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COSMIC! This name has become increasingly popular in the open-source community over the past year, raising high expectations. Now, more than two years after System76 unexpectedly announced its bold plan to create a new desktop environment written in Rust programming language from scratch, users can finally try it out. And let me tell you, the wait was worth it.We recently tested the alpha version of COSMIC, and our initial thoughts can be summed up most briefly with this: it’s a game-changer! Above all, it is incredibly fast. And when I say fast, I don’t just mean fast – it’s fast...

“Seeding the Cosmos for Life” –From Supernova to Super Bubbles Posted on Jul 29, 2021 in Astrobiology, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Science Supernova explosions release as much energy in a second as our Sun will in its entire 10-billion year existence. Without supernovae, “there would be no computer chips, trilobites, Mozart or the tears of a little girl,” wrote science writer Clifford A. Pickover.When a massive star explodes at the end of its life, the explosion ejects essential elements – carbon, oxygen, and iron – that form the basis for life across the universe. The supernovae also release tremendous amounts of radiative,...

Astronomers have observed record-breaking photons that strain classical theories of accelerationA little before sunrise on July 4, A.D. 1054, imperial astronomers of the Song Dynasty in China spotted an unknown star lighting up the eastern sky. “It’s as bright as Venus, with pointed rays in all four directions and a reddish-white color,” they wrote in notes delivered to the emperor. The glow, which remained visible to the naked eye during the day for almost a month, was from an explosion caused by the spectacular death of a star located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation of Taurus. Its relics are...

Pope Francis promotes ‘native spirituality’, meets with Amazonian indigenous chief ROME, May 27, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – In his latest effort to “shape a Church with an Amazonian face,” Pope Francis on Monday met with internationally renowned defender of the Amazon’s delicate ecosystem, indigenous chief Raoni Metukire. Raoni, the leader of the Kayapò people, has become the “living symbol” of the fight for the preservation of the Amazon rainforest and indigenous culture, winning the international acclaim of prominent figures and celebrities such as Sting, Arnold Schwarzenegger and former French president Jacque Chirac. His visit to the Vatican is seen as part of Pope Francis’s push...

[Catholic Caucus] Draft for Curia Reform: "Very Negative Impression," "Poor Quality" Marco Tosatti has seen the draft of Praedicate Evangelium, the document for an upcoming reform of the Roman Curia, and had a "very negative impression," "I was struck by the poor quality, from a formal and substantial point of view," he writes on his blog (May 11). Tosatti gives as an example article 130 which calls on episcopal conferences to value and protect "indigenous cultures" with their "heritage of wisdom" and their "cosmic and spiritual balance" as "wealth for all humanity.” "Cosmic?" Tosatti asks. [Among Catholics this is commonly...

The airburst "in an instant, devastated approximately 500 km2 [about 200 square miles] immediately north of the Dead Sea, not only wiping out 100 percent of the [cities] and towns, but also stripping agricultural soils from once-fertile fields and covering the eastern Middle Ghor with a super-heated brine of Dead Sea anhydride salts pushed over the landscape by the event's frontal shock waves," the researchers wrote in the abstract for a paper that was presented at the American Schools of Oriental Research annual meeting held in Denver Nov. 14 to 17. Anhydride salts are a mix of salt and sulfates....

Nearly 40 years after it was proposed, mathematicians have settled one of the most profound questions in the study of general relativity. In a paper posted online last fall, mathematicians Mihalis Dafermos and Jonathan Luk have proven that the strong cosmic censorship conjecture, which concerns the strange inner workings of black holes, is false.“I personally view this work as a tremendous achievement — a qualitative jump in our understanding of general relativity,” emailed Igor Rodnianski, a mathematician at Princeton University.The strong cosmic censorship conjecture was proposed in 1979 by the influential physicist Roger Penrose. It was meant as a...

Cracks in the universe: the search for cosmic strings Galaxy-sized filaments of raw energy may be threaded through spacetime, according to some theories. Will we ever find traces of them? Cathal O’Connell takes up the hunt. Share Tweet Tatyun / Getty Images Our universe exploded into being, expanded at a fantastic speed and cooled. Perhaps too quickly. Some physicists believe the rapid cooling might have cracked the fabric of the universe.These hairline fractures may still be threaded through space-time. Dubbed cosmic strings, mathematical models see them as invisible threads of pure energy, thinner than an atom but light-years long. The...

Physicists have insisted for a long time that black holes are impenetrable ciphers. Whatever goes in is lost, impossible to study or meaningfully understand. Some small amount of matter and energy might escape a black hole in the form of "Hawking radiation," but anything still inside the black hole is functionally disappeared from the physical universe. The idea is a basic premise of modern physics: If something falls into a black hole, it can't be contacted, it's future can't be predicted. No observer could possibly survive traveling into the dark space, not even long enough to glance around and notice...

