Cosmic discovery could shed light on black holes in distant galaxies
Scientists have discovered extreme nuclear transients (ENTs), the most powerful energy blasts in the universe, occurring when stars are torn apart by supermassive black holes.
ENTs can emit 100 times more energy in a year than the Sun does over its 10-billion-year lifetime.
Astronomer Jason Hinkle identified the first two ENTs in data from the European Space Agency 's Gaia telescope.
Researchers believe ENTs can be used to study massive black holes in distant galaxies, providing insights into black hole growth when the universe was half its current age.
ENTs are rare, occurring much less frequently than supernovae, but upcoming observatories like the Vera C Rubin Observatory and Nasa 's Roman Space Telescope may help discover more of them.
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Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Bernie Ecclestone fired everyone in the team apart from me
As a man who came up with some of Formula One's greatest innovations, it is not a surprise that Gordon Murray marvels with fascination about the futuristic robots that operated on him last year. For decades, Murray – who spent two successful decades in F1 with Brabham and McLaren – has suffered from acid reflux, which increases the risk of oesophageal cancer. At the start of 2024 he was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma [cancer that starts in the glands]. 'For 15 years I've been going for an endoscopy every year and a biopsy. We caught it with one of those. The problem with oesophageal cancer is that it doesn't have many symptoms until it's too late, which is why the survival rate is very low,' Murray tells Telegraph Sport. Murray's brother Terry died of the disease 11 years ago. From there it was a choice of having surgery straight away or chemotherapy first and then robotic-assisted surgery. Murray chose the latter. 'The oncologist spent the best part of an hour going through the possible side-effects with me and my wife before I started the chemo and boy I got everything,' he says. The most extreme of the side-effects was atrial fibrillation, where Murray's heart rate soared to 180bpm. To remedy this, his heart was stopped and restarted. This delayed his procedure but he eventually had the operation to remove the cancer in July last year. The Da Vinci XI surgical robot used in Murray's procedure is controlled by a doctor. In Murray's case this was Professor Shaun Preston, based at Private Care at Guy's Hospital. Preston and his team have now performed more than 250 robotic-assisted cancer operations. 'The Da Vinci robots allow keyhole surgery to be performed with a magnified, immersive, 3D image that is better than the naked eye,' Professor Preston explains. 'It is like operating from within the abdomen and/or chest.' This groundbreaking technology, which allows surgeons to operate with greater precision, was a natural point of fascination for Murray the engineer. 'The surgeon sits on the other side of the room with a PlayStation, basically, and you are lying there and everything is done with robots,' he says. The surgery was a success and Murray was out of intensive care within six days. He claims to be back to working 11-hour days – although he has been getting used to being fed by tube. Murray, as enthusiastic as ever at 78, sees the similarities in the medical technology used in his operation and his own career. 'It's a bit like us prototyping a racing car. That's the fun bit for me: when you think of an idea and then you have to develop it before you actually go racing,' he says. 'Racing' is still what Murray is best known for, 35 years after he left F1. His years helping to revive Brabham, working with then owner Bernie Ecclestone, were undoubtedly the peak of his (and arguably anybody's) innovation in motorsport. Murray moved to the UK from his native South Africa in 1969 as a 23-year-old. Not too long after, he secured a job on Brabham's design team after meeting with then-designer and co-founder Ron Tauranac. In 1972 the struggling outfit was bought by Bernie Ecclestone, who sacked everyone in the technical team apart from Murray. He became chief designer at just 26, starting a period of revival that would result in 22 grand prix wins and two world championships. 'I should have gone home and had many sleepless nights thinking about it. But I didn't. I just came in in the morning and got stuck in and designed a car I thought would win,' Murray says. 'Bernie Ecclestone was my business partner for 14 years at Brabham. He fired the other four guys and just kept me in and said right, you're it, you're the chief designer – I want a brand new Formula One car.' To this day, Murray is still not totally sure why Ecclestone decided to keep only him on board. 'Nobody has ever got the real answer. One time he said 'I found him under a dust sheet in the corner of the design office'. Another time it was everybody – I don't know who 'everybody' was – told me to fire Gordon so I decided to keep him. Bernie loves coming up with these fun answers.' Murray has a suspicion that interest from other teams – he designed Alain de Cadenet's Duckhams LM for the 1972 edition of Le Mans and was approached by Italian team Tecno to design their F1 car – made Ecclestone think he was worth retaining. Murray says he would 'hate' to design F1 cars today because of the lack of freedom for designers. Back then the latitude in the regulations allowed him space to come up with some of motorsport's most enduring innovations and designs, including structural carbon fibre and pull-rod suspension. There was also the introduction of strategic pit-stops and refuelling in F1 towards the end of the 1982 season with the BT50. 'I did some calculations on the lap-time differential between half tanks and full tanks and that was very easy to calculate. We knew that going from empty tanks to full tanks was about 2.5sec a lap. So, if you could start on half tanks you would have a second-a-lap advantage, every lap,' Murray explains. 'Because there were no rules about refuelling I used pressure – we had a couple of old beer barrels and we pressurised one, I think 2.5bar or something and we could get 30 gallons of fuel in in three seconds. It was highly dangerous!' The problem was that turbo-charger issues were so persistent that they only got to the pit stop once in that period. The chance of a real and lasting advantage, Murray believed, had disappeared. 'Because we never finished a race, I said to Bernie 'we've completely blown it'. We've shown them now for about four or five races what we're going to do and when we arrive at the first race in Brazil [next season], everybody will have a half-tank car, a pit-stop car and they didn't. I couldn't believe our luck!' When you think of innovation and Gordon Murray and embody it within a single Formula One car, though, the machine that will pop into most people's heads is 1978's Brabham BT46B, or the 'fan car'. The design came about almost by accident. Brabham's flat-12 Alfa Romeo engine was too large to go down the ground-effect route of the Lotus 78, