Unknown disease kills five in Burundi
Investigators are working to establish whether the outbreak is a mutation of a known infection or an emerging threat Source link
All posts tagged: unknown
Fleetwood Mac star Lindsey Buckingham attacked by woman with an ‘unknown substance’
Get the inside track from Roisin O’Connor with our free weekly music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This Fleetwood Mac legend Lindsey Buckingham has been attacked with an unknown substance by a woman who police say might be a stalker. The guitarist, 76, was ambushed while walking into a building Wednesday in Santa Monica, police said. The woman, who police described as a “stalking suspect,” reportedly threw something on Buckingham and then ran away. Both Santa Monica and Los Angeles police are investigating the reported ambush. Police did not immediately return The Independent’s request for comment. No arrests have been made as of Wednesday afternoon, but police said they know who the woman is. Authorities also said Buckingham is familiar with the woman due to previous incidents, according to NBC Los Angeles. Police said they believe the woman found out when and where Buckingham would be, which is how she knew where to confront him. Lindsey Buckingham was attacked Wednesday by …
The Iranian moment: A leap into the unknown | US-Israel war on Iran
Since the 1920s, Iran has lived through two defining political moments that have reflected two distinct civilisational identities. They have shaped not only the country’s internal character but also its relationship with the wider world. Today, with the Islamic republic under unprecedented strain, a third Iranian moment may be approaching. Modernity on the shah’s terms The first Iranian moment was the reign of the Pahlavi monarchy, which began in 1925 with Reza Khan Pahlavi, an army officer, being instated to the throne and ended in 1979 with the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution. It was built around a particular vision of Iran: secular, modernising, and firmly anchored in the dominion of the Western-led camp during the Cold War. Tehran recognised Israel after it was created in 1948, supplied oil to Western markets, and served as Washington’s chosen guardian of the Gulf. The shah projected power across a region fraught with ethnic and sectarian rivalries, leading a country that posed a challenge to its Arab neighbours, but also served as a model of state-driven development. Central …
Quantum spin study reveals a previously unknown state of matter
At temperatures approaching absolute zero, most magnetic materials settle into tidy patterns. Their tiny magnetic moments, or spins, align in one of two ways: all pointing in the same direction in ferromagnetic order, or alternating neatly in an antiferromagnetic pattern. But a compound of cerium, magnesium, aluminum, and oxygen — CeMgAl₁₁O₁₉ — refuses to follow those rules. For decades, scientists assumed it was a quantum spin liquid, a rare state where spins remain disordered even in extreme cold. New experiments reveal that assumption was wrong, uncovering a previously unknown state of matter. “This material had been classified as a quantum spin liquid due to two properties: observation of a continuum of states and lack of magnetic ordering,” said Bin Gao, co-first author and research scientist at Rice University. “But closer observation of the material showed that the underlying cause of these observations wasn’t a quantum spin liquid phase.” Rice University Professor Pengcheng Dai. (CREDIT: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University) Unlike quantum spin liquids, where spins fluctuate between many low-energy states because of quantum mechanics, CeMgAl₁₁O₁₉ shows similar …
Mysterious Chinese Space Plane Conducting Unknown Mission in Orbit
Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech The United States Space Force has been testing its top-secret Boeing X-37B space plane for over a decade. Two versions of the unusual spacecraft have completed seven orbital missions over the last 15 years, spending a combined thousands of days in space. Despite its extensive experience of being launched atop a rocket and slowing its descent on its own during reentry, much like NASA’s Space Shuttle, we still have no idea what it’s doing in space, beyond the military vaguely pointing towards testing new spaceflight hardware and space-based capabilities. And China isn’t far behind. Its own secretive space plane, dubbed Shendong, or “Divine Dragon,” launched for the fourth time on February 7 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. Its purpose similarly remains under tight wrap. According to state-run news network Xinhua, the space plane “will conduct technological verification for reusable spacecraft, providing technical support for the peaceful use of space.” The plane’s third trip to space concluded in …
In Gaza, the fate of thousands missing remains unknown
Tahrir Abou Madi writes on the walls of her burned and half-destroyed house: slogans that give her courage, words that express her pain and her hope. In her notebooks, she draws anything that might help her endure the wait that has eaten away at her for nearly two years. “This is my cry, the outpouring of my suffering,” confided the 40-year-old mother via video call. For the past 28 months, Israel has barred foreign media from entering the Gaza Strip. Like thousands of Gazans searching for answers about the fate of their missing loved ones, the Abou Madi family does not know what happened to two of their children, Malak and Youssef. On the morning of February 23, 2024, during an Israeli incursion into the city of Khan Yunis – which was carried out in retaliation for the massacres perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023 – and after the family had been forced to evacuate a month earlier to the coastal area of Al-Mawassi, Malak and Youssef, aged 20 and 18, decided to return …
Verizon outage has been resolved but cause is unknown
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Man Steals Sword from Parisian Statute of Joan of Arc, Motive Unknown
A statue of Joan of Arc in Paris’s 8th arrondissement is missing a sword after a man broke it off and swiped it for reasons not yet known. As reported by Le Parisien, the incident occurred on Monday morning, when the man approached the monument—with Joan of Arc dramatically riding a horse in mid-gallop—and committed a crime captured by a security camera. Karen Taïeb, the deputy mayor of Paris in charge of heritage, said of the CCTV footage: “We see the man violently shaking the horse, before climbing the statue and breaking the sword with a sharp blow, using his bare hands.” The sword broke into “a few pieces” and was recovered when the man was apprehended by police shortly after on a street nearby. Authorities have not described any known motive behind the act. Taïeb said an assessment of the sword would be carried out to see if it can be repaired; if not, it will be reproduced and returned to its heroic pose. “In any case, Joan of Arc will get her sword back,” …
We Could Hitch a Ride to Unknown Frontiers on Super-Fast Interstellar Objects Like 3I/ATLAS
Mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS made its closest approach to Earth on December 19, coming within just 167 million miles. Scientists have been closely monitoring the object — which is largely believed to be a natural comet and only the third of its kind to have been directly observed in the solar system — as it continued on its highly eccentric trajectory. The encounter with Earth, however, turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax, as Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has long championed the far-fetched theory that the object may be an alien spacecraft, lamented in a blog post titled “3I/ATLAS Ignores Earth.” Instead of doing something you might expect of aliens during their closest approach to Earth, it simply cruised on by. While hopes that we were just visited by an alien race diminish even further, Loeb made an interesting pivot in a follow-up piece, proposing that other objects like 3I/ATLAS could be useful for our future attempts to explore beyond our solar system. “The Voyager Golden Records, containing a time capsule of …
How technology is reshaping children’s development – the good, the bad and the unknown
It’s a common scene on public transport. A parent holds a mobile phone showing noisy cartoons to their young child. The pair is looking at the screen together, laughing. Yet parent and child rarely exchange a gaze or look out across the landscape. While many parents can relate to such moments, this is just an example of how technology (mainly digital screens but also vocal assistants, domestic robots and so on) have become part of our daily routines, changing the way we interact and engage with the world around and – most importantly – with each other. But how does all this change how young children develop? Human development is essentially a social practice. From infancy, we participate in the world around us and learn from experience, especially from unfamiliar situations and cultural encounters, with the help of more knowledgeable partners. As adults interact with kids, they share views and create new knowledge. We make sense of the world around us, in its variety, complexity and beauty. Children learn from it, and adults learn how …