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It lived in Patagonia almost 100 million years ago and ate 130 kilos of vegetation a day: A cast of one of the largest dinosaurs on earth can be seen in London from Friday, a first in Europe.

• Also read: ‘Jurassic World’ dinosaur show expands on Montreal

• Also read: ‘Jurassic World’: Dinosaurs land at Bell Center in September

• Also read: Huge dinosaur footprint discovered in Britain

The skeleton of the 37.2-meter-tall animal – a titanosaur named Patagotitan mayorum, the “Titan of Patagonia” – has just entered the exhibition hall of London’s Natural History Museum. If its neck had been raised, the dinosaur would have been the size of a five-story building, researchers say.

The Titanosaur replica resides in the same room in the museum that housed the popular “Dippy,” a famous cast of a Diplodocus, until 2017.

The dismantling of the dinosaur “Dippy”, which has been enthroned in the main hall of the museum since 1979, triggered a wave of grief among museum visitors who had started a “Save Dippy” petition. It had been replaced by the skeleton of a blue whale, christened “Hope” (“Hope” in French).

The new skeleton on display is a replica of one of six titanosaurs, one of Earth’s largest dinosaurs, discovered after an Argentine farmer discovered a giant bone sticking out of the ground in 2010. The excavations lasted until 2015.

AFP

“They discovered a graveyard with six different animals in the ground,” Paul Barrett, the exhibition’s scientific director, told AFP. “For about three years, they dug up all these bones and were able to reveal that they had discovered a new species of giant dinosaur, one of the largest animals to ever set foot on the ground.”

The discovered dinosaurs lived in the forests of present-day Patagonia in the Late Cretaceous period, 95 to 100 million years ago.

AFP

According to research, these gigantic herbivores could weigh around 57 tons, with huge necks and long tails. They had to eat 130 kilos of plants every day to support themselves.

Scientists estimate that the six animals died at the same time without knowing why.

AFP

“We don’t know why they died… They may have been swept away by a flood. Or they were killed by some other environmental problem like a drought,” says Mr Barrett, adding that the research is ongoing.

After the discovery in Argentina, experts 3D scanned each dinosaur to create replicas out of polyester resin and fiberglass, which they then mounted on a steel structure.

It took a Canadian company more than six months to create this giant cast from dozens of fossil bones extracted on site.

The real bones would have been far too heavy to show, but the fact that they are replicas allows visitors to touch the cast.

AFP

The replica arrived in London in 32 separate boxes, meaning that “each piece had to be put together like a giant jigsaw puzzle,” said Sinead Marron of the Natural History Museum.

According to her, the exhibition aims to “tell the story of how an animal like this grows from a tiny egg, smaller than a soccer ball, into this amazing giant of 57 tons”.

Games and recreations help bring this story to life. Visitors can touch the teeth of one of the titanosaur’s predators or even enter its internal organs to see how the lungs, heart and intestines work together.

Mauricio Garzon, Associate Professor at the University of Montreal’s School of Kinesiology and Physical Activity Sciences

We suspected it, but now the science backs it up: cyclists born at high altitude would fare better.

That’s the conclusion of a Colombian study that Mauricio Garzon, a lecturer at the University of Montreal’s School of Kinesiology and Physical Activity Sciences, took part in.

To arrive at this result, the research team subjected 80 runners aged 80 to 80 to runners aged 17 to 22 from three ability classes and three age groups.

First, while cyclists born at altitudes greater than 2000m accounted for about 50% of the analyzed sample, cyclists who competed as professionals in a “grand tour” (Tour de France, Giro d’Italia or Tour of Spain ) a significantly higher proportion (84%) of the study group.

Second, runners born at low altitude had lower MAP and VO2max than mid- and high-altitude cyclists.

“For cyclists who get on the podium in the Grand Tour, the fundamental factor of their success is better oxygen consumption, and we have shown that being born, growing up and training at high altitude improves this consumption,” says Mauricio Garzon.

height and performance

At altitude, the available oxygen is reduced. To compensate for this, the body produces, among other things, more hemoglobin and hematocrit, elements of the blood that facilitate the transport of oxygen to the organs. These hematological adaptations would increase aerobic capacity in that total red blood cell volume increases and promotes oxygen consumption, a key factor in endurance sports success.

Many teams and professional organizations go on “altitude training courses” to improve the performance of their athletes. However, the hematological benefits of these approximately three-week stays only remain in the body for a short time.

“Our study shows that there appears to be a genetic component in high-altitude natives, possibly even more so if this is also the case in their parents and grandparents, that allows this adaptation to occur naturally,” continued Mauricio Garzon. This is what we see on the great tours: many cyclists from Ecuador, Colombia or in general from mountain areas such as the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Sierra Nevada or the Carpathians and even those who train at altitude in some areas of Colorado and Arizona manage to to stay on top during the mountain stages, they respond better to efforts at high altitude.

