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Category Archives: Wellness Live
Astronomers stunned as fiery auroras blaze on a planet without a star
Strong Northern Lights-like activity is the standout feature of today’s weather report, which is coming at you from a strange, extrasolar world, instead of a standard TV studio. That is thanks to astronomers from Trinity College Dublin, who used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to take a close look at the weather of a toasty nearby rogue planet, SIMP-0136.
The exquisite sensitivity of the instruments on board the space-based telescope enabled the team to see minute changes in brightness of the planet as it rotated, which were used to track changes in temperature, cloud cover and chemistry.
Surprisingly, these observations also illuminated SIMP-0136’s strong auroral activity, similar to the Northern Lights here on Earth or the powerful aurora on Jupiter, which heat up its upper atmosphere.
“These are some of the most precise measurements of the atmosphere of any extra-solar object to date, and the first time that changes in the atmospheric properties have been directly measured,” said Dr Evert Nasedkin, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Trinity College Dublin’s School of Physics, who is the lead author of the research article just published in leading international journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics.
“And at over 1,500 °C, SIMP-0136 makes this summer’s heat wave look mild,” he continued. “The precise observations we made meant we could accurately record temperature changes smaller than 5 °C. These changes in temperature were related to subtle changes in the chemical composition of this free-floating planet, which is suggestive of storms – similar to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot – rotating into view.”
Another surprise finding was the lack of variability of the clouds on SIMP-0136. One might expect changes in the cloud coverage to lead to changes in the atmosphere, similar to observing patches of clouds and blue sky here on Earth. Instead, the team found that the cloud coverage was constant over the surface of SIMP-0136. At the temperatures of SIMP-0136 these clouds are unlike those on earth, instead composed of silicate grains, similar to sand on a beach.
This is the first publication from the new ‘Exo-Aimsir’ group led by Prof. Johanna Vos in Trinity’s School of Physics, and includes contributions from all the group members, including PhD candidates Merle Schrader, Madeline Lam and Cian O’Toole.
These data were initially published by a similar team led by Allison McCarthy at Boston University, but the new analysis has revealed more details about the atmosphere.
“Different wavelengths of light are related to different atmospheric features. Similar to observing the changes in colour over the surface of the earth, the changes in the colour of SIMP-0136 are driven by changes in the atmospheric properties,” added Dr. Nasedkin. “So by using cutting-edge models, we could infer the temperature of the atmosphere, the chemical composition, and the position of the clouds.”
Prof. Vos said: “This work is exciting because it shows that by applying our state-of-the-art modelling techniques to cutting-edge datasets from JWST, we can begin to piece together the processes that drive weather in worlds beyond our solar system. Understanding these weather processes will be crucial as we continue to discover and characterize exoplanets in the future.”
“While for now these types of spectroscopic variability observations are limited to isolated brown dwarfs, like this one, future observations with the Extremely Large Telescope and eventually the Habitable Worlds Observatory will enable the study of the atmospheric dynamics of exoplanets, from Jupiter-like gas giants to rocky worlds.”
One day of planning went into Covid school closures, inquiry hears
This part of the inquiry is looking at the impact the pandemic had on children and young people.
Doctors’ union warning over online booking safety risk
GPs are concerned they will be at the end of an “online triage tsunami” when the new system launches.
I Just Learned What ‘Snafu’ Really Stands For, And Wow
Turns out CAPTCHA actually stands for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart” – and LEGO, HARIBO, and Twix all have hidden meanings, too.
And my friends are probably bored by now of hearing that IKEA, ASDA, and Tesco are acronyms or portmanteaus.
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Well, sorry to them: I’ve found another word with an unexpected meaning.
Yup, “snafu” – which refers to a situation in which nothing goes to plan, and everything that can go wrong seems to – stands for five words, and has a surprisingly military origin.
What does ‘snafu’ stand for?
Per Merriam-Webster, snafu stands for “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up” (or “fouled up”). In other words, it suggests a scenario where chaos or confusion is the norm.
The American military slang seems to have appeared in World War II – it was explained in the Kansas City Star in 1941 as “situation normal, all fixed up” and was presented as a novel word, not suitable for use “on leave”, back then.
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Interestingly, in that entry, the sergeant said soldiers were torn on whether the initials were a “backronym” – a word which starts out not standing for anything but is later given words for each letter.
“Most fellows” said the word “snafu” just “popped out” of the head of one of the members of the 35th division outfits, who he claimed invented the word, per the Kansas City Star.
But “after snafu got pretty well spread around, somebody decided it was a bunch of letters that stood for words,” one theory reportedly went.
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However it began, there was a fictional character called Private Snafu who appeared in instructional cartoons in the ’40s.
