that emit intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. They are created when magnetic energy builds up in the solar atmosphere and is released. Solar flares are categorized by size into lettered groups, with X-class being the most powerful. Then there are M-class...

The Coriolis effect describes the pattern of deflection taken by objects not firmly connected to the ground as they travel long distances around the Earth.

Abig update has emerged in connection with COVID vaccine and its rare side effects, which are being questioned by several health experts. British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company AstraZeneca has admitted in court papers that its COVID vaccine, Covishield, can cause rare side effect, The Telegraph reported. Covishield was developed by AstraZeneca and was produced by the Serum Institute of India. In India, it was one of the widely administered COVID vaccine. What did AstraZeneca say about the vaccine side effect? Currently, AstraZeneca is facing a class action lawsuit in the UK due to claims that its vaccine caused deaths....

Canada’s drug regulator asked Pfizer to provide data on the size of DNA fragments in its COVID-19 vaccine, due to genomic integration concerns, shortly after learning the pharma giant withheld information on DNA sequences contained in its product.“Concerning the residual plasmid DNA in the drug substance, provide data/information characterizing [...] the size distribution of the residual DNA fragments [and] residual intact circular plasmid,” says a request for clarification Health Canada issued to Pfizer on Aug. 4, 2023.A sign is displayed in front of Health Canada headquarters in Ottawa in a file photo. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)The information was released as...