Red Star Betelgeuse Had Explosion

NASA Says Restless Red Giant Star Betelgeuse Had an Unprecedented Explosion

Its famous dimming event from a few years ago turns out to be evidence of a recent explosion rather than an imminent supernova.

Massive red supergiant star Betelgeuse is at the end of its life span, at least on cosmic timescales, but the gargantuan fireball is going out kicking and screaming.

Astronomers used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories to determine that the senior star actually blew off part of its surface in 2019.

"We've never before seen a huge mass ejection of the surface of a star. We are left with something going on that we don't completely understand," Andrea Dupree, from the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement.

"It's a totally new phenomenon that we can observe directly and resolve surface details with Hubble. We're watching stellar evolution in real time."  READ MORE...

Becoming Healthy Easily

Is punching health data into your phone or constantly checking your watch to see how much oxygen your blood has starting to feel like a chore?

We live in a time where the line between our bodies and our data is getting increasingly blurry. With the availability of apps that track our menstrual cycles and watches that can tell how stressed we are, there's pressure to keep tabs on any incremental changes to our health metrics. If we don't, how can we possibly know if we're healthy?

While tracking such metrics can be helpful (or even fun), it's not necessary to live a healthy life. In fact, if you stay tuned in to your body, you'll be able to gauge your well-being through some key patterns.

Here are a few health clues.

You're 'regular'
This applies to both bowel movements and menstrual cycles (for people that have one). Just like the nonexistent hands on our smartwatches, our bodies like to keep a rhythm.

Having at least one bowel movement a day is a good sign that your digestive system is working properly, and anywhere from three a week to three a day is considered normal. (Bonus points if you normally go around the same time each day.) Painful or infrequent bowel movements could be signs of constipation or irritable bowel syndrome -- conditions that flag a reason for a doctor's visit.  READ MORE...

Experience Daylight Together

At any given moment, one side of the Earth is facing the sun and the other is in the dark — it's simple geometry. Intuitively then, it makes sense that roughly half the planet's population is in the dark at any given time; this is the only way Santa Claus' December gift delivery schedule makes any sense, right?

But the geography and distribution of people across our world is actually a little more complicated than that. So much so that almost every human will experience some form of direct (or indirect sunlight) at the same moment on July 8.

Every year around now, reports start to circulate that 99 percent of Earthlings will experience daylight at the same time, specifically at 4:15 a.m. PT.

This year Timeanddate.com decided to fact check this claim and found it to be "technically true" with the caveat that at least three percent of the world's population might not be able to really perceive the limited amount of late-night or early-morning photons crashing into their eyeballs.  READ MORE...

Wanr A Speedier Chromebook?

Do a web search for "how to install Chrome OS on a laptop" or anything like that and you likely discovered that it can't be done... at least, not the same way that you're able to install the latest Windows OS or a version of Linux. Google's Chrome OS isn't available for consumers to install, but you can get the next best thing: Neverware's CloudReady Chromium OS.

CloudReady looks and feels nearly identical to Chrome OS, but it can be installed on nearly any laptop or desktop, whether Windows or Mac. And although Neverware has paid versions for enterprise and education users, its Home Edition is free for personal use. You don't get tech support, and it can't be managed with the Google Admin console, but again: free.

Google acquired Neverware in December 2020, and in February 2022 it announced the first public fruits of that acquisition: Chrome OS Flex, a more robust version of CloudReady that's still free for home use. A stable release of Chrome OS Flex is expected to roll out in the second quarter of 2022. At that time, computers already running CloudReady will automatically update to Chrome OS Flex. Until then, you can download and use an early version, though the company cautioned that you should expect bugs while it's improving the system.

However, the current version of CloudReady Home Edition is still available. It was incredibly helpful to me during the pandemic's early days, converting an old HP netbook that could barely function under the weight of Windows 10 into a Chromebook capable enough for schoolwork online through Google Classroom and other services.       READ MORE...

Cryptocurrency's Computing Problem

Cryptocurrencies hold the potential to change finance, eliminating middlemen and bringing accounts to millions of unbanked people around the world. Quantum computers could upend the way pharmaceuticals and materials are designed by bringing their extraordinary power to the process.

Here's the problem: The blockchain accounting technology that powers cryptocurrencies could be vulnerable to sophisticated attacks and forged transactions if quantum computing matures faster than efforts to future-proof digital money.

Cryptocurrencies are secured by a technology called public key cryptography. The system is ubiquitous, protecting your online purchases and scrambling your communications for anyone other than the intended recipient. The technology works by combining a public key, one that anyone can see, with a private key that's for your eyes only.

If current progress continues, quantum computers will be able to crack public key cryptography, potentially creating a serious threat to the crypto world, where some currencies are valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. If encryption is broken, attackers can impersonate the legitimate owners of cryptocurrency, NFTs or other such digital assets.

"Once quantum computing becomes powerful enough, then essentially all the security guarantees will go out of the window," Dawn Song, a computer security entrepreneur and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Collective[i] Forecast forum in October. "When public key cryptography is broken, users could be losing their funds and the whole system will break."

Quantum computers get their power by manipulating data stored on qubits, elements like charged atoms that are subject to the peculiar physics governing the ultrasmall. To crack encryption, quantum computers will need to harness thousands of qubits, vastly more than the dozens corralled by today's machines. The machines will also need persistent qubits that can perform calculations much longer than the fleeting moments possible right now.

But makers of quantum computers are working hard to address those shortcomings. They're stuffing ever more qubits into machines and working on quantum error correction methods to help qubits perform more-sophisticated and longer calculations.

"We expect that within a few years, sufficiently powerful computers will be available" for cracking blockchains open, said Nir Minerbi, CEO of quantum software maker Classiq Technologies.  READ MORE...