Wolfsburg. Gunnar Kilian will be leaving Volkswagen AG’s Group Board of Management with immediate effect. His current area of responsibility, Human Resources, will be taken over by Thomas Schäfer until further notice. The Group Supervisory Board adopted this resolution on Friday. This became necessary due to differing views on how holding companies should be managed.
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Neeraj Chopra views NC Classic as watershed moment for Indian athletics
Two-time Olympic medallist Neeraj Chopra believes the NC Classic 2025 javelin throw, set to take place in Bengaluru on Saturday, will be a watershed moment for Indian athletics.
Named in his honour, the inaugural NC Classic marks a historic milestone as India’s first-ever World Athletics Continental Tour Gold Level or World Athletics Category A event.
For the Tokyo 2020 gold medallist, the moment is as surreal as it is significant.
“I feel like I’m in a dream. Medals are a different thing. But I’ve given something like this to India and to Indian athletes,” Neeraj said at the pre-event press conference on Friday. “I’m very happy about that. This is the beginning of a new chapter in our athletics.”
While the event does bear his name, Neeraj was quick to emphasise that the NC Classic isn’t about personal recognition, but more to do with providing world-class platforms for future Indian athletes to compete alongside the global elite.
“This is the beginning of international competitions in India. As we see, there are so many international competitions in Germany and such nations – A category, B, C etc and every week, there’s a competition,” he said.
“So, this is what I want in India, as there should be at least 4, 5, 6 competitions which are world class. The athletes should get a chance and people should see them play. That will be very good for our sport,” the Indian javelin throw ace added.
Even though the significance of the inaugural NC Classic isn’t lost on Neeraj, his main focus still firmly remains on defending his title at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo in September.
“Of course, tomorrow’s competition is very important and after that we will start preparing for the World Championships. I’m very happy to be here with the coach (Jan Zelezny). Yesterday, I was training in the gym with the coach. This is the kind of competition that will be the target ahead of the World Championship,” Neeraj stressed.
The NC Classic will be Neeraj’s sixth competitive outing of the 2025 athletics season.
The reigning world champion and two-time Olympic medallist began his season with a win at the Potch Invitational in South Africa before finishing second at the Doha Diamond League, where he breached the 90m barrier with a massive 90.23m throw – a new national record.
He had to settle for a second-place finish again at the Janusz Kusocinski Memorial in Poland before logging wins at the Paris leg of the Diamond League and the prestigious Ostrava Golden Spike athletics meet in Czechia.
Neeraj’s last outing on Indian soil was at the Federation Cup in Bhubaneswar last year, where he claimed top spot with a relatively modest 82.27m effort.
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Game On: You Can Now Drive a Ford Mustang GTD in Fortnite and Rocket League
The mightiest Mustang ever made is no longer for the lucky few. Anyone with a gaming console or PC can take control of the 815-hp Mustang GTD as it’s now available in the in-game stores of Fortnite and Rocket League.
Interestingly, neither of these are actually racing sims. Fortnite is a “Battle Royale” game, but has increasingly become a showcase for automakers thanks to its 110 million monthly players. Ford is in good company, with Lamborghini, McLaren, Porsche, Ferrari, BMW, Nissan, Tesla, Jeep, Dodge, and Cadillac all offering cars to Fortnite players.. You’ll also find screen star cars such as K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider and the Nissan Skyline GT-R and Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat from the Fast and Furious franchise, as well as a bunch of vehicles developed just for the game. Ford’s lineup also includes the Shelby GT500, and Bronco Raptor.
Fortnite players can use the new Mustang GTD to hoon around the map, and there are even gas stations to refuel, while each can also be customized. The Mustang GTD costs 2800 V-Bucks, which is rather less than the $325,000 of the real car and can also be had in T-Pain livery in a collaboration with the rap artist.
Rocket League is essentially a soccer-style game, but instead of kicking a ball players drive exotic vehicles in an arena and try to score a goal against their opponent. Ford already offers the Mustang Mach-E, GT350R, Bronco Raptor and F-150 to Rocket League’s 100 million active monthly players. It also costs 2800 credits. Other carmakers showcasing their machines in the game include Aston Martin, BMW, McLaren, and Lamborghini. Movie machines from Batman, Back to the Future, Knight Rider, Jurassic World, and the Marvel universe also star.
With both Fortnite and Rocket League free to download on almost every gaming platform, now anyone can take control of the ultimate pony car.