Cosmic rays fired at Earth - now we know where from The violent region at the centre of our galaxy is the prime candidate, after gamma ray analysis, Bill Condie reports. Photo montage of gamma-rays as measured by the HESS array on the night sky over Namibia, with one of the small HESS telescopes in the foreground. Credit: H.E.S.S. Collaboration, Fabio Acero and Henning Gast Astronomers believe they may have identified the source of the stream of cosmic rays that rain down on Earth from outer space. Cosmic rays are extremely high-energy particles such as protons and atomic nuclei....

Another year passes. Another 365 planetary spins completed (14.6 million kilometers of combined distance traveled if you live at the Earth's equator), and another journey of 940 million kilometers around the Sun. Time is marked off for us by a largely predictable, if not tedious, set of cycles. Except, this is by no means all the cosmic traveling we've done in the last 31.5 million seconds. For one thing, the solar system is not at rest with respect to its host galaxy. The Sun and its planetary entourage are moving in an orbital path within the Milky Way. The generally...

Cosmic Inflation’s Five Great Predictions A “speculative” theory no more; it’s had four of them confirmed. Image credit: Max Tegmark / Scientific American, by Alfred T. Kamajian. “Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.” -Paul Steinhardt, 2014 When we think about the Big Bang, we typically think about the origin of the Universe: the hot, dense, expanding state where everything came from. By noticing and measuring the fact that the Universe is expanding today — that the galaxies are getting farther apart from one another in all directions — we...

Aliens may be trying to communicate with Earth by flashing blinking lasers towards our planet like a cosmic lighthouse, astronomers believe.Laser scientists at the Vienna University of Technology are searching for faint but repetitive light signals from the distant reaches of space, in the hope of identifying signals sent out by extraterrestrials, according to Astrobiology Magazine. Because of their ability to transmit signals over vast distances, lasers have long been considered a possible means of contact by alien species. But while astronomers have searched tens of thousands of stars for laser signals in the past – without identifying any...

New data from Greenland ice cores suggest North America may have suffered a large cosmic impact about 12,900 years ago. A layer of platinum is seen in ice of the same age as a known abrupt climate transition, US scientists report. The climate flip has previously been linked to the demise of the North American "Clovis" people. The data seem to back the idea that an impact tipped the climate into a colder phase, a point of current debate. Rapid climate change occurred 12,900 years ago, and it is proposed that this is associated with the extinction of large mammals...

Scientists have spotted swirling patterns in the radiation lingering from the big bang, the so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB). The observation itself isn't Earth-shaking, as researchers know that these particular swirls or "B-modes" originated in conventional astrophysics, but the result suggests that scientists are closing in on a much bigger prize: B-modes spawned by gravity waves that rippled through the infant universe. That observation would give them a direct peek into the cosmos' first fraction of a second and possibly shed light on how it all began."I see it as a big step forward," says Charles Bennett, a cosmologist...

Did An 8th Century Gamma Ray Burst Irradiate Earth?Science DailyJanuary 21,2013 A nearby short duration gamma-ray burst may be the cause of an intense blast of high-energy radiation that hit the Earth in the 8th century, according to new research led by astronomers Valeri Hambaryan and Ralph NeuhÓ“user. The two scientists, based at the Astrophysics Institute of the University of Jena in Germany, publish their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 2012 scientist Fusa Miyake announced the detection of high levels of the isotope Carbon-14 and Beryllium-10 in tree rings formed in 775 CE,...

“Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.” -James Jeans Here on Earth, every living thing is based around four fundamental, elemental building blocks of life: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and, perhaps most importantly, carbon.Image Credit: Robert Johnson / University of Pennsylvania. From diamonds to nanotubes to DNA, carbon is indispensable for constructing practically all of the most intricate structures we know of. Most of the carbon in our world comes from long-dead stars, in the form of Carbon-12: carbon atoms containing six neutrons in their nucleus. About 1.1% of all carbon is Carbon-13, with one...

Latest research deflates the idea that the Universe cycles for eternity.Our view of the early Universe may be full of mysterious circles — and even triangles — but that doesn't mean we're seeing evidence of events that took place before the Big Bang. So says a trio of papers taking aim at a recent claim that concentric rings of uniform temperature within the cosmic microwave background — the radiation left over from the Big Bang — might, in fact, be the signatures of black holes colliding in a previous cosmic 'aeon' that existed before our Universe.

Have we found the universe that existed before the Big Bang? The current cosmological consensus is that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang. But a legendary physicist says he's found the first evidence of an eternal, cyclic cosmos. The Big Bang model holds that everything that now comprises the universe was once concentrated in a single point of near-infinite density. Before this singularity exploded and the universe began, there was absolutely nothing - indeed, it's not clear whether one can even use the term "before" in reference to a pre-Big-Bang cosmos, as time itself may...

Mg20727753.800-1_300 NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory located a cosmic "ghost" that scientists think is evidence of a huge eruption produced by a supermassive black hole equal in power to a billion supernovas. The source, HDF 130, is over 10 billion light years away and existed at a time 3 billion years after the Big Bang, when galaxies and black holes were forming at a high rate. The X-ray ghost, so-called because a diffuse X-ray source has remained after other radiation from the outburst has died away, is in the Chandra Deep Field-North, one of the deepest X-ray images ever taken. "We'd...