JERUSALEM--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 18, 2023--

A vast plume has been seen coming out Enceladus, one of Jupiter’s moons. The satellite is one of the best hopes for finding life outside our own planet. It has salty water and other conditions that leave scientists to believe that it could support alien life. Now the James Webb Space Telescope has watched a vast plume being ejected out of the planet. It found that the water shooting out of the planet is more than 20 times the size of the moon itself. Researchers already knew that jets of water were spurting out of Enceladus. But the vast size of the one found by Webb led researchers to wonder whether they had made a mistake. “When I was looking at the data, at first, I was thinking I had to be wrong. It was just so shocking to detect a water plume more than 20 times the size of the moon,” said lead author Geronimo Villanueva of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The water plume extends far beyond its release region at the southern pole.” It wasn’t only the scale of the plume that was shocking in the data, however. Researchers also found that the amount of water gushing out is surprisingly large: some 79 gallons spurt out each second, enough to fill an olympic swimming pool in a couple of hours. Read More Japan aims to beam solar power from space by 2025 China announces plan to put boots on the moon before 2030 amid space race with US US tells China: ‘We’ll fight in outer space if we have to’

Signups for Netflix in the United States remain elevated despite a fall from June's record high after the

After allegedly creating a tabletop role-playing game set in the world of Zack Snyder’s upcoming ‘Rebel Moon’ film, Evil Genius Games is taking legal action against Netflix over the alleged “wrongful termination” of a contract for its creation.

An Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup bent on bringing blockchain technology to the corporate world has managed to raise new

Elon Musk has said X, previously known as Twitter, will fund the legal bills of any user ‘unfairly treated’ by an employer for their activity on the social media platform. Posting on the recently-rebranded site on Sunday, he added there would be ‘no limit,’ encouraging users to ‘please let us know’. Musk has been vocal about his commitment to freedom of speech in the past, once defining himself as a ‘free speech absolutist’. Shortly after acquiring Twitter, he tweeted: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”. The post has already received over 18,000 replies to his post, with Musk responding to just one so far from right-wing account ‘Libs of TikTok’. Chaya Raichik, who operates the account, claims US content creator Kara Lynne was fired by her former employer for following her and other right-wing accounts on Twitter. Reaching out to Lynne directly, Musk replied: “Kara, is that accurate?” The billionaire CEO’s interactions with the ‘Libs of TikTok’ account, noted for its anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ content, have been criticised in the past. In December, he was accused of amplifying anti-trans bigotry when he liked a tweet from them. Earlier this week X Corp, Musk’s firm that owns X, launched a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The move came after the group published research criticising the platform for an increase in hate speech under Musk’s leadership. X Corp has accused the CCDH “unlawful acts” to “improperly gain access to its data”. The not-for-proft organisation researches and campaigns against online hate, and is often cited by the press. In response to the lawsuit, CCDH founder and CEO Imran Ahmed said: “Elon Musk’s latest legal move is straight out of the authoritarian playbook – he is now showing he will stop at nothing to silence anyone who criticizes him for his own decisions and actions.” “CCDH has no intention of stopping our independent research – Musk will not bully us into silence.” Read More X marks the lawsuit: Elon Musk's social media company sues nonprofit highlighting site's hate speech Flashing ‘X’ sign removed from Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco Meta’s Twitter rival Threads sees steep drop in daily users by 80 per cent, report says Mark Zuckerberg reveals his 4,000 calorie diet and large McDonald’s order Meta’s Twitter rival Threads sees ‘steep drop in daily users by 80 per cent’ Twitter takes down giant ‘X’ sign on roof after a week following city investigation

Zimbabwe will allow developers of carbon credits to keep as much as 70% of the proceeds for the

Apex Legends is having a Halloween event in 2023 featuring the return of Shadow Royale LTM, Fight or Fight cosmetics, and more.

Apple has failed to fix a bug in macOS Ventura's App Management feature for more

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 13, 2023--

A researcher has figured out that the Earth’s first continent was formed 3bn years ago, in a new paper that sheds fresh light on the early stages of the planet’s life. Jane Greaves, an astronomy professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University in Wales, was examining continent formation on distant stars and planets. It is thought that exoplanets with continents that formed in a similar way to Earth’s are more likely to be habitable, and perhaps even contain alien life. In the process, she calculated when several distant planets’ continents were born, as well as those a little closer to home. Continents on Earth sit on top of the planet’s hot, viscous mantle. Heat from the inner core stops the mantle from solidifying. The reason the core is hot is because it contains radioactive elements that came from neutron star collisions billions of years ago such as forms of Uranium, Thorium and Potassium. By analysing how many materials like this are present on Earth and on other planets, we are also able to estimate when the continents formed. On Earth, that was about 9.5 billion years since the beginning of the universe. Meanwhile, in Greaves' sample, the first continents appeared 2bn years before Earth’s on the exoplanets of younger, so-called thin disk stars. Older, thick disk stars analysed in her work produced rocky planets with continents that appeared even earlier: about 4 to 5bn years before Earth’s. “The outlook seems very promising for finding rocky exoplanets with continents, given that nearby Sun-like stars have already produced a few candidate hosts,” she wrote. The study, “When were the First Exocontinents?” is published in Research Notes of the American Astronomical SocietySign up to 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.

Learning how to pronounce ‘biopic’ is one thing. Understanding why it’s such a commonly mispronounced word is another.