The universe is filled with almost incomprehensibly bizarre phenomena, but astronomers may be a step closer to understanding the life cycle of stars. Astronomers observing a distant star system have identified what may be . This could help shed light on the murky division between black holes and neutron . Neutron stars like the newly discovered J0740+6620 are the remains of dead stars. While stars burn for millions or billions of years, they all eventually run out of fuel. Some stars, those between eight and 29 solar masses end up as neutron stars. Smaller stars like the sun become white dwarfs, and larger ones collapse into black holes.
Astronomers around the world were elated in 2017 when ‘Oumuamua appeared in the sky, becoming the very first confirmed alien object to visit our solar system. Sadly, ‘Oumuamua was already on its way out of the solar system before its discovery by the Pan-STARRS observatory, and we couldn’t capture an image. Now, astronomers have of the second known interstellar visitor, called Comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov). Unlike ‘Oumuamua, this new object was spotted by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov. The Minor Planet Center has confirmed the tentative discovery of the second alien object, noting that Comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) is on an extreme hyperbolic orbit.
If you’re ready to do away with hard drives and switch to an all SSD solution for your storage needs, then you may want to pick up one of Samsung’s 970 Evo 2TB SSDs. Not only does this drive offer a large storage capacity, but it also features a fast data transfer rate and a $200 discount. Reading data at 3,500MB/s, this SSD hits the limits of what the M.2 interface is capable of when connected using PCI-E 3.0 lanes. With a total of 2TB of storage capacity, this drive removes any need to have a second drive to store files as it can hold more data than the average user typically needs.
There are numerous music streaming services, most of which have largely similar offerings. Amazon has just rolled out a new version of its own with ultra-high fidelity audio. , you can get access to millions of songs at higher quality than other services, but that won’t matter much unless you’ve got the audio gear to truly enjoy it. With most music streaming services, the “high” quality options are around 320kbps. So, we’ve sacrificed some quality in exchange for having easy access to almost every song in the world. For many music listeners, that’s a fair exchange. Tidal, and now Amazon, cater to the few consumers who want more.
Google launched Project Fi (now just Google Fi) at a time when unlimited mobile data was a rarity. Now, all carriers have a nominally “unlimited” service tier, and some only offer unlimited. Google is getting with the times today, to Google Fi. It’ll cost you more than the pay-as-you-go standard service, but it could be perfect for frequent travelers who use a lot of data. calls the standard Fi plan that launched in 2015 the “Fi Flexible” option. You pay a flat $20 monthly fee for a single line (it’s less if you have more lines) and then $10 per gigabyte of data used.
If you’ve ever tried to search Amazon for anything, you’re aware that the website has long been an utterly confusing muddle. For years, trying to rank products by anything other than relevance resulted in a complete mishmash of non-results being inserted into your pages. Attempting to search for a TV and ranking by price might produce results for TV stands and dinner trays — products completely unrelated to your original search query, in other words. Last year, Amazon changed its search behavior without communicating the change to end-users. Instead of simply ranking items by “Relevance,” it began to rank them with an eye towards which items would make Amazon the most profit.
When a drone strike knocked out a Saudi Aramco oil facility producing 5 percent of the world’s oil supply, the shockwaves were nearly instantaneous. Crude oil prices jumped almost 20 percent Monday and could spike higher, depending on how fearful the markets are that the strike could be replicated this week, this month or this year. In the overlapping worlds of automobiles and energy conservation, there are questions about whether this will move buyers to smaller cars and/or highly fuel-efficient battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. Transportation uses a quarter of the world’s energy. Here’s our analysis on how we’ll be affected.
Borderlands 3 launched last week, and the game is in wretched condition. Reviews of the title have been good on the merits, though pretty much everyone agrees that Borderlands 3 is, at best, a retread of previous titles. Whether that’s a good thing depends entirely on how much you enjoyed those previous games, but the consensus seems to be that the game doesn’t do a great job with expanding on core gameplay mechanics or reinventing the wheel. Unfortunately, the merits of the execution have been swamped by technical issues. Borderlands 3 players have been unhappy enough with how the game plays to swamp various online forums, including Steam’s forums for Borderlands 2.
AMD’s new Ryzen 3000-series processors are here, and today you can save on a new laptop that utilizes one to provide plenty of performance for everyday tasks. Acer builds this laptop with one of AMD’s new Ryzen 3 3200U processors. This efficient chip has two SMT-enabled cores that can operate at speeds up to 3.5GHz. The 3200U also has a small integrated GPU with 192 streaming processors. This GPU is too weak to play modern games, but it is able to run many games from the Windows 7 era with acceptable frame rates. Other key features of Acer’s Aspire 5 Slim laptop include an LED-backlit keyboard and a 1080p IPS display.