Favored, of course, but…

Athletes born at high altitude would therefore be more predisposed to becoming high-performance athletes, especially in endurance sports (when the socio-economic context allows it), thanks to a natural production of hematological components that favor oxygen transport in the body.

But there is a downside.

Professional athletes are subject to doping controls. And sometimes some cyclists exceed the permitted limits even without doping.

This applies in particular to erythropoietin (EPO). Used as a doping agent, EPO is a hormone naturally secreted by the kidneys to stimulate red blood cell production, thereby increasing oxygenation and saturation. And the hypoxia caused by the altitude just stimulates the production of EPO. It would therefore be possible to present high levels of this hormone naturally.

“In the world of sport, we are beginning to think about this hypothesis: that certain athletes react differently because of their environment or their genetics, and not because of cheating,” specifies the researcher.

The CST-100 Starliner mission is not expected to resume until July 21, officials from both units said.

“We discussed and decided that the best launch attempt would not occur until July 21,” Steve Stich, head of NASA’s manned commercial program, told reporters.

The American space agency wants to set up a second means of transport to the ISS for its astronauts, and the SpaceX capsule is already in use.

But Boeing suffered a series of setbacks that significantly delayed its program, including a failed test flight in 2019. In May 2022, the company finally made it to the ISS for the first time — with no crew aboard.

Boeing then hoped to conduct its first manned flight in 2022, before first being pushed back to February 2023, then April.

“We’re pretty confident about that July 21 date,” said Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager.

According to Steve Stich, more time is needed to certify the parachute system that will be used to bring the astronauts and the capsule safely back to Earth. A ground test of the parachutes will be conducted in May.

The Starliner capsule will carry two NASA astronauts, Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams, to the ISS, where they are expected to stay for at least eight days.

Launch will be on an Atlas V rocket (manufactured by the United Launch Alliance consortium) from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

If the mission is successful, the Boeing capsule can finally be certified and begin operational flights at a date to be determined.

NASA signed fixed-price contracts with both SpaceX ($2.6 billion) and Boeing ($4.2 billion) in 2014.

By using two companies, it wants to diversify its options so as never again to run the risk of being without American transport, as it did after the space shuttles were shut down in 2011. Until SpaceX, NASA actually had to pay for seats on Russian Soyuz rockets.

Elon Musk’s company, which is still a newcomer to the aerospace industry compared to Boeing, has already transported 18 astronauts to the ISS with its own Dragon capsule – as well as four private passengers as part of a space tourism mission.

Several well-known figures and key players in the field of artificial intelligence believe that chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT can pose “serious risks to society and humanity”.

ChatGPT makes a lot of noise. This conversation tool is able to exchange and follow a real dialogue with its interlocutor in the form of written messages. Its potential is huge when used with other digital tools.

For example, criminals could use ChatGPT to “significantly speed up the search process” in areas they don’t know about: writing texts to commit fraud or gathering information about home burglary, terrorism, cybercrime and sexual abuse,” he said the Agency.

Hear Dave Anctil, affiliate researcher at the International Observatory on the Impacts of Artificial Intelligence and Digital, talk about the non-trivial arrival of ChatGPT.

The chatbot’s ability to mimic speech styles also made it particularly effective at creating phishing emails.

ChatGPT, which can quickly produce text, is “ideal for propaganda and disinformation purposes,” warns Europol.

ChatGPT can also be used to write computer code without having the technical knowledge.

Dave Anctil also addresses the job market, which will surely be affected by the combined use of tools with ChatGPT.

It’s a phenomenon of rare intensity that intrigued astronomers at NASA’s dependent Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). As reported by the Korii site, which is dependent on Slate, a tornado recently formed on the Sun at the star’s north pole. As always, the phenomenon could have been caused by magnetic fields when terrestrial tornadoes are formed by the wind. These magnetic fields are themselves generated by hot particles present on the star. Tornadoes formed by magnetic fields hurl plasma clouds into the nearby area.

The solar tornado lasted a total of three weeks. Astronomers observed a large extension of the phenomenon on March 14, according to the SpaceWeather website, before the tornado exploded on March 18, releasing a large “cloud of magnetized gas” and with it plasma that luckily didn’t reach Earth. Exceptionally, at the peak of its intensity, this tornado reached 120,000 kilometers in size, fourteen times the diameter of the Earth.

Plasma released into the atmosphere

According to one specialist, the gigantic tornado poured “a rain of incandescent materials” onto the sun. One astronomer says he “hasn’t seen anything like it since (he) observed the sun star.”