Described as “the goofiest soldier in the US army,” Private Snafu seems to have been named after the slang rather than giving rise to it.
And it turns out that the person who voiced his animated persona, Mel Blanc, also provided the instantly recognisable tones of Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny.
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Dr Seuss helped to write some episodes
The National WWII Museum in New Orleans shared that Dr Seuss – or, to give him his full name, Theodor Geisel – wrote “most” of the shorts.
As ScreenRant pointed out, the shorts didn’t just advise US soldiers on what not to do during the war (whatever Private Snafu was up to was wrong, basically). But on top of that, the cartoons kept animation studios alive during wartime as an essential industry.
Episodes of Private Snafu did not have to be approved by the Production Code Administration. That led to more raunchy scenes and swearing.
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Though the Private Snafu clips are now in the public domain and can be viewed online, the museum warned that “the series does contain outdated cultural depictions that were common during the war”.
Reform UK Chief Left Squirming Over Former Party Leader Who Made Pro-Russia Statements For Cash
A senior Reform UK official was left squirming over a former leader of the party who has admitted making pro-Russia statements for cash.
Nathan Gill, who led Reform in Wales, last week pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to eight counts of bribery between 2018 and 2019.
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His activities were said to include making pro-Russian statements about events in Ukraine in the European Parliament and in opinion pieces to news outlets.
Gill was first elected as a UKIP member of the European Parliament in 2014 and became an MEP for the Brexit Party after the UK formally left the EU in 2020.
He led Reform UK’s 2021 Welsh Parliament election campaign but is no longer a member of the party.
On BBC Breakfast on Monday, Reform policy chief Zia Yusuf said what he had done was “appalling and totally unacceptable and treacherous”.
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However, he then went on to accuse Labour of “smears and name calling” to deflect from the government’s record.
Asked by presenter Jon Kay if anyone else in Reform shared Gill’s views, Yusuf said: “The first time I heard his name or seen his name was in news reports.”
As he insisted “most people in the senior leadership team” of Reform had never heard of him, Kay pointed out that they had just shown a number of images of him with party leader Nigel Farage.
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“We’ve just shown our viewers pictures of Nigel Farage with his arm around him holding a Union Flag – they obviously knew one another pretty well,” he said.
Yusuf said: “Whatever that footage is, Nigel meets tens of thousands of people on an annual basis ultimately. He can’t be held accountable for the actions of everyone he comes into contact with.
“Given he has pleaded guilty, I have no concerns in telling you that is atrocious behaviour and we condemn it.
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“Reform is a very nascent political party and in the end what we’ve got to stick to is the issues that matter to British people, and smearing Reform, calling Reform voters names, calling us racist, these issues no longer matter.”
Watch the exchange below:
Emerald Fennell Explains Why She Cast Jacob Elordi And Margot Robbie In Wuthering Heights Amid Backlash
Emerald Fennell has explained how she came to cast Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as the leads in her new Wuthering Heights movie.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker has faced some criticism in the last year over the actors she chose to portray Catherine and Heathcliff in her much-hyped film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic gothic novel.
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Many have questioned whether Margot, who turned 35 earlier this year, was the right choice for Catherine, given the character is in her late teens for much of the main story, while others have accused the film of “whitewashing” the character of Heathcliff, who is described in the book as being “dark-skinned”.
While his ethnicity is never specified in the source material, it’s been pointed out by fans that Heathcliff is subjected to racism by other characters in the book, particularly as a younger man, so the Euphoria actor’s casting in the role has been a controversial one.
Per BBC News, Emerald opened up about her reasons for casting Margot and Jacob while speaking at the Brontë family home over the weekend.
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via Associated Press
Emerald explained that the idea for Jacob to play Heathcliff occurred to her when they were working together on her most recent film, Saltburn.
“He looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read,” Emerald recalled. “And it was so awful because I so wanted to scream. Not the professional thing to do, obviously.
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“I had been thinking about making [a film version of Wuthering Heights], and it seemed to me he had the thing… he’s a very surprising actor.”
As for Margot, Emerald noted that she’s “not like anyone I’ve ever met – ever”, which is the same way she felt about the character when she first read Wuthering Heights.
“[Margot is] so beautiful and interesting and surprising, and she is the type of person who, like Cathy, could get away with anything,” the Promising Young Woman director said. “I think honestly she could commit a killing spree and nobody would mind. And that is who Cathy is to me. Cathy is somebody who just pushes to see how far she can go.
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“So it needed somebody like Margot, who’s a star, not just an incredible actress – which she is – but somebody who has a power, an otherworldly power, a Godlike power, that means people lose their minds.”
via Associated Press
While Emerald and Jacob first worked together on Saltburn, she and Margot have also collaborated numerous times.
