Israel Adesanya was dazzling in his title defense and Jan Blachowicz cemented himself as the new light heavyweight champion as the UFC 253 main and co-main events both ended in dramatic fashion.
While Adesanya and Blachowicz will undoubtedly enjoy their victories with a well-deserved post-fight celebration, it didn’t take long for the subject of their next fight to be raised on Saturday night.
In fact, it was Adesanya himself who made the call about the top contender in the middleweight division. He immediately turned his attention to Jared Cannonier, who’s been on his radar for the past year.
Cannonier is currently preparing for a showdown with former champion Robert Whittaker at UFC 254 in October. If he’s victorious, Cannonier should expect his next fight to come against Adesanya with the middleweight title up for grabs.
“That’s the fight if Cannonier wins,” UFC president Dana White confirmed at the UFC 253 post fight press conference. “And I love that about Israel. He’s ready for who’s next, who else thinks they can beat me. The kid is an absolute stud.”
Adesanya will undoubtedly be keeping a close eye on Cannonier’s fight in just a few weeks to see if his next opponent is secured or not.
Things aren’t quite as clear cut at light heavyweight, but there are only a few options that make sense for Blachowicz after he dispatched Dominick Reyes in impressive fashion to claim the vacant title.
The Polish veteran made it clear just after the belt was wrapped around his waist that he would like to cement his championship status by facing Jon Jones, who vacated the belt just recently with the intention of moving up to the heavyweight division.
Jones even went as far as hinting on Twitter that perhaps he could return to 205 pounds now that a challenger like Blachowicz exists for him but obviously nothing is set in stone at this point.
The other fight that could determine the next contender for the light heavyweight title will take place on Nov. 7 when Thiago Santos goes to battle with Glover Teixeira.
White confirmed the winner of that fight would earn the next crack at the new 205-pound champion unless Jones really did decide he wanted to return to his old stomping grounds.
“Those are the guys that are fighting for the next shot,” White said about Santos vs. Teixeira. “But obviously if Jon Jones wanted that fight, we wouldn’t deny Jon Jones the opportunity.”
“An episode I hoped I’d never have to record, but one I felt I owed to all the beautiful Armcheries who have been on this ride with me for the last couple years,” Shepard said in an Instagram post announcing the episode.
In the episode, Shepard — known for his roles on “Parenthood” — detailed the bumps of his journey, most recently dealing with an addiction to Vicodin, the opioid painkiller. For the last eight weeks, he said, he had been “on them all day,” after taking them originally for injuries.
This led to a situation where he was “taking, you know, eight 30s a day, and I know that’s an amount that’s going to result in a pretty bad withdrawal. And I start getting really scared, and I’m starting to feel really lonely. And I just have this enormous secret.”
At first Shephard said he tried to fix the problem himself by slowly weaning off the pills — but it didn’t work.
But this month, he revealed his addiction to wife Kristen Bell and his friends. As of Friday, he is on day 11 of being sober once more.
Shepard has previously dealt with addiction to cocaine and alcohol, which he says he has not touched in 16 years. The actor has been open about his recovery journey, discussing it in the past on his podcast and in interviews.
The strap design looks pretty different from the original.
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Rear view shows more of the strap.
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Close up on the strap’s rear connection behind your skull.
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The handheld Quest controllers have been updated with “new ergonomics” according to the leak.
Close up on the new controllers.
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Check out this average consumer having so much fun with the new Oculus Quest 2!
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You could be this gleeful, too, if you were in the Oculus Quest 2!
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Branding!
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Facebook has inadvertently revealed key information about its next VR headset, the Oculus Quest 2, ahead of an expected unveiling at the Facebook Connect conference later this week.
As discussed in videos posted briefly on Facebook’s Blueprint e-learning platform (and since archived on YouTube), the Oculus Quest 2 is presented as more of a spec upgrade to the existing Quest than a completely new generational split. The standalone headset, which doesn’t require external sensors or processing hardware, will play all original Quest games, according to the video. The Quest 2 can also display VR games running on a Windows PC via Oculus Link, just like the original headset.
The Quest 2 sports a SnapDragon XR2 processor, according to the videos, a significant upgrade from the Snapdragon 835 that was adapted for the Quest from mobile phones. Chipmaker Qualcomm says the XR2 can provide two times the CPU & GPU performance, four times the pixel throughput, and 11 times the AI operations per second, compared to the 835.
