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PARIS The Paris prosecutor has opened a judicial inquiry into planned obsolescence of Apple products, a spokesperson for

Earth has been hit by a blast from a dead star so energetic that scientists cannot explain it. The burst of gamma rays, originating in a dead star known as a pulsar, is the most high energy of its kind ever seen. It was equivalent about ten trillion times the energy of visible light, or 20 tera-electronvolts. Scientists are unable to explain exactly what kind of a scenario could lead a pulsar to emit such intense energy, and the researchers behind the breakthrough say that it “requires a rethinking of how these natural accelerators work”. Scientists hope that they can find yet more powerful energy blasts from pulsars, with a view to better understanding how they are formed. Pulsars are formed when a star dies, exploding in a supernova and leaving behind a tiny, dead star. They are just 20 kilometres across, and spin extremely fast with a powerful magnetic field. “These dead stars are almost entirely made up of neutrons and are incredibly dense: a teaspoon of their material has a mass of more than five billion tonnes, or about 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza,” said Emma de Oña Wilhelmi, a scientist at the High Energy Stereoscopic System observatory in Namibia that detected the blast. As pulsars spin, they throw out beams of electromagnetic radiation, throwing it out like a cosmic lighthouse. That means that someone in one spot – like the Earth – will see the radiation pulses flash in a regular rhythm as they spin past. The radiation is thought to be the result of fast electrons that are produced and thrown out by the the pulsar’s magnetosphere, which is made up of plasma and electromagnetic fields that surround the star and spin with it. Scientists can search the radiation for different energy bands within the electromagnetic spectrum, helping them understand it. When scientists previously did that with the Vela pulsar examined in the new study, they found that it was the brightest everseen in the radio band, and the brightest persistent source in the giga-electronvolts. But the new research found that there is a part of the radiation with even more high energy components. “That is about 200 times more energetic than all radiation ever detected before from this object,” said co-author Christo Venter from the North-West University in South Africa. Scientists don’t know exactly how that could happen. 
“This result challenges our previous knowledge of pulsars and requires a rethinking of how these natural accelerators work,” says Arache Djannati-Atai from the Astroparticle & Cosmology (APC) laboratory in France, who led the research. “The traditional scheme according to which particles are accelerated along magnetic field lines within or slightly outside the magnetosphere cannot sufficiently explain our observations. “Perhaps we are witnessing the acceleration of particles through the so-called magnetic reconnection process beyond the light cylinder, which still somehow preserves the rotational pattern? But even this scenario faces difficulties to explain how such extreme radiation is produced.” An article describing the findings, ‘Discovery of a Radiation Component from the Vela Pulsar Reaching 20 Teraelectronvolts’, is published today in the journal Nature Astronomy. Read More ‘Ring of fire’ solar eclipse this month will be last until 2046 Mystery behind massive star suddenly vanishing decoded New discovery is ‘holy grail’ breakthrough in search for aliens, scientist say ‘Ring of fire’ solar eclipse this month will be last until 2046 Mystery behind massive star suddenly vanishing decoded New discovery is ‘holy grail’ breakthrough in search for aliens, scientist say

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The name “core” suggests something hard and fixed but, it turns out, the Earth’s core is leaking. That is, at least, according to a team of top scientists, who drew the conclusion after analysing 62-million-old Arctic rocks. Geochemists from the California Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution detected record concentrations of helium 3 (3He) and helium 4 (4He) isotopes in the rocks, which suggest a slow trickle up from the very heart of our planet. They believe there could be reserves of the elusive gas buried some 2,900km underground. Helium is a surprisingly rare element on the Earth’s surface and experts have yet to establish just how much of it remains trapped deep beneath our feet. However, the new discovery has provided them with a fresh insight into the most mysterious region of our world. Understanding the presence of these helium isotopes could illuminate key processes in the core, such as how the Earth generated its life-protecting magnetic field. Most helium in the universe dates back to the Big Bang which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. The Earth swallowed up some of this as an infant planet, but mostly burped it all away during its 4.6 billion-year-long formation, as Science Alert reports. This means that any traces of helium found in volcanic rock – such as the samples unearthed in the Arctic – are believed to come either from pockets of mantle that are yet to release their helium, or from a vast, slow-leaking reserve. Basaltic lavas on Canada's Baffin Island contain some of the world's highest ratios of 3He to 4He, which geologists believe indicates that the gas's presence is not to do with the atmosphere, but rather the sign of deeper terrestrial origins. Several years ago, geochemist Forrest Horton uncovered helium isotope ratios of up to 50 times that of atmospheric levels in samples collected from Baffin's lava fields. This unusual concentration was also detected in lavas collected from Iceland. Horton and his team wondered if the helium in both samples may have derived from an ancient reservoir deep within the crust. And, it seems, their hunch may have been right. Their latest analysis – including specimens of the mineral olivine taken from dozens of sites across Baffin and surrounding islands – has delivered the highest ratio of 3He to 4He ever recorded in volcanic rock – measuring nearly 70 times anything previously detected in the atmosphere, as Science Alert notes. The team also considered ratios of other isotopes in order to rule out factors that may have altered the helium’s composition post-volcanic eruption, and found that the ratio of isotopes in the gas neon also matched the conditions present during the Earth’s formation. Despite advances in geology, the Earth’s core remains a great mystery, given that we have no way of directly exploring its core. The deepest hole humans have ever dug – branded the "entrance to hell" – extended an impressive 12,263m (40,230ft) down, but even that doesn’t come close to breaking through the crust to the layers beneath. Still, thanks to techniques like seismic tomography – which analyses how waves of energy travel through different materials during earthquakes – we’ve been able to map out the world’s interior. And carefully crafted simulations, based on the thermodynamics and pressures of our planet’s innards, suggest reserves of noble gases (like helium and neon) trapped in the core could have been protected as the Earth grew before seeping into the surrounding mantle over time. If the core is leaking, this could teach us a thing or two about how planets like ours form and how life, eventually, emerges. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings

BEIJING China's President Xi Jinping has called for speeding up efforts to make breakthroughs in core technologies, state

Kai Cenat jumped and ran around the room in excitement, happy that he was able to make his idol laugh