Every galaxy, including our Milky Way, has at its centre a massive black hole whose gravity influences the stars around it. Generally, the stars orbit around the black hole without incident, but sometimes a star will wander a little too close, and the black hole will "make a meal" of the star in a process astrophysicists have termed spaghettification. "Gravity around the black hole will shred these unlucky stars, causing them to be squeezed into...
Two Los Angeles police officers were fired for chasing Pokémon rather than fleeing robbers, court documents show. The pair were parked nearby when a radio call came in for officers to respond to a shop robbery, the BBC reports. But a review of their in-car camera footage showed they had been playing the video game Pokémon Go, and chose to pursue a nearby Snorlax – a relatively rare catch – instead of providing back-up. The pair denied...
What physical changes occur in the brain when a memory is made? A team of researchers at the University of Southern California has answered this question by inducing a memory in a larval zebrafish and mapping changes in their transparent heads with brain cells lit up like Times Square on New Year's Eve. After six years of research, they made the groundbreaking discovery that learning causes synapses, the connections between neurons, to proliferate in some areas and...
Experts said Monday that an alleged hybrid coronavirus mutation dubbed "Deltacron" reportedly discovered in a Cyprus lab is most likely the result of a lab contamination, and not a new worrying variant, reports Medical Xpress. Cypriot media reported the discovery Saturday, describing it as having "the genetic background of the Delta variant along with some of the mutations of Omicron". While it is possible for coronaviruses to genetically combine, it is rare, and scientists analysing the discovery...
NASA's new space telescope opened its huge, gold-plated, flower-shaped mirror Saturday, the final step in the observatory's dramatic unfurling, reports Phys.org. The last portion of the 6.5-metre mirror swung into place at flight controllers' command, completing the unfolding of the James Webb Space Telescope. "I'm emotional about it," said Thomas Zurbuchen, chief of NASA's science missions. "What an amazing milestone. We see that beautiful pattern out there in the sky now." More powerful than the...
The price of Bitcoin fell to its lowest level in months following remarks from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The cryptocurrency dropped in value from $47,000 USD earlier this week to less than $42,000 per digital coin today. It follows minutes from a meeting of the Federal Reserve, which suggested it may raise interest rates, the BBC reports. Political events in Kazakhstan have also raised concerns about the network's capacity. Because of its global and decentralised nature, attributing a...
The World Health Organization said today that the spread of Omicron was down to a combination of factors including the make-up of the COVID-19 variant and increased social mixing. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's COVID-19 technical lead, said people therefore needed to think about reducing their exposure to the virus and take control over its transmission, following a week of record numbers of new cases, reports Medical Xpress. Van Kerkhove said Omicron is transmitted...
Since the first lab-modified virus capable of replication was generated in 1974, an evidence-based consensus has emerged that many changes introduced into viral genomes are likely to prove unstable if released into the environment. On this basis, many virologists would question the release of genetically modified viruses that retain the capacity to spread between individual vertebrate hosts. Researchers from Germany, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States now point out in a...
(HealthDay)—The Abbott BinaxNOW and Quidel QuickVue – two widely used rapid at-home COVID tests – may fail to spot evidence of the Omicron variant in the first days after infection, even when people are carrying substantial levels of the virus, preliminary research suggests. The researchers focused on 30 people infected with COVID at five workplaces that experienced what were most likely outbreaks of the Omicron variant in December. The people received both saliva-based PCR tests (the...
The world we experience is governed by classical physics. How we move, where we are, and how fast we're going are all determined by the classical assumption that we can only exist in one place at any one moment in time. But in the quantum world, the behaviour of individual atoms is governed by the eerie principle that a particle's location is a probability. An atom, for instance, has a certain chance of being in...
