"The Lumberjack is a suspenseful drama thriller, and it will give you chills.
A mix between; The Silence of the Lambs & First Blood"
Looking for peace, she found a nightmare…
Fading movie star Christina Dawn has decided to start a new life, so she
relocates from L.A. to a picturesque mountain town, hoping she'll find peace
and tranquility there.
Meanwhile, a man who has hunted a witness to a massacre for over fifty years
has also settled in the town, Skull Creek, in an effort to keep a dangerous
legacy hidden from the world.
Little do Christina and Nero know that their paths will soon cross, leading to
a horrifying revelation: a practice that has recurred for centuries, causing
the murders of countless people, none of which have ever been linked or solved.
The largest manhunt in history is about to take place. But what law enforcement
will soon discover is that they aren't the ones doing the hunting.
NASA scientists used microwave
observations to spot the first polar cyclone on Uranus, seen here as a
light-colored dot to the right of center in each image of the planet. The
images use wavelength bands K, Ka, and Q, from left. To highlight cyclone features,
a different color map was used for each. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/VLA
Scientists
used ground-based telescopes to get unprecedented views, thanks to the giant
planet’s position in its long orbit around the Sun.
For the first
time, NASA scientists have strong evidence of a polar cyclone on Uranus. By
examining radio waves emitted from the ice giant, they detected the phenomenon
at the planet’s north pole. The findings confirm a broad truth about all
planets with substantial atmospheres in our solar system: Whether the planets
are composed mainly of rock or gas, their atmospheres show signs of a swirling
vortex at the poles.
Scientists
have long known that Uranus’ south pole has a swirling feature. NASA’s Voyager 2 imaging of methane cloud tops
there showed winds at the polar center spinning faster than over the rest of
the pole. Voyager’s infrared measurements observed no temperature changes, but
the new findings, published in Geophysical
Research Letters, do.
This image of Uranus was taken by
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/VLA
Using huge radio
antenna dishes of the Very Large Array in New Mexico, they peered below the ice
giant’s clouds, determining that the circulating air at the north pole seems to
be warmer and drier – the hallmarks of a strong cyclone. Collected in 2015,
2021, and 2022, the observations went deeper into Uranus’ atmosphere than any
before.
“These observations tell us a lot more
about the story of Uranus. It’s a much more dynamic world than you might
think,” said lead author Alex Akins of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Southern California. “It isn’t just a plain blue ball of gas. There’s a lot
happening under the hood.”
Uranus is showing off more these days,
thanks to the planet’s position in orbit. It’s a long haul around the solar
system for this outer planet, taking 84 years to complete a full lap, and for
the last few decades the poles weren’t pointed toward Earth. Since about 2015,
scientists have had a better view and have been able to look deeper into the
polar atmosphere.
Ingredients
for a Cyclone
The cyclone on Uranus, compactly shaped
with warm and dry air at its core, is much like those spotted by
NASA’s Cassini at
Saturn. With the new findings, cyclones (which rotate in the same direction
their planet rotates) or anti-cyclones (which rotate in the opposite direction)
have now been identified at the poles on every planet in our solar system
except for Mercury, which has no substantial atmosphere.
But unlike hurricanes on Earth, cyclones on
Uranus and Saturn aren’t formed over water (neither planet is known to have
liquid water), and they don’t drift; they’re locked at the poles. Researchers
will be watching closely to see how this newly discovered Uranus cyclone
evolves in the coming years.
“Does the warm core we observed represent
the same high-speed circulation seen by Voyager?” Akins asked. “Or are there
stacked cyclones in Uranus’ atmosphere? The fact that we’re still finding out
such simple things about how Uranus’ atmosphere works really gets me excited to
find out more about this mysterious planet.”
The National Academies’ 2023 Planetary
Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey prioritized exploring Uranus.
In preparation for such a mission, planetary scientists are focused on
bolstering their knowledge about the mysterious ice giant’s system.
A new
generation of wirelessly powered, environmentally friendly 'smart bandages'
could help patients with non-healing wounds avoid infections, scientists say.
The bandage could help improve the quality of life of
people who live with chronic non-healing wounds, which currently frequently
require painful cleaning and treatment. Non-healing wounds can be a side effect
of certain medications or health factors like diabetes, cancer or damaged blood
vessels.
A team of researchers from the UK and France developed
the first-of-its-kind bandage, which is embedded with light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to bathe wounds in sterilizing ultraviolet light, preventing the growth of bacteria without the use of drugs like
antibiotics.
UV light is already widely used to sterilize objects
like surgical equipment and fresh food. Treating bacterial infections in
non-healing wounds with UV light instead of drugs could help to slow the rise
of dangerous new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria known as
"superbugs."
In a new paper published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and
Systems, the researchers outline how they built the smart bandage and demonstrated its antibacterial effectiveness.
They built a slim, flexible inductive coil which could
be integrated into the fabric of the bandage. The coil uses a technique called
magnetic-resonant wireless power transfer to provide power to the UV LEDs
without the need for batteries.
