News Burst 26 September 2024 – Get The News!
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> Swiss police have launched an investigation after a woman died in a “suicide pod”. Several people have been taken into custody and face criminal charges, the authorities announced on Tuesday. The action came after police learned that the Sarco suicide capsule had been used in a forest area the previous day. Those detained are suspected of “inducement and aiding and abetting suicide,” regional police said in a statement. The Last Resort, an assisted dying group, told AFP news agency that the person who died in the booth was a 64-year-old woman from the United States. She has not been named. Swiss authorities secured the capsule and took the body of the deceased for an autopsy, according to police.
> What do you get when you cross Norse mythology with a 78-million-year-old ancestor to the Triceratops? Answer: Lokiceratops rangiformis, a plant-eating dinosaur with a very fancy set of horns. The new dinosaur was identified and named by Colorado State University affiliate faculty member Joseph Sertich and University of Utah Professor Mark Loewen. Loewen and Sertich, co-lead authors of the PeerJ study, dubbed the new species Lokiceratops (lo-Kee-sare-a-tops) rangiformis (ran-ɡi-FOHR-mees) because of the unusual, curving blade-like horns on the back of its frill – the shield of bone at the back of the skull – and the asymmetrical horns at the peak of the frill, reminiscent of uneven caribou antlers. “The dinosaur now has a permanent home in Denmark, so we went with a Norse god, and in the end, doesn’t it just really look like Loki with the curving blades?” Loewen said, referring to the god’s horned helmet.
> A new species of ghost shark, with an unusually long nose and a whip-like tail, has been discovered in the inky depths of New Zealand waters. Scientists at New Zealand’s National Institute for Water and Atmospherics (Niwa) initially believed the creature was part of an existing species found around the world, but further investigation revealed it was new, genetically distinct, species. The newly described Australasian narrow-nosed spookfish is only found in New Zealand and Australian waters. Ghost sharks – also known as chimaeras and spookfish – are a group of cartilaginous fish closely related to sharks and rays. They have smooth skin, beak-like teeth and feed off crustaceans such as shrimp and molluscs. They are sometimes referred to as the ocean’s butterflies for the way they glide through the water with their large pectoral fins. The mysterious fish are typically found at great ocean depths – up to 2,600 metres – and little is known about their biology or the threats they face.
> From the 1990s to the 2000s, multiple celebrities were photographed attending Diddy’s white parties. Adult entertainer Adria Sheri English, who filed a lawsuit against the rapper, said she was hired as a dancer at the extravagant “White Parties” in the early 2000s and claimed she was forced into participating in explicit activities there. Inside Diddy’s White Parties English said the notorious parties with an all-white dress code were exclusive events hosted by the rapper at the Hamptons, an affluent New York seaside neighbourhood frequented by the rich and famous. English alleged that beyond the exterior of the lavish events lay a darker reality marred by forced sexual encounters. She said she was coerced by Diddy’s immense power and felt that if she did not comply, the music mogul would ruin her music career, which he promised he would help her build. In her lawsuit, she stated that drugs and alcohol were used to lower the inhibitions of all participants, both willing and unwilling. She said specific alcohol bottles were spiked with illicit substances and offered to women at the parties.
> A big-wave specialist says he is lucky to be alive after escaping relatively unscathed from a massive wipeout at a notoriously dangerous surf spot in Tasmania. Mikey Brennan was surfing at Shipstern Bluff, a remote slabbing wave that can only be accessed by a 30km jetski ride or a two-hour hike, when he was gobbled up by the giant waves off the Tasman Peninsula coastline. The 38-year-old, who is no stranger to the location known as “Shippies” – or big wipeouts – was towed on to the wave by a jetski before he lost control and disappeared from view as the wave crashed over him. “I’m amazed I’m still alive,” Brennan told the Mercury.
> Caroline Ellison, a former top adviser to the cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced to two years in prison on Tuesday for her role in the $8 billion fraud that led to the implosion of the once high-flying FTX crypto exchange. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of U.S. District Court in Manhattan said that he believed Ms. Ellison was genuinely remorseful and that her cooperation with the government had been substantial. But given the severity of the fraud, he added, he could not give her a “‘get out of jail free’ card.” Ms. Ellison is set to report to a minimum security prison in the Boston area by around Nov. 7, almost exactly two years after FTX collapsed. Soon after the downfall of FTX in 2022, Ms. Ellison, who was Mr. Bankman-Fried’s on-and-off girlfriend, pleaded guilty to conspiring with him to steal $8 billion in savings that customers had deposited on the exchange.
> “Perhaps part of the challenge is that humankind is both the observer and the observation,” Nathalie Cabrol explains. That is, we are life trying to understand itself and its origin. “We are reminded that the universe is both an enigmatic puzzle and a profound mirror reflecting our own existence,” Cabrol writes. Nathalie Cabrol is a French-American explorer and the director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
> Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered that a “puffy” planet is asymmetric, meaning there is a significant difference between one side of the atmosphere and the other. The extrasolar planet or “exoplanet” in question is WASP-107 b, which orbits an orange star smaller than the sun located around 210 light-years away. Discovered in 2017, WASP-107 b is 94% the size of Jupiter but only has 10% of the mass of the solar system gas giant. This means it is one of the least dense exoplanets ever discovered, far “puffier” than expected. Earlier this year, scientists determined this is likely the result of the interior of WASP-107 b being much hotter than predicted, and the planet is also thought to possess a rocky core that is larger than what was previously modeled. These strange characteristics were explained by a scarcity of methane in its atmosphere. Now, scientists have another WASP-107 b mystery to solve. WASP-107 b orbits its star at a distance of around 5 million miles, or about 6% of the distance between Earth and the sun. This means that the planet completes an orbit in around five Earth days. In addition, the exoplanet is tidally locked to its star. This results in one side, the “dayside,” permanently facing the star, while the other, the “nightside,” faces out to space in perpetuity.
> Astronomers have used the wide-field view of the Dark Energy Camera to confirm that supermassive-black-hole-powered quasars in the early universe were packed into dense neighborhoods. The team behind this research found quasars are “noisy neighbors” blasting out radiation that can cut off star formation, thus “killing” galaxies that live in their close cosmic neighborhoods. As a result, the closest companion galaxies around some quasars fail to grow and are thus too small and dim to see. The team says these results about the “urban density” of quasars and their companion galaxies could also explain why some prior studies about the early universe’s density have shown galaxies and quasars tightly packed together while others have indicated a lack of companion galaxies around quasars.