That extra power goes in part toward an “almost 4K display” on the Quest 2 with nearly 2K resolution per eye, according to the video. That’s a nearly 50 percent increase in raw pixel count over the original Quest, making it “the highest-resolution headset we’ve ever made).
The new headset also sports an upgrade to 6GB of RAM (up from 4GB on the original) and will come in configurations with up to 256GB of storage. The headstrap has been redesigned as a “new soft touch strap” while the Oculus Touch controllers have been “updated with new ergonomics,” according to the videos.
Simulated dark matter haloes. (J. Wang/S. Bose/Center for Astrophysics)
BRIAN KOBERLEIN, UNIVERSE TODAY
7 SEPTEMBER 2020
How do you study something invisible? This is a challenge that faces astronomers who study dark matter.
Although dark matter comprises 85 percent of all matter in the Universe, it doesn’t interact with light. It can only be seen through the gravitational influence it has on light and other matter. To make matters worse, efforts to directly detect dark matter on Earth have been unsuccessful so far.
Despite the elusive quality of dark matter, we have learned several things about it.
We know that it is not just dark but cold. As a result, it clumps together, forming the seeds of galaxy clusters. It also often forms halos around galaxies, making up the majority of a galaxy’s mass.
However, there are still many unanswered questions about dark matter, so astronomers often develop new models for dark matter, comparing them to observation to test their accuracy.
One way this is done is through sophisticated computer simulations.
Recently a team from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics ran a detailed simulation of the dark matter cosmos, and it has produced some surprising results.
The accuracy of any dark matter simulation depends upon the assumptions you make about dark matter. In this case, the team assumed dark matter consists of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) with a mass about 100 times that of a proton.
IceCube neutrino Detector in Antarctica searches for WIMPs. (IceCube Collaboration/NSF)
WIMPs are one of the more popular theories for dark matter. Similar computer simulations of WIMP dark matter have been done before. Still, this one was exceptionally high in resolution, simulating features on a scale ranging across thirty orders of magnitude.
In this simulation, dark matter formed in halos around galaxies, just as we observe. But interestingly, it found that halos also developed at all mass scales, from small, planet-mass halos, to galactic halos, to massive halos that form around clusters of galaxies.
These halos have a similar structure, where they are most dense toward their center, becoming more diffuse at their edges. The fact that this happens at all scales makes it an explicit feature of dark matter.
Simulated dark mater halos at all scales. (J. Wang/S. Bose/Center for Astrophysics)
While the small scale halos are too small to be detected through their gravitational influence on light, they could tell us about how dark matter interacts with itself. One idea about dark matter is that when dark matter particles collide, they emit gamma radiation.
Since the scale of a halo would affect the energy spectrum of the gamma rays, this model makes specific predictions about the gamma-ray excess we should see both in the Milky Way and other galaxies.
Dark matter remains one of the biggest unsolved problems in modern astronomy.
While we would love to detect it directly, until that happens, simulations such as this are one of our most powerful tools to better understand dark matter.
On Tuesday, the 29-year-old singer announced wife Cherry Seaborn had given birth to the couple’s first child, daughter Lyra Antarctica, last week.
Ed Sheeran and Cherry SeabornGetty Images
“Ello! A quick message from me as I have some personal news that I wanted to share with you… Last week, with the help of an amazing delivery team, Cherry gave birth to our beautiful and healthy daughter – Lyra Antarctica Seaborn Sheeran,” the proud dad posted to Instagram, sharing a photo of baby socks in navy and gray.
“We are completely in love with her,” Sheeran continued. “Both mum and baby are doing amazing and we are on cloud nine over here. We hope that you can respect our privacy at this time. Lots of love and I’ll see you when it’s time to come back, Ed x.”
In August, reports surfaced that Sheeran and Seaborn, 28, were expecting.
“Ed and Cherry are over the moon. They’re very excited, but have kept things very low key,” a source said, according to the Sun.
The high school sweethearts tied the knot in January 2019. In December, they starred in his music video for “Put It All On Me.”
New information from popular industry analyst TrendForce reveals that, despite a series of controversialcuts, the iPhone 12 line-up looks set to be the most expensive iPhones ever released. And up to $150 more than previously expected.