Instead, the
inductive coil receives its power over the air, transmitted from a second coil
connected to the electrical mains. The LEDs can be powered indefinitely simply
by keeping the transmitting and receiving coils close to one another until the
antimicrobial treatment is complete.
In lab tests, the researchers exposed samples of a strain of gram-negative bacteria
called Pseudoalteromonas sp. D41 to the UV light supplied by the smart bandage.
Some forms of gram-negative bacteria can cause a range of serious infections in
humans.
The tests showed that the smart bandage could slow and
stop the growth of Pseudoalteromonas sp. D41 on the surfaces of slides,
effectively eradicating the bacteria within six hours. The researchers suggest
that the system could find use in medical settings to do the same for bacteria
in patients' chronic non-healing wounds.
Professor Steve Beeby, RAEng chair in emerging
technologies at the University of Southampton, is a co-author of the paper. He
said, "The use of ultraviolet light to kill viruses and bacteria is well
known and this is the first work to integrate UVC emitting LEDs within a
bandage and explore its efficacy. This approach could provide a significant
benefit to the treatment of persistent wounds and is a major advance over
typical smart bandages that attempt to monitor wound condition."
Dr. Mahmoud Wagih, of the University of Glasgow's
James Watt School of Engineering, is another co-author of the paper. He developed the
smart bandage's wireless power delivery system.
Credit: University of Glasgow
Dr. Wagih said, "Traditional batteries are bulky, inflexible, and
need to be changed regularly. That makes them difficult to use in bandages,
which need to conform closely to the contours of patients' bodies to deliver
reliable treatment over several hours. The system we've developed is flexible
and can be seamlessly integrated into the fabric of a bandage to power the
LEDs, which deliver UV-C light across any surface."
"We believe that smart
bandages will be key to future healthcare, but we need to be mindful of their
environmental footprint. In the UK alone, over 40,000 tons of batteries are
sold annually and less than half of them are recycled. Our wireless power
technology will allow healthcare wearables to grow, sustainably, as an
alternative to drug-based treatments" .
"We'll be continuing to
collaborate on developing the bandage further to integrate sensors capable of
monitoring the progress of wounds, as well as setting out to test the
technology in clinical settings in the years to come."
The smart bandage is built on
technology initially developed by Dr. Wagih and his colleagues from the
University of Southampton. The research is showcased in a second paper,
recently published in IEEE Transactions
on Industrial Electronics.
The paper demonstrates the
first use of magnetic-resonant wireless power transfer to provide electricity
to standard textiles using embroidery or screen printing—a feature which helped
to make the smart bandage possible.
In this case, the power was
supplied to a newly developed flexible electronic resistor made from silver and
carbon which was printed into a textile surface to act as a wearable heating
element. The system was capable of being heated to up to 60◦C
while separated from the transmitter by 2cm at an efficiency exceeding 50%.
Credit: University of Glasgow
Dr. Wagih
said, "Heaters are very power-intensive, so battery-powered heaters tend
to either chew through batteries very quickly or provide only a moderate amount
of heat for a bit longer before a change is required."
"This paper shows how high-frequency magnetic-resonant wireless power transfer can be used to power an
efficient heating system built into clothing which can be washed and reused,
which is impossible with conventional batteries."
"The efficiency of power delivery is twice that
of previous wearable wireless power receivers developed elsewhere. Given the
importance of energy-efficient heating solutions, this opens up new
possibilities for use in medical applications, heated clothing which could be
worn in cold conditions, and more."by University
of Glasgow
Astronomers using
NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope have come up
with what they say is some of their best evidence yet for the presence of a
rare class of "intermediate-sized" black hole that may be lurking in
the heart of the closest globular star cluster to Earth, located 6,000
light-years away.
Like intense gravitational potholes in the
fabric of space, virtually all black holes seem to come in two sizes: small and
humongous. It's estimated that our galaxy is littered with 100 million small
black holes (several times the mass of our Sun) created from exploded stars.
The universe at large is flooded with supermassive black holes, weighing
millions or billions of times our Sun’s mass and found in the centers of
galaxies.
A long-sought missing link is an
intermediate-mass black hole, weighing in somewhere between 100 and 100,000
solar masses. How would they form, where would they hang out, and why do they
seem to be so rare?
A Hubble Space Telescope image of
the globular star cluster, Messier 4. The cluster is a dense collection of
several hundred thousand stars. Astronomers suspect that an intermediate-mass
black hole, weighing as much as 800 times the mass of our Sun, is lurking,
unseen, at its core. Credits: ESA/Hubble, NASA
Astronomers have identified other possible
intermediate-mass black holes through a variety of observational techniques.
Two of the best candidates — 3XMM J215022.4−055108, which Hubble helped discover in
2020, and HLX-1, identified in 2009 — reside in dense star clusters
in the outskirts of other galaxies. Each of these possible black holes has the
mass of tens of thousands of suns, and may have once been at the centers of
dwarf galaxies. NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory has also helped make many
possible intermediate black hole discoveries, including a large sample
in 2018.