The fiery and massive ball of gas Sun is in a period of intense activity, scientists say. In particular, spots would be visible on the star’s surface, which would be a harbinger of large solar flares and projections of plasma in the atmosphere, which could then affect “space weather”. These days, the Sun is entering the culmination of an 11-year cycle, suggesting that these normally harmless phenomena for Earthlings may soon be multiplying.

Also read:

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Last December, the GameRant website mentioned Microsoft filing an intriguing patent for a touchscreen-equipped controller. While Microsoft yesterday unveiled two new colors for its Xbox Elite Series 2 Pad, a new patent filing caught our attention and the concept seems clearer than it was at the end of last year.

A touch screen to display player performance

It’s once again the GameRant journalists telling us about the patent filing, as Microsoft just filed a new one and the controller in question would be a lot more versatile than we might have thought last December.

The drawing presented shows us an even more impressive screen, on which the player could follow his performance in each game.It would also be possible to record personalized loads and connect to social networks directly on the controller, which would itself be connected to an external application , probably on a smartphone.

It’s hard to say where these projects are now and what the added value would be for us players. Still, it’s interesting to say that Microsoft is working on new concepts designed to improve our user experience, and this patent is just one example among many others. For example, some recent Microsoft patents focus on improving older games through a new cloud-based streaming service. In any case, Microsoft intends to develop its proposal on the pads side to better compete with Sony, which has been innovating in this area for some time.

After the disappointment of Fallout 76 Released in 2018, fans of the series are eagerly awaiting Fallout to make them feel good. In 2023, a team of modders introduce themselves Failure: Londonan extremely ambitious mod for the 4th episode of the license.

Fallout: London mod overview

Developed by volunteers since 2017 this mod should appear this year. As the name suggests, Fallout: London is set in London and will allow the survivors of the shelterExplore territories other than the United States of America.

Fallout: London is a mod with unabashed ambitions can easily function as DLC (downloadable content).. The team of volunteers of the project planned for this year has not yet given precise information about the upcoming release of this “new fallout”. We can imagine that the end of the recently opened casting and recording sessions will say more about the completion of this major project.

The development team paid attention to detail in this fallout mod set in the British capital. We will be eligible a whole new world with this latest fallout mod. We discover in particular Multiple environments create an immersive experience in the British capital. Fallout: London is a remake of a remarkable quality that can surpass the original game.

New products presented in the first quarter of 2023

Every quarter, the team behind the mod showcases its progress in a YouTube video. The official channel posted and shows this from the first quarter of 2023 some weapons, vehicles And puts will be available in game.

The new weapons

• The Laser Lewis pistol
• The Viper MK1

The new vehicles

New properties

One of the major new features announced is the integration of the functional scale. As a reminder, it’s a running gag in the Bethesda games that didn’t allow them to be used. The developers also announce the start of syncing with community posts.

quality work

The shared video shows development progress for the first four months of the year and hints quality workwho should benefit from a better processing than the original game.

First foray into post-apocalyptic Europe

Fallout: London was announced in 2021 with a trailer showcasing the unique features of this mod the size of a DLC. The London setting will captivate fans of the series for the first time Post-apocalyptic Europewhich allows developers to explore different cultures and deploy one rich gaming experience And changeable.

A project eagerly awaited by the fans

Nine months after the latest Fallout: London news, the development team continues to work hard to bring fans a mod that meets their expectations. With an expected release in 2023, players are excited to discover it The new universe And all the news that they expect.

play online games

A gravitational lensing effect. Some simulations. This is how astronomers arrived at one of the largest black holes ever seen. Its mass is more than 30 billion times that of our sun!

It is about 2.7 billion light-years from Earth. At the heart of the galaxy, the brightest galaxy in the Abell 1201 galaxy cluster. Its incredible gravity betrayed its presence. By distorting the light coming from a background galaxy through gravitational lensing. It is one of the most massive black holes ever discovered by astronomers. It appears more than 30 billion times “heavier” than our sun!

Researchers at the University of Durham (UK) estimated its mass from simulations run on supercomputers at DiRAC’s HPC facility. They compared them to images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Unravel the mysteries of black holes

Aside from the extraordinary size of this black hole, “at the limit of what we imagine its maximum size to be,” it’s the fact that it was detected by gravitational lensing that excites astronomers even more. Because traditionally it is active black holes that devour the surrounding matter that researchers flush out. Precisely thanks to the emissions associated with their activity. But that’s what astronomers call an inactive black hole, or a dormant black hole. And the work of researchers at Durham University offers hope that we may now discover much more.

A record black hole with 40 billion solar masses

Therefore, astronomers hope this observation will open the door for further study of these supermassive black holes, which still remain mysterious. That it allows access to objects located outside of our local universe to understand how they might have evolved in distant times.