08/30 Update: Bloomberg has revealed further iPhone 12 launch details, with excellent investigative reporter Mark Gurman stating that the range will not be ready for the launch of iOS 14 in September. Gurman says the delayed release means the iPhone 12 line-up is likely to ship with iOS 14.1 out of the box, when it arrives some time in October (or even later). Current iPhone owners can expect multiple ‘minor point’ versions of iOS 14 to launch before that (iOS 14.0.1, 14.0.2, etc). Historically, this has only happened once before when the iPhone X was pushed back to November. But never before in the iPhone’s 12 year history, have all new models missed the debut of a new iOS generation. That said, it might just give Apple enough time to squeeze in the upgrade everyone is waiting for.
Breaking this down, TrendForce states that the new entry-level 5.4-inch iPhone 12, the renamed 6.1-inch iPhone 12 Plus, iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max will start from as much as $749, $849, $1,099 and $1,199 respectively. These are $100 increases on the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max, but the head turning price rise is the $150 leap for the iPhone 12 Plus, the successor to the iPhone 11.
And the reason for this increase will prove controversial: 5G, a network standard still not available to most users around the world. At present, 5G chips are cripplingly expensive with recent estimates saying they will add up to $135 to the build cost – or closer to $200, once Apple factors in profit margins. This transition also arrives in a year when Apple is moving all iPhones from LCD to OLED, another cost increase.
Apple’s iPhone 12 (5.4-inch concept render) will add an OLED display as well as 5G this year
The upside, despite these price rises, is rivals are being hit even harder and the iPhone 12 range is still likely to undercut most premium 5G smartphones on sale today. That said, with Apple tipped to launch a long-lasting, lower priced 4G iPhone 12 Pro early next year, those reluctant to pay the ‘5G Tax’ may well find the smartest upgrade decision is to wait.
Pixel 4a? That’s a damn good question and there a number of interesting answers, some tongue-in-cheek. For example, could Google be waiting for the public to forget that the
Apple iPhone SE (2020) is a thing before releasing the Pixel 4a? Will Google decide to introduce the Pixel 4a and Pixel 5 together? We know that the phone exists because
the Pixel 4a has been spotted at the FCC. Once again, the latest Pixel will use an e-label and there are three model numbers: G025J, G025M, and G025N. The first model number is presumed to be for U.S. variants of the phone while the other two designate models offered in other countries. Google filed the paperwork with the FCC on April 2nd.
The Google Pixel 4a is the runner up to last year’s red hot
Pixel 3a XL. For $399, consumers were buying the amazing Google photo processing prowess that gets more done with a single camera than many manufacturers can with a multiple rear-camera setup.
The FCC shares the frequency range for the Pixel 4a
The Pixel 4a (sorry boys and girls, Google doesn’t play the budget ‘XL’ game any more) is expected to hit the market wearing a 5.81-inch OLED panel with a resolution of 1080 x 2340. That works out to an aspect ratio of 19.5:9. The phone should be powered by the Snapdragon 730 chipset and sport 6GB of memory, a 50% hike from last year’s model. We could see versions of the phone with 64GB and 128GB of storage.Here’s a stunner. The expected battery capacity of 3080mAh is larger than the 2800mAh battery on the full-size
Pixel 4! The Pixel 4a is rumored to feature the same 12.2MP primary and 16MP telephoto cameras seen on the back of the Pixel 4.
Now that we know that the FCC has given a thumbs up for the Pixel 4a, the unveiling shouldn’t be that far away. Earlier this week, we told you that listings for the phone published by a couple of etailers in Europe
hinted at an early July release for the handset. We should point out that the FCC did not mention the Soli radar chip like it did when the Pixel 4 series passed through its doors. The FCC regulates the mmWave frequencies that Soli runs on. However, this really is not a major surprise since we didn’t see any hint that the feature would be available for the Pixel 4a.
“The soul we’d been excited to welcome into the world had lessons for our family that did not include joining us in a living physical body,” James Van Der Beek said
James Van Der Beek and his wife Kimberly are mourning another loss.
On Saturday, the actor shared the heartbreaking news that his wife had suffered another miscarriage.
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“After suffering a brutal, very public miscarriage last November, we were overjoyed to learn we were pregnant. This time, we kept the news to ourselves. But last weekend, once again, 17 weeks in… the soul we’d been excited to welcome into the world had lessons for our family that did not include joining us in a living physical body,” he wrote on Instagram.