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Margot was an executive producer on both Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, while Emerald made a brief appearance in the 2023 movie Barbie as Midge, a friend of Margot’s doll character.
Preview screenings of Wuthering Heights were reported to have first taken place earlier this year – with audiences having a big reaction to some of the artistic choices Emerald has made with her latest film.
Earth was born dry until a cosmic collision made it a blue planet
After the formation of the Solar System, it took a maximum of three million years for the chemical composition of the Earth’s precursor to be completed. This is shown by a new study by the Institute of Geological Sciences at the University of Bern. At this time, however, there were hardly any elements necessary for life such as water or carbon compounds on the young planet. Only a later planetary collision probably brought water to Earth, paving the way for life.
Earth is so far the only known planet on which life exists — with liquid water and a stable atmosphere. However, the conditions were not conducive to life when it formed. The gas-dust cloud from which all the planets in the Solar System formed was rich in volatile elements essential for life, such as hydrogen, carbon and sulphur. However, in the inner Solar System — the part closest to the Sun, where the four rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars and the asteroid belt are located today — these volatile elements could hardly exist: Due to the high temperature of the Sun, they did not condense and initially remained largely in the gas phase. As these gaseous substances were not incorporated into the solid rocky materials from which the planets were formed, the early precursor of the Earth, the so-called proto-Earth, also contained very little of these vital substances. Only celestial bodies that formed further away from the Sun in cooler regions were able to incorporate these components. When and how the Earth became a life-friendly planet is still not fully understood.
In a new study, researchers from the Institute of Geological Sciences at the University of Bern have now been able to show for the first time that the chemical composition of the early Earth was complete no later than three million years after the formation of the Solar System — and in a way that initially made the emergence of life impossible. Their results, recently published in the journal Science Advances, suggest that life on Earth was only made possible by a later event. Dr. Pascal Kruttasch is first author of the study, which was part of his dissertation at the Institute of Geological Sciences and was financially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Kruttasch is now an SNSF Postdoc Mobility Fellow at Imperial College London.
Using a precise clock to measure the history of the Earth’s formation
The research team used a combination of isotope and element data from meteorites and terrestrial rocks to reconstruct the process of the Earth’s formation. Using model calculations, the researchers were able to narrow down in time how the chemical composition of the Earth developed in comparison to other planetary building blocks.
Kruttasch explains: “A high-precision time measurement system based on the radioactive decay of manganese-53 was used to determine the precise age. This isotope was present in the early Solar System and decayed to chromium-53 with a half-life of around 3.8 million years.” This method allowed ages to be determined with an accuracy of less than one million years for materials that are several billion years old. “These measurements were only possible because the University of Bern has internationally recognized expertise and infrastructure for the analysis of extraterrestrial materials and is a leader in the field of isotope geochemistry,” says co-author Klaus Mezger, Professor Emeritus of Geochemistry at the Institute of Geological Sciences at the University of Bern.
Life on Earth thanks to a cosmic coincidence?
Using model calculations, the research team was able to show that the chemical signature of the proto-Earth, i.e. the unique pattern of chemical substances of which it is composed, was already complete less than three million years after the formation of the Solar System. Their study thus provides empirical data on the time of formation of the original material of the young Earth. “Our Solar System formed around 4,568 million years ago. Considering that it only took up to 3 million years to determine the chemical properties of the Earth, this is surprisingly fast,” says first author Kruttasch.
The results of the study thus support the assumption that a later collision with another planet — Theia — brought the decisive turning point and made the Earth a life-friendly planet. Theia probably formed further out in the Solar System, where volatile substances such as water accumulated. “Thanks to our results, we know that the proto-Earth was initially a dry rocky planet. It can therefore be assumed that it was only the collision with Theia that brought volatile elements to Earth and ultimately made life possible there,” says Kruttasch.
Life-friendliness in the universe cannot be taken for granted
The new study contributes significantly to our understanding of the processes in the early phase of the Solar System and provides clues as to when and how planets on which life is possible can form. “The Earth does not owe its current life-friendliness to a continuous development, but probably to a chance event — the late impact of a foreign, water-rich body. This makes it clear that life-friendliness in the universe is anything but a matter of course,” says Mezger.
The next step would be to investigate the collision event between proto-Earth and Theia in more detail. “So far, this collision event is insufficiently understood. Models are needed that can fully explain not only the physical properties of the Earth and Moon, but also their chemical composition and isotope signatures,” concludes Kruttasch.
How weight-loss injections are turning obesity into a wealth issue
With claims of a ‘two-tier system’, could it be that these drugs are exacerbating health inequalities?
Can England’s rugby heroes inspire more girls to stay in sport?
Sports groups hope England Women’s Rugby World Cup success can boost girls playing sport.