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Tiandu scientists successfully prototype lunar regolith 3D printer – VoxelMatters
- Tiandu scientists successfully prototype lunar regolith 3D printer VoxelMatters
- 3D Printing On The Moon: Project Olympus parametric-architecture.com
- Who Can Build on the Moon? Understanding the Wild West of Lunar Architecture Architectural Digest
- Ceramics will be critical to the lunar economy—but we don’t know how to make them on site Phys.org
- How to make building blocks for a lunar habitat Phys.org
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Curiosity Cracked Open a Rock on Mars And Discovered a Huge Surprise : ScienceAlert
A rock on Mars spilled a surprising yellow treasure after Curiosity accidentally cracked through its unremarkable exterior.
When the rover rolled its 899-kilogram (1,982-pound) body over the fragile lump of mineral in May last year the deposit broke open, revealing yellow crystals of elemental sulfur: brimstone.
Although sulfates are fairly common on Mars, this represents the first time sulfur has been found on the red planet in its pure elemental form.
Related: Largest Mars Rock on Earth Could Sell For US$4 Million
What’s even more exciting is that the Gediz Vallis Channel, where Curiosity found the rock, is littered with objects that look suspiciously similar to the sulfur rock before it got fortuitously crushed – suggesting that, somehow, elemental sulfur may be abundant there in some places.
frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen>“Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert,” said Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in July 2024.
“It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”
Sulfates are salts that form when sulfur, usually in compound form, mixes with other minerals in water.
When the water evaporates, the minerals mix and dry out, leaving the sulfates behind.
These sulfate minerals can tell us a lot about Mars, such as its water history, and how it has weathered over time.
The sulfur Curiosity found on Mars. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS) Pure sulfur, on the other hand, only forms under a very narrow set of conditions, which are not known to have occurred in the region of Mars where Curiosity made its discovery.
There are, to be fair, a lot of things we don’t know about the geological history of Mars, but the discovery of scads of pure sulfur just hanging about on the Martian surface suggests that there’s something pretty big that we’re not aware of.
Curiosity’s view of the Gediz Valley channel. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS) Sulfur, it’s important to understand, is an essential element for all life. It’s usually taken up in the form of sulfates, and used to make two of the essential amino acids living organisms need to make proteins.
Since we’ve known about sulfates on Mars for some time, the discovery doesn’t tell us anything new in that area. We’re yet to find any signs of life on Mars, anyway.
A rock very similar to the one broken by Curiosity, photographed nine days after the sulfur discovery. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS) But we do keep stumbling across the remains of bits and pieces that living organisms would find useful, including chemistry, water, and past habitable conditions.
Stuck here on Earth, we’re fairly limited in how we can access Mars. Curiosity’s instruments were able to analyze and identify the sulfurous rocks in the Gediz Vallis Channel, but if it hadn’t taken a route that rolled over and cracked one open, it could have been sometime until we found the sulfur.
Curiosity’s path (in yellow) towards Gediz Vallis channel (top-center). (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UC Berkeley) The next step will be to figure out exactly how, based on what we know about Mars, that sulfur may have come to be there.
That’s going to take a bit more work, possibly involving some detailed modeling of Mars’s geological evolution.
Meanwhile, Curiosity will continue to collect data on the same.
frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen>The Gediz Vallis channel is an area rich in Martian history, an ancient waterway whose rocks now bear the imprint of the ancient river that once flowed over them, billions of years ago.
Curiosity drilled a hole in one of the rocks, taking a powdered sample of its interior for chemical analysis, and is still trundling its way deeper along the channel, to see what other surprises might be waiting just around the next rock.
An earlier version of this article was published in July 2024.
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Review | On ‘Period,’ the old Kesha is back. Again. – The Washington Post
- Review | On ‘Period,’ the old Kesha is back. Again. The Washington Post
- Kesha’s comeback era: New album, new label, and zero apologies The Express Tribune
- Kesha: . (Period) review – a smart, funny return to her hedonistic hot-mess persona The Guardian
- Kesha Is Free, Fierce, and Finally in Charge Kiss 95.1
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Biting the ‘Bullet’: Amazing new JWST photo shows titanic collision of galaxy clusters
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has produced a new image of the Bullet Cluster, which is a titanic collision between two individual galaxy clusters.
The image, produced in conjunction with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, reveals not only the location and mass of dark matter present, but also points the way toward one day figuring out what dark matter is actually made of.
In the new image, we see the hot gas within the Bullet Cluster in false-color pink, detected by Chandra. The inferred location of dark matter is represented in blue (also false color), as measured by the JWST. Note that the blue and the pink are separate — what has caused the dark matter and the gas to separate, and how were astronomers able to produce this map of the material within the Bullet Cluster?