Looking much closer to home, there
have been a number of suspected intermediate-mass black holes detected in dense
globular star clusters orbiting our Milky Way galaxy. For example, in 2008, Hubble astronomers announced the
suspected presence of an intermediate-mass black hole in the globular cluster
Omega Centauri. For a number of reasons, including the need for more data,
these and other intermediate-mass black hole findings still remain inconclusive
and do not rule out alternative theories.
Hubble's unique capabilities have
now been used to zero in on the core of the globular star cluster Messier 4
(M4) to go black-hole hunting with higher precision than in previous searches.
"You can't do this kind of science without Hubble," said Eduardo
Vitral of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, lead
author on a paper to be published in the Monthly
Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Vitral’s team has detected a
possible intermediate-mass black hole of roughly 800 solar masses. The
suspected object can't be seen, but its mass is calculated by studying the
motion of stars caught in its gravitational field, like bees swarming around a
hive. Measuring their motion takes time, and a lot of precision. This is where
Hubble accomplishes what no other present-day telescope can do. Astronomers
looked at 12 years' worth of M4 observations from Hubble and resolved pinpoint
stars.
His team estimates that the black
hole in M4 could be as much as 800 times our Sun's mass. Hubble's data tend to
rule out alternative theories for this object, such as a compact central
cluster of unresolved stellar remnants like neutron stars, or smaller black
holes swirling around each other.
"We have good confidence that
we have a very tiny region with a lot of concentrated mass. It's about three
times smaller than the densest dark mass that we had found before in other
globular clusters," said Vitral. "The region is more compact than
what we can reproduce with numerical simulations when we take into account a
collection of black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs segregated at the
cluster's center. They are not able to form such a compact concentration of
mass."
Credits: NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center; Lead Producer: Paul Morris; Computer Representation of the
Stellar Motions in the Core of M4: Mattia Libralato (AURA/STScI for ESA)
A grouping of close-knit objects
would be dynamically unstable. If the object isn't a single intermediate-mass
black hole, it would require an estimated 40 smaller black holes crammed into a
space only one-tenth of a light-year across to produce the observed stellar
motions. The consequences are that they would merge and/or be ejected in a game
of interstellar pinball.
"We measure the motions of
stars and their positions, and we apply physical models that try to reproduce
these motions. We end up with a measurement of a dark mass extension in the
cluster's center," said Vitral. "The closer to the central mass, more
randomly the stars are moving. And, the greater the central mass, the faster
these stellar velocities."
Because intermediate-mass black
holes in globular clusters have been so elusive, Vitral cautions, "While
we cannot completely affirm that it is a central point of gravity, we can show
that it is very small. It's too tiny for us to be able to explain other than it
being a single black hole. Alternatively, there might be a stellar mechanism we
simply don't know about, at least within current physics."
The Hubble Space Telescope is a
project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space
Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble and
Webb science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of
Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.
Our approach DragGAN allows users to
"drag" the content of any GAN-generated images. Users only need to
click a few handle points (red) and target points (blue) on the image, and our
approach will move the handle points to precisely reach their corresponding
target points. Users can optionally draw a mask of the flexible region
(brighter area), keeping the rest of the image fixed. This flexible point-based
manipulation enables control of many spatial attributes like pose, shape,
expression, and layout across diverse object categories. Credit: arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2305.10973
A team of computer scientists from the Max Planck
Institute for Informatics, MIT, Google and the University of Pennsylvania has
developed a new AI imaging tool for user-interactive 3D manipulation of 2D
images depicted in a photograph. The team published a paper describing the new
tool, which is called DragGAN, on the arXiv preprint
server along with short videos depicting what the tool can do.
Photoshop was
first released back in the late 1980s, and since that time, it and similar apps
have been used to edit photographs. Such use has become a standard part of
social media—people photoshop images before posting them online as a way to
"improve" them. In this new effort, the research team has taken image
editing to a whole new level by adding artificial intelligence.
At first glance,
DragGAN looks very much like any other image manipulation tool. But videos posted
by the creative team clarify that it is capable of doing things no prior
application has come even close to achieving, allowing users to alter images in
imaginary 3D, on the fly. The researchers call
the results "hallucinated occluded content."
Photographs, by their very nature,
are two-dimensional. Previous photo editing tools have allowed for blurring, coloring or
even patching in other imagery. But all such editing is based on user
effort—the user has to direct the color correction or blur out wrinkles. An
AI-based photo editing tool, taught to recognize features through analyzing
thousands or millions of other images, can infer what missing parts of a
picture might look like and make changes based on that, with user prompting.
In one video, for example, a photograph of an angry person
can be changed to show the same person smiling—all with just a click and a
drag. The person's face can be turned, as well, revealing parts of the head
that were never captured in the original photograph. Likewise, cars, animals or
landscapes can be drastically altered using just a few clicks and drags. Adding
AI to photo editing adds a whole new dimension to the category—one that could
make as big a splash as Photoshop did when it was first introduced.
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