In November 2019, he revealed the news of their miscarriage during his season of Dancing with the Stars and dedicated his dance to his wife. “My wife Kimberly and I went through every expecting parent’s worst nightmare. We lost the baby. The little soul that we had expected to welcome into our family took a shortcut to whatever lies beyond,” he said.
The couple share children Olivia, 9, Joshua, 8, Annabel, 6, Emilia, 4, and Gwendolyn, who turned 2 earlier this month. This is Kimberly’s fifth miscarriage in 9 years.
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Kimberly Van Der Beek
Kimberly Van Der Beek/Instagram
Speaking of the heartbreaking experience, Van Der Beek said on Saturday that he felt “helpless.”
“We rushed @vanderkimberly to the hospital by ambulance for another harrowing night of blood transfusions,” he continued. “And as I stood by, grateful for the good people who navigated the maze of regulations to save her life – but helpless to do much for the woman I loved other than massage her feet and try to keep her warm (with my #DWTS robe, ironically) – something kept running through my head, again and again, which I now feel compelled to share: We’ve got to take better care of each other.”
Van Der Beek added, “The world is in pain right now. There’s denial, shock, numbness, anger – all the old patterns we cling to when deep trauma is unearthed. And there are no words to ease that pain… to make the process hurt less or to solve it quickly. But the way out of it? Starts with an open, broken-hearted contemplation of this question: How can we take better care of each other?”
As his message came to an end, the star simply wrote, “To all the families who have gone through this… you are not alone.”
James Van Der Beek, Kimberly Van Der Beek and children
James Van Der Beek/ Instagram
The couple has been candid about the miscarriages they endured on their road to expanding their family, as well as their respective recovery processes.
Last Thanksgiving, Van Der Beek expressed his appreciation for his wife. “In a place of newfound gratitude to have @vanderkimberly in this world today. Got really scary for a minute there — scary enough to wake me up to how much appreciation I have for so many things I just take for granted,” he wrote on Instagram, referring to his wife’s miscarriage, during which she said she “nearly lost my life.”
“I’d never been so open (especially with tragedy) as I’ve been these last few weeks, and you responded with love and support and prayers and shared your own stories, and we felt the energy … and it helped. So thank you,” he added.
And in early December, the actor opened up about the healing process in an Instagram post. “Still in repair,” he wrote alongside a photograph of him and his wife together at the beach.
“Discovering that healing happens at its own pace. Not the pace you’d like, and definitely not the pace at which the world keeps on moving… But it happens. And there’s beauty in allowing yourself to be exactly where you’re at,” he said.
If you want to see one of the wonders of the natural world, just startle a bombardier beetle. But be careful: when the beetles are scared, they flood an internal chamber with a complex cocktail of aromatic chemicals, triggering a cascade of chemical reaction that detonates the fluid and sends it shooting out of the insect’s spray nozzle in a machine-gun-like pulse of toxic, scalding-hot vapor. The explosive, high-pressure burst of noxious chemicals doesn’t harm the beetle, but it stains and irritates human skin—and can kill smaller enemies outright.
The beetle’s extraordinary arsenal has been held up by some as a proof of God’s existence: how on earth, creationists argue, could such a complex, multistep defense mechanism evolve by chance? Now researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. show how the bombardier beetle concocts its deadly explosives and in the process, learn how evolution gave rise to the beetle’s remarkable firepower.
“We explain for the first time how these incredible beetles biosynthesize chemicals to create fuel for their explosions,” said Athula Attygalle, a research professor of chemistry and lead author of the work, which appears today in the July 2020 issue of the Science of Nature. “It’s a fascinating story that nobody has been able to tell before.”
To trace the workings of the beetle’s internal chemistry set, Attygalle and colleagues at University of California, Berkeley used deuterium, a rare hydrogen isotope, to tag specially synthesized chemical blends. The team led by Kipling Will then either injected the deuterium-labeled chemicals into the beetles’ internal fluids, or mixed them with dog food and fed them to the beetles over a period of several days.
Attygalle’s team sedated the bugs by popping them in the freezer, then gently tugged at their legs, annoying the sleepy insects until they launched their defensive sprays onto carefully placed filter papers. The team also dissected some beetles, using human hairs to tie closed the tiny ducts linking their chemical reservoirs and reaction chambers, and sampling the raw chemicals used to generate explosions.