Located 3.9 billion light-years away, the Bullet Cluster has been an occasionally controversial poster child for dark-matter studies. Back in 2006, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory worked together to image the Bullet, showing the presence of its dark matter based on how light from more distant galaxies was being gravitationally lensed by the dark matter’s mass.
Collisions between galaxy clusters are the perfect laboratories for testing our ideas about dark matter, because they are nature’s way of throwing together huge amounts of the stuff. This gives us a chance to test how dark matter particles interact with each other, if at all, and the degree of any interaction would be a huge clue as to the properties of the mysterious dark matter particle.
Yet despite the dramatic Hubble and Chandra images, the Bullet Cluster — and, indeed, other galaxy cluster collisions — haven’t always played ball. For instance, the velocities at which the sub-clusters are colliding seem too high for the standard model of cosmology to explain.
Now the JWST has entered into the fray. A team led by Ph.D. student Sangjun Cha of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, and professor of astronomy James Jee at both Yonsei and the University of California, Davis, have used the most powerful space telescope ever built to get a best-ever look at the Bullet Cluster.
Hubble and Chandra had previously shown that, as the two individual galaxy clusters in the Bullet Cluster collided, the galaxies and their surrounding dark matter haloes had passed right through each other. This makes sense for the galaxies — the distances between them are so great that the chance of a head-on collision between any two is slim. It also suggests that the degree with which dark matter particles interact with each other — what we refer to as their collisional cross section — is small; otherwise, the interaction would have slowed the clouds of dark matter down, and we would detect it closer to where Chandra sees the hot, X-ray emitting intracluster gas. In contrast to the dark matter, these huge gas clouds can’t get out of each other’s way, so they slam into each other and don’t progress any further.
The end result is that the hot gas is found stuck in the middle of the collision, and the galaxies and dark matter belonging to each sub-cluster are found on opposite sides, having glided right through one another.
“Our JWST measurements support this,” Jee told Space.com. “The galaxy distribution closely traces the dark matter.”
JWST was able to produce a better map of the distribution of matter, both ordinary and dark, in the Bullet Cluster by detecting, for the first time, the combined glow from billions of stars that have been thrown out of their galaxies and are now free-floating in the space between the galaxies in each sub-cluster. Cha and Jee’s team were then able to use the light from these “intracluster stars” to trace the presence of dark matter and gain a more accurate map of its distribution in the Bullet Cluster.
However, this has just raised more mysteries. The more refined map of the dark matter shows that, in the larger sub-cluster, on the left, the dark matter is arranged in an elongated, “hammerhead” shape that, according to Jee, “cannot be easily explained by a single head-on collision.”
This elongated mass of dark matter is resolved into smaller clumps centered on what we call the brightest cluster galaxies — giant elliptical galaxies that are the brightest galaxies in the sub-cluster located at its gravitational core. In contrast, the dark matter halo around the sub-cluster on the opposite side is smaller and more compact.
Cha and Jee’s team suspect that the elongated, clumpy mass of dark matter could only have formed when that particular sub-cluster, which was a galaxy cluster in its own right before the Bullet collision, underwent a similar collision and merger with another galaxy cluster billions of years before the formation of the Bullet.
The JWST and Chandra’s image of the Bullet Cluster. Pink represents hot gas, while blue is the location of dark matter. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/CXC) “Such an event would have stretched and distorted the dark-matter halo over time, resulting in the elongated morphology that we observe,” said Jee.
Despite the new discoveries such as this from JWST’s more refined observations of the Bullet cluster, it is still not enough to resolve the issue of the collision velocities of the two sub-clusters.
“Even with these updates, the required collision velocity remains high relative to expectations from cosmological simulations,” said Jee. “The tension persists and remains an active area of research.”
Dark matter makes up over a quarter of all the mass and energy in the universe, and roughly 85% of all matter, so figuring out its secrets, in particular its collisional cross-section and the cause of those high velocities, is going to be essential if we want to better understand this universe in which we live.
Alas, the JWST observations of the Bullet Cluster alone are not enough to confirm what the collisional cross-section of dark matter must be. However, they do tighten the estimate of the upper limit for the value of the cross-section, constraining the list of possibilities.
Astronomers are already in the process of rigorously measuring as many galaxy cluster collisions as possible, seen from all angles and distances, to try and constrain this value further. Gradually, we’ll be able to rule out different models for what dark matter could be, until we’re left with just a few. Coupled with experimental data from direct dark matter searches from detectors deep underground, such as the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, we could soon be on the cusp of answering one of science’s greatest mysteries: what is dark matter?
