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Newly Discovered Star Has an Almost Pure Oxygen Atmosphere (popularmechanics.com)
William Herkewitz, reports for Popular Mechanics: A newly discovered star is unlike any ever found. With an outermost layer of 99.9 percent pure oxygen, its atmosphere is the most oxygen-rich in the known universe. Heck, it makes Earth's meager 21 percent look downright suffocating. The strange stellar oddity is a radically new type of white dwarf star, and was discovered by a team of Brazilian astronomers led by Kepler de Souza Oliveira at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. The star is unique in the known pool of 32,000 white dwarf stars, and is the only known star of any kind with an almost pure oxygen atmosphere. The new white dwarf has a mouthful of a name -- SDSSJ124043.01+671034.68 -- but has been nicknamed 'Dox' (pronounced Dee-Awks) by Kepler's team. The discovery was reported today in a paper in the journal Science.
With all that oxygen you'd think it would be on fire....
No smoking on that planet...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
WTF?
Its not like the star is for sale or anything
I presume its just an April Fool joke
Who the hell thought this "slashvertisement" thing would be funny?
Non Fumar!
Something is fishy with this story:
"These observations are simple graphs about what colors of light came from each pinpoint source (called a spectral graph). Because a computer isn't easily programmed with such a vague task as "find something weird and cool," Ourique was challenged with the grunt-work task of physically looking at printed out pages of all 300,000 graphs."
Computers are very good at finding "weird and cool" things from graph data. Why would you need to look at printed out pages?
I never know whether news articles are serious or fake. /. you need to stop doing this shit, as do all of the new organizations who try to pull shit like this.
It's unprofessional, it makes you look like an idiot.
Seriously, I think the Chinese have the right idea in banning this shit.
Now I'm going to pop three xanax and sleep the rest of the day out.
I studied physics at UFRGS and I met him a couple of times. He was also a heavy weight lifter. That's not fat in his belly. Don't know him well, though.
reason defies logic
Can somebody inform those running Slashdot that April Fools ended hours ago?
It starts at 00:00 UTC on April 1, and runs until noon (12:00) UTC on April 1, at which point all jokes should end.
It doesn't matter which time zone the Slashdot editors or admins are in, or which time zone the Slashdot readers are in.
All times in this case are measured relative to UTC. (Just like how UNIX times are based on UTC.)
They should have disabled the April Fools changes at exactly 12:00 UTC, which was now long ago.
It was found by way of a process so grueling that its initial discoverer—one of Kepler's undergraduate students Gustavo Ourique—deserves a mention.
Ourique was looking for strange, new types of white dwarfs in a data pile of 300,000 possible observations. These observations are simple graphs about what colors of light came from each pinpoint source (called a spectral graph). Because a computer isn't easily programmed with such a vague task as "find something weird and cool," Ourique was challenged with the grunt-work task of physically looking at printed out pages of all 300,000 graphs.
Its not like the star is for sale or anything ...by earthlings.
"Kepler de Souza Oliveira"
I did some research on what humans are better at than computers, in order to develop a replacement for CAPTCHA. I found that indeed, humans, especially through our visual and auditory systems, WILL detect a pattern - even when there is no pattern. Our brain are very, very attuned to seeing patterns.
/ \ .) .)\
What I ended up using for my non-captcha was our amazing ability to instantly spot and categorize this type of pattern:
((* *|)
)_\o/_)
(
//(
I have no idea what that is but it looks like a stripper with a mouse-mask.
I'm not positive but I have a good idea that that's not what you were going for. Sorry - but I have no clue what it is that that's meant to represent.
It's okay. Don't feel bad. I can't do those MagicEye© things either. I seriously haven't got a clue what it is you're going for. It looks like a stripper (sans bra) wearing a rodent mask to me. I really, really doubt that's what you intended I, the recipient, to see.
That doesn't negate your point, of course. But yes, we humans do pattern recognition pretty well and from an early age. I think one of the AI guys that posts here on a frequent basis likened our current computer abilities to that of an 18 month old child. I, not being an expert, defer to them.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
That you should be so lucky
Back in my day we had to crawl on hand and bare feet over glass to get to school....
> It looks like a stripper (sans bra) wearing a rodent mask to me. I really, really doubt that's what you intended I, the recipient, to see.
That's pretty it. We'll spot a potentially sexy member of the opposite gender in the dark at 200 yards. Even if the pattern of lines looks quite rodent-like, we'll spot those tits. :)
In tests, I found we're better at distinguishing a man vs a woman than we are a man vs a fire hydrant - we'll "see" a man 200-300 yards out in the dark (black and white vision) even if that "man shape" is actually a fire hydrant. We know the curves of a woman when we see them though.
Because the summary is actually funny; thanks for the joke.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Temperature of a white dwarf star is around 99726.85 C.
Oxygen would ignite.
Might be a managed star. Its evolution has been managed by civilization that values the materials the star is producing now.
It's a baboon sitting on it's haunches, facing to the left. Big cheek pouches. At each end.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
In fact, the way my non-CAPTCHA is used, we know -exactly- what the user thinks is sexy. Guess how we pull that trick off.
You are correct, the code is mostly used on porn sites (about 30,000 of them). If you've paid $29.95 to join RedheadMilf.com, we can reasonably infer that you might like red headed milfs. We use whatever photos the site itself is selling, what the customer already paid for.
If it were a free site, and it were call redhead-lolitas.com, you might see a few of those. Paying $29.95 for MILFs? Odds close to zero.
However, if such a person takes an extra two or three seconds to recognize the red headed MILFs in the pics, that's great.