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“This was completely unexpected.”

Stars are essentially large fiery balls of plasma, which is often referred to as the “fourth state of matter” as it forms when gas is heated into a soup of positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons.

The star’s magnetic field is so strong it appears to have “frozen” its surface into a solid outer crust, a press statement reveals.

Naeblys/iStock.

Now, though, an international group of astronomers has observed a star with a solid outer layer for the first time, casting doubt on widely held preconceptions about the cosmic giants lighting the night sky.

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The Large Hadron Collider is one of the most important scientific instruments in the world — and also one of the biggest humans have ever built.

The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, situated along the border between Switzerland and France, just outside the Swiss city of Geneva. Still, that description doesn’t quite do it justice.

It is also one of the largest scientific instruments ever built; the result of a decade of collaboration between over 100 countries, hundreds of universities and scientific institutes, and more than 10,000 scientists and researchers.

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His work will be published soon.

Shanghai-born Zhang Yitang is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. If a 111-page manuscript allegedly written by him passes peer review, he might become the first person to solve the Riemann hypothesis, The South China Morning Post (SCMP)

The Riemann hypothesis is a 150-year-old puzzle that is considered by the community to be the holy grail of mathematics. Published in 1,859, it is a fascinating piece of mathematical conjecture around prime numbers and how they can be predicted.

Riemann hypothesized that prime numbers do not occur erratically but rather follow the frequency of an elaborate function, which is called the Riemann zeta function. Using this function, one can reliably predict where prime numbers occur, but more than a century later, no mathematician has been able to prove this hypothesis.

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The designer has equipped the headset with explosive charges.

Palmer Luckey, the guy who co-founded the virtual reality (VR) headset-making company Oculus, has now made another VR headset that can kill you if you die in an online game. Luckey’s company was acquired by Facebook, now Meta, and his product is now a critical component of the metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg plans to build the company around.

At the outset, it might seem that Zuckerberg did the right thing by acquiring Oculus. Otherwise, we would not really know what sort of products they would bring to the market.

Palmer Luckey.

However, in a blog post, Luckey has given us some clues as to what inspired him to make the VR headsets in the first place and what continues to inspire him even today, and it all boils down to an anime game called Sword Art Online (SOA).

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Turns out, altering bacteria from within could be the solution to antibiotic resistance.

In an ironic twist, researchers used viruses engineered with the CRISPR-Cas system to alter bacterial defense mechanisms and edit their genomes selectively in complex environments. Significantly, the novel approach may help address the pressing issue of antibiotic resistance.

Meletios Verras/iStock.

The CRISPR Conundrum

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face_with_colon_three circa 2012.

A century after Albert Einstein came up with his theories of relativity, a constellation of Global Positioning System satellites is orbiting Earth, making practical use of his ground-breaking understanding of time.

If the discovery of the Higgs boson particle pans out, will even more mind-bending technologies result?

Theoretically, it’s possible, says Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss; but practically, it’s unlikely.

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Digital transformation has been positioned as a cure-all to many of the challenges today’s enterprises face. But to fully reap the benefits of a digital transformation, businesses need to do more than just adopt the latest tools and apps. They also have to change their attitudes, practices and processes around data and technology, throughout their own organization and in their interactions with partners and customers.

“Digital transformation requires a jump on the technology side, but it requires a leap on the people side,” says Bill Gundrey, executive director for digital engineering and operations at Raytheon Missiles & Defense. “At Raytheon, digital transformation is a team sport. It impacts every function in our company, as well as customers and suppliers. We had to change the way people think about data and technology.”

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