The JWST observations were reported on June 30 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Giant radio telescope in the Utah desert could reveal hidden corners of the cosmos — and brand-new physics
A gigantic array of radio dishes proposed for the Utah desert could advance our understanding of physics and help us decode cosmic radio signals. Now, scientists have outlined how it would work.
Beginning in the 1950s, radio astronomy has opened up a powerful view into the inner workings of the universe, revealing everything from how stars form to incredible images of our galaxy’s gigantic black hole. Now, astronomers are building a gigantic array of radio dishes, called the Deep Synoptic Array 2000 (DSA-2000). The array consists of 2,000 radio dishes, each 16 feet (5 meters) across, laid out in a radio-quiet part of the Utah desert.
Now, an international team of astronomers has demonstrated how DSA-2000 will be a premier instrument for revealing some of the most hidden corners, particles and processes in the cosmos.
Because DSA-2000 will have both a wide field of view and a high resolution, it will be like the world’s ultimate digital camera but at radio frequencies, the team explained in a paper uploaded to the preprint database arXiv in May. These capabilities will allow the DSA-2000 to detect a wide variety of phenomena that are not possible with our current radio telescopes.
And there are a whole lot of unexplored radio transmissions in the universe. For example, astronomers think the vast majority of the mass of every galaxy comes in the form of dark matter, an invisible entity that has so far escaped direct detection.
One potential candidate for dark matter is called the axion, a hypothetical particle trillions of times lighter than the lightest known particles. Axions can collect around dense objects like neutron stars, and under the influence of extremely strong magnetic fields (which neutron stars have in spades), they can convert to photons with just the right frequency range that DSA-2000 could pick up those signals.
Related: ‘Staggering’ first images from Vera C. Rubin Observatory show 10 million galaxies — and billions more are on the way
Another candidate for dark matter is called the dark photon, which is like our normal, familiar photons (light particles) but … dark. Dark photons can also collect around neutron stars, where they can get whipped up into a frenzy due to the star’s extreme rotation. In a process called superradiance, the dark photons get boosted to extremely high energies, where they start to resonate with regular photons, giving off blasts of signals that could be directly detected by DSA-2000.
This means that DSA-2000 could potentially offer our first direct glimpse of a new form of matter in the universe. But that’s not all.
In 2023, astronomers with the NANOGrav experiment announced the detection of gravitational waves through pulsar timing arrays. DSA-2000 could take that one step further by precisely measuring the rotation rates of approximately 3,000 pulsars — rapidly spinning neutron stars that pulsate in regular intervals. This would allow the new instrument to find any subtle variations in the spins of pulsars, such as those due to unseen orbiting companions, like black holes or small clumps of dark matter.
Lastly, DSA-2000 could detect tens of thousands of fast radio bursts (FRBs) — tremendous explosions that manifest as blips and bloops in the radio spectrum. This unprecedented number of detections would allow scientists to build a comprehensive survey of the nearby universe, which would aid our understanding of everything from dark energy to the nature of ghostly particles called neutrinos.
The universe is trying to whisper its secrets to us. All the answers are there, if we listen carefully enough.
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The Earth Is Spinning Faster This Summer
While the shortest day of the year typically falls in winter, summer will have its fair share of abnormally short days this year. According to TimeandDate, Earth will spin unusually fast in July and August, resulting in shorter days.
From the point of view of the sun, it takes Earth roughly 86,400 seconds (24 hours) to complete one full rotation. This changes slightly from day to day, and these small variations are measured with atomic clocks. The number of milliseconds above or below 86,400 seconds is referred to as length of day.
Until 2020, the shortest length of day ever recorded was -1.05 milliseconds, meaning it took the Earth 1.05 milliseconds less than 86,400 seconds to complete one rotation. Since then, Earth has beaten this record every year, with the shortest day of all being -1.66 milliseconds.
This month,TimeandDate reports that Earth will get close to its previous record. On July 9, the length of date is expected to be -1.30 milliseconds, followed by -1.38 milliseconds on July 22 and -1.51 milliseconds on August 5.
“Nobody expected this,” Leonid Zotov, a leading authority on Earth rotation at Moscow State University, told the outlet. “The cause of this acceleration is not explained.” Zotov added that most scientists believe it is something inside the Earth. “Ocean and atmospheric models don’t explain this huge acceleration,” he said.
Despite this acceleration, Zotov predicts that Earth will slow down soon. “I think we have reached the minimum,” he told TimeandDate. “Sooner or later, Earth will decelerate.” In the meantime, scientists will continue to study the reason behind Earth’s length of day variations.
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