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Author: 一毫秒的永恒 A Name Fit for Poetry In this artist's concept, a supermassive black hole is surrounded by a rotating disk of matter. The faintly purple sphere of light above the black hole represents a feature of the corona containing high-energy particles capable of producing X-rays. Credit: NASA/JPL-CalTech   On April 10, 019, the first image of M87*, a black hole 55 million light-years from Earth, was released. It also received a name far more interesting than those of most black holes. This may have been the first stroke of naming luck in black-hole history: its new name was “Pōwehi,” a word in the Indigenous Hawaiian language meaning “embellished dark source of unending creation.” The name came from Larry Kimura, a professor and Hawaiian-language expert at the University of Hawaiʻ ...

Salvation Author: 观复·钧天   Salvation is the pursuit of a higher material or spiritual state by people dissatisfied with their present condition. It begins with an awareness that one must save oneself. Along the way, the external force of “salvation by others” may either help or hinder that effort. Its outcome is deliverance, and the highest form of deliverance is awakening: recognizing that things have always been as they are, that free will is as it is, that the natural environment is as it is, and that the course of history is as it is.   Within finite time and space, salvation is indispensable and runs through the whole of human existence. Humanity confronts the infinite with the finite: finite time and space face infinite time and space; finite perception faces infinite vastness; a fi ...

A still from a video simulation showing what a black hole's shadow might look like. The video was produced by Peter Galison and Chyld King for a short film about the Event Horizon Telescope project. The first image of a black hole will be unveiled at a press conference at 9:00 a.m. EDT on April 10, 2019 (9:00 p.m. Beijing time). Image: © EHT Outreach/YouTube   The EHT recently announced a press conference for April 10, 2019. Its statement read in part:   On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration will hold simultaneous press conferences in several regions around the world to present its latest research results, together with numerous events organized by researchers and affiliated institutions. The press conferences will take place simultaneously in Brussels (Engli ...

Author: A Millisecond of Eternity   A British study found that the additional cancer risk associated with drinking one bottle of wine per week was roughly equivalent to smoking 5 cigarettes per week for men and 10 for women. The researchers used data from nonsmokers and compared the risks with an epidemiological model.   The study, published in the British journal BMC Public Health on March 28, 2019, was among the first to estimate the relationship between alcohol and cigarettes in terms of cancer risk. Credit: Shutterstock   The study aimed to communicate the cancer risks of moderate drinking more effectively. Moderate alcohol consumption is widely believed to be less harmful than smoking, but research in the United States and the United Kingdom has found that many people are unaware o ...

Author: A Millisecond of Eternity At Earth's spring equinox, the illuminated and dark hemispheres are almost equal in area. | Credit: NOAA; NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory   On March 20, 2019, a GOES satellite photographed Earth at the spring equinox. In the image, half the planet is bathed in light while the other half lies in darkness, like a black-and-white cookie.   This beautiful symmetry will not surprise anyone familiar with astronomy and geography. Yet a real photograph—especially an astronomical one—can be more powerful than the theories we learn, leaving us in awe of the universe’s extraordinary beauty. In Latin, “equinox” means “equal night.” As geography teachers tell us, the spring and autumn equinoxes occur in March and September each year, when day and night a ...

Author: Guanfu · Juntian   Camus opens The Myth of Sisyphus by declaring suicide the only serious philosophical problem: deciding whether life is worth living is itself an answer to a philosophical question. His philosophy is therefore centered on individual life, not merely on the external world.   One point needs to be clear: when Camus says that “suicide is the only serious philosophical problem,” he is by no means urging anyone to take their own life. He once wrote: “The absence of hope is not the same as despair; lucidity does not lead to submission. A person should recognize that life is their only wealth: it must inevitably pass away, yet it can also be developed to the fullest possible extent. A person should, and can, find the courage to live in this world—even happiness.” Camu ...

Author: 一毫秒的永恒   Physics is full of particles such as neutrons and photons, but the particle world is stranger than most people imagine. Its members come in different sizes, behave in different ways, and bear memorable names ranging from supersymmetric particles to the “God particle.” Today, let us meet some of the coolest members of this extraordinary family. Higgs Boson   The Higgs boson is enormously important to physics. Often nicknamed the “God particle,” it is tied to the origin of mass for many elementary particles. In 1964, physicists were trying to understand why some particles were more massive than others and where their mass came from. Peter Higgs proposed what became known as the Higgs mechanism. The boson is associated with the Higgs field, which the mechanism assumes perm ...

Author: A Millisecond of Eternity “A Moon That Shouldn’t Exist” Artist's concept of Hippocamp, the tiny moon discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013. This was the first evidence that a moon may have splintered from a larger parent body after a comet strike. | Credit: NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted (STScI)   After several years of analysis, a team of planetary scientists finally had an explanation for the mysterious Neptunian moon they discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013.   The tiny moon, named Hippocamp, orbits unusually close to the much larger Proteus. Ordinarily, a moon as large as Proteus should clear smaller moons from its path or draw them in through its gravity.   So why is Hippocamp still there? It is probably a fragment of Proteus, knocked loose when a comet ...

Author: A Millisecond of Eternity   At 9:45 a.m. Beijing time on February 22, 2019, just as the Moon rose above the horizon, a Falcon 9 rocket set off toward it.   On the evening of February 21, 2019, a previously flown SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched an Israeli lunar lander and an Indonesian communications satellite from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in the United States. After placing both payloads into orbit, Falcon 9’s first stage returned to Earth and landed safely on the uncrewed drone ship Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic Ocean.   Although the mission’s primary payload was Indonesia’s Nusantara Satu satellite, the small lunar lander riding along as a secondary payload stole the spotlight. It became not only Israel’s first spacecraft to venture beyond Eart ...

Author: A Millisecond of Eternity The Naval Battle   Archaeologists have explored the site of a naval battle fought between Rome and Carthage 2,200 years ago. Their discoveries offer clues to how the battle unfolded, along with several mysteries that remain unsolved. Archaeologists found numerous helmets while surveying the Roman–Carthaginian battlefield. This 3D model of one helmet was created by William M. Murray. | Credit: Courtesy of RPM Nautical Foundation   The finds suggest that Carthage reused captured Roman warships in the battle. They also indicate that Carthaginian sailors may have thrown their cargo overboard in a desperate attempt to escape Roman pursuit.   Historical records place the naval battle on March 10, 241 BCE, near the Aegadian Islands off Sicily in the Mediterra ...