Using mass spectrometers, Attygalle checked the samples sent to Stevens for deuterium-labeled products, enabling him to figure out exactly which chemicals the beetles had incorporated into their bomb-making kits. “People have been speculating about this for at least 50 years, but at last we have a clear answer,” Attygalle said. “It turns out that the beetles’ biochemistry is even more intricate than we’d thought.”
Previously, researchers had assumed that two toxic, benzene-like chemicals called benzoquinones found in the beetles’ spray were metabolized from hydroquinone, a toxic chemical that in humans can cause cancer or genetic damage. The team at Stevens showed that in fact just one of the beetle’s benzoquinones derived from hydroquinone, with the other springing from a completely separate precursor: m-cresol, a toxin found in coal tar.
It’s fascinating that the beetles can safely metabolize such toxic chemicals, Attygalle said. In future studies, he hopes to follow the beetles’ chemical supply chain further upstream, to learn how the precursors are biosynthesized from naturally available substances.
The team’s findings also show that the beetles’ explosives rely on chemical pathways found in many other creepy-crawlies. Other animals such as millipedes also use benzoquinones to discourage predators, although they lack the bombardier’s ability to detonate their chemical defenses. Evolutionarily distant creatures such as spiders and millipedes use similar strategies, too, suggesting that multiple organisms have independently evolved ways to biosynthesize the chemicals.
That’s a reminder that the bombardier beetle, though remarkable, is part of a rich and completely natural evolutionary tapestry, Attygalle said. “By studying the similarities and differences between beetles‘ chemistry, we can see more clearly how they and other species fit together into the evolutionary tree,” he explained. “Beetles are incredibly diverse, and they all have amazing chemical stories to tell.”
More information:
Athula B. Attygalle et al, Biosynthetic origin of benzoquinones in the explosive discharge of the bombardier beetle Brachinus elongatulus, The Science of Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1007/s00114-020-01683-0
Citation:
Research reveals the chemistry behind the bombardier beetle’s extraordinary firepower (2020, June 16)
retrieved 17 June 2020
from https://phys.org/news/2020-06-reveals-chemistry-bombardier-beetle-extraordinary.html
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part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Apple may finally be getting round to updating the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Intel’s tenth generation processors. The good news is that the MacOS powered laptop going to get a bucketload of extra power.
A MacBook is shown during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers … [+] Conference Monday, June 5, 2017, in San Jose , Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
Intel’s i7-1068NG7 CPU is probably the biggest indication of the power that will be on tap. Not only is it one of Intel’s tenth generation chips (offering far more performance than the current 8th-generation chipset in the 13-inch model from 2019), it’s also a brand new chip that has yet to be confirmed by Intel. Welcome to a MacBook Pro with a cutting edge processor of the current generation.
This laptop is loaded to bear in terms of memory and storage as well. The current 13-inch MacBook Pro can be upgraded to 16 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage, so we’re looking at a doubling of the core specs. That suggests this MacBook is going to be able to handle a lot of high end media work,especially 4K video.
On top of the hardware specs here, the new MacBook Pro is expect to follow the MacBook Air and 16-inch MacBook Pro with a new design to increase the thermal efficiency and the replacement of the butterfly keyboard with the scissor-switch based Magic Keyboard. Given the 16-inch MacBook Pro was the replacement for the 15-inch MacBook Pro, many of the geekerati are hoping for the upcoming ‘smaller’ MacBook Pro to shrink the bezels and add a millimeter or two so a 14-inch screen can be used, instead of the current 13-inch screen.
FILE- In this Oct. 30, 2018, file photo Apple’s new MacBook Air computers are displayed during the … [+] company’s showcase of new products in the Brooklyn borough of New York. Apple Inc. reports earnings Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2019. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)
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I’m pretty sure we’re looking at the top-specced MacBook Pro here, and a price that will be in excess of $3000 when it goes on sale. No doubt the entry level machine will sport a lower configuration. My best guess would be a Core i5 chip, 8 GB of memory and a 256 GB SSD, priced at around $1499.
As for the all important release date, before the coronavirus pandemic hit, the obvious time would be to do it during the keynote of the annual Worldwide Developer Conference which traditionally takes place in June. Given WWDC is going virtual, you have to assume that this new MacBook Pro will follow the same route as March’s MacBook Air with online announcements and press releases driving the awareness.
