The world is heating up, and things are often on fire—literally. As we do what we can to squelch the flames, check out some old and obscure words people of the past used when they wanted to talk about all things fire.

Workplace messaging app Slack is retiring its status update account on X – formerly Twitter – where it previously shared updates about issues such as outages on the platform. “We made the decision to retire the @SlackStatus account,” the company posted on X. “We’ll continue to share other Slack news and provide support through our main account, @SlackHQ,” it said. The X account had been a useful source of information about ongoing issues with the platform and about problems being investigated by the company. Slack said it is consolidating news related to incidents in its status site. “Moving forward, the Slack Status site, https://status.slack.com, will be the source of truth for all incident news,” the company noted, adding that users can also reach out at feedback@slack.com “with any questions or feedback.” “Alerts will also be available through the RSS and Atom feeds linked at the bottom of the Slack Status home page,” Slack noted. Slack has undergone a number of technical issues this year with the app going offline during the workday for many users globally multiple times. The latest move by Slack to stop providing updates via its status account on X comes as the number of daily active users has declined on the social media platform following Tesla chief Elon Musk’s purchase of the company last year. X chief Linda Yaccarino said earlier this year that the company had about 225 million daily active users at the time – marking a decline of over 10 per cent of users from just before Mr Musk acquired the company. Market intelligence firm Similarweb also noted in a report recently that X’s global traffic is down by about 14 per cent year-on-year in September. Similarweb said the drop in user retention is “a bad sign for app user loyalty” for Twitter following the launch of rival app Threads by Instagram. Mr Musk also noted in July that the platform’s ad revenue was down 50 per cent as social media competition mounts. Other companies, including American Express and Air France have also stopped providing customer service over X. American Express had made its @AskAmex account private, while AirFrance said in April that it would stop offering support to customers via direct messages on the social media platform, The Verge reported. Read More Tesla’s profits dip as Musk goes on rant about staff working from home Elon Musk’s X may charge some users $1 a year to post on platform EU to investigate X’s handling of disinformation over Hamas attack on Israel Could X’s creditors push the social media company into bankruptcy? Slack down: Work chat app goes down as the working day begins Why taking a mental health day could be bad… for your mental health

Scientists have found the first ever disc structure around a star outside of our own Milky Way. The disc is around a young massive star forming in a stellar nursery called N180. It is within the Larg Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that neighbours ours. The disc is 163,000 light years from Earth – meaning that it is not only the first to be detected outside of our galaxy, but also the most distant such disc ever seen. Lead author of the study, Dr Anna McLeod from Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Durham University said: “When I first saw evidence for a rotating structure in the ALMA data, I could not believe that we had detected the first extragalactic accretion disc; it was a special moment. “We know discs are vital to forming stars and planets in our galaxy, and here, for the first time, we’re seeing direct evidence for this in another galaxy. “We are in an era of rapid technological advancement when it comes to astronomical facilities. “Being able to study how stars form at such incredible distances and in a different galaxy is very exciting.” The findings are reported in a new article, ‘A likely Keplerian disk feeding an optically revealed massive young star’, published in Nature. Read More Scientists find planets moving around in strange ‘rhythm’ Astronomers discover new six-planet system Scientists have cooked ‘alien haze’ that could help find life

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