UPDATE: Aug. 8, 2023, 5:00 a.m. EDT This story has been updated with new picks

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There are eight planets in our solar system – plus poor old Pluto, which was demoted in 2006 – but what if there were more? Turns out that might be the case. Astronomers have calculated there is a 7 per cent chance that Earth has another neighbour hiding in the Oort cloud, a spherical region of ice chunks and rocks that is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun than we are. “It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” said Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hidden worlds like this are “a class of planets that should definitely exist but have received relatively little attention” until now, he said.. If a planet is hiding in the Oort cloud, it’s almost certainly an ice giant. Large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are generally born as twins. They have huge gravitational pulls of their own, however, and sometimes destabilise one another. That could have led to a planet to be nudged out of the solar system entirely – or exiled to its outer reaches, where the Oort cloud resides. “The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” said lead author Sean Raymond, researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory. That means that the Oort cloud planet could have a significantly elongated orbit, unlike the near-perfect circle Earth tracks around the sun. Trouble is, when things are that far away, they’re pretty difficult to spot. “It would be extremely hard to detect,” added Raymond. “If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our own Oort cloud, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have found it yet,” said Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT not involved in this work. “Amazingly, it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those right in our own backyard.” Time to crack out the telescope. 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.

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WhatsApp has unveiled a major update that will allow users to hide intimate conversations in a secret folder. The Chat Lock feature, which parent company Meta announced on Monday, means selected messages can only be accessed with a password or biometric identification, like a fingerprint or face scan. Any incoming messages will also be hidden on the receiver’s phone or computer screen to prevent bystanders from seeing what they say or who they are from. “We believe this feature will be great for people who share their phones from time to time with a family member, or in moments where someone else is holding your phone at the exact moment an extra-special chat arrives,” Meta wrote in a blog post announcing the WhatsApp update. “Over the next few months, we’re going to be adding more options for Chat Lock, including locks for companion devices and creating a custom password for your chats so that you can use a unique password different from your phone’s.” The new WhatsApp feature will be rolling out globally this week to more than 2 billion people who use the messaging app. “New locked chats in WhatsApp make your conversations more private,” Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Facebook. “They’re hidden in a password protected folder and notifications won’t show sender or message content.” The latest update comes just days after widespread concerns emerged from WhatsApp users about a “creepy” feature relating to the app’s privacy settings. Messages on people’s phones appeared to show that WhatsApp was listening to users while they were asleep, with notifications of the app activating the device’s microphone displayed on the privacy menu within Google’s Android operating system. WhatsApp blamed the issue on a bug within Android, claiming it would never access a user’s microphone without their consent. “Users have full control over their mic settings,” WhatsApp posted in response to a tweet about the issue. “Once granted permission, WhatsApp only accesses the mic when a user is making a call or recording a voice note or video – and even then, these communications are protected by end-to-end encryption so WhatsApp cannot hear them.” Read More Creepy WhatsApp update sparks fears users are being listened to through their phone

KARLSRUHE, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 16, 2023--

Virtual reality could help footballers improve their heading without the repetitive head impacts from a ball, a new study indicates. Players involved in a study at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Institute of Sport and its Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences demonstrated greater performance in ‘real world’ heading after training with a VR headset compared to a control group who did no training. The VR group also reported greater self-confidence and efficacy in their heading compared to the control group, the study found. Our findings show that virtual reality (VR) based training can be used to improve real-world heading performance. Dr Ben Marshall, Manchester Metropolitan University Institute of Sport The study, titled: ‘A preliminary investigation into the efficacy of training soccer heading in immersive virtual reality’, has been published in the journal Virtual Reality on Tuesday. It provides some insights into how players may be able to improve heading technique amid restrictions on training. Football Association guidelines advise against any heading training in under-12s, while a trial is ongoing in the current season and next season to eliminate deliberate heading completely from matches up to and including that age group. At ages 12 and 13, heading should be limited to a single session of no more than five headers, and no more than 10 headers per session for children aged 14 to 17, according to FA guidance. Even in adult football at all levels, players are advised to perform only 10 ‘higher force headers’ per training week, such as headers from crosses, corners, free-kicks and returning of goal kicks. The exposure to heading has been limited because of concerns over the sub-concussive impact of repetitive heading on a player’s longer-term wellbeing. The 2019 FIELD Study found professional footballers were three and a half times more likely to die of neurodegenerative disease than age-matched members of the general population. “With increasing restrictions of heading exposure to professional and youth soccer, it is evident that alternative methods for training heading confidence and technique will be required while it remains an integral part of the game,” the VR paper concluded. “The work presented here provides some initial evidence suggesting that immersive VR may have a place in any new approach to training this important skill.” A group of 36 adult recreational-level players, made up of 30 men and six women, participated in the study in total. The 36 were split into two groups of 18, with 16 men and two women in the control group who did not use the VR headsets between ‘real world’ heading sessions, and 14 men and four women in the VR group. The VR group used the Oculus Quest 2 head-mounted display, with the Rezzil Player 22 application used to provide the VR football heading training. Dr Ben Marshall, Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Psychology at the Manchester Metropolitan University Institute of Sport, said: “Our findings show that virtual reality (VR) based training can be used to improve real-world heading performance and that this method is more effective than not training the skill at all. “This is important as current training guidelines recommend limiting the number of physical headers performed in training for all age groups due to the associated long-term risks to player health. “Our findings suggest the inclusion of VR-based training could play an important role in developing football heading skills whilst reducing the number of real-world headers and sub-concussive head impacts that players need to be exposed to – which is really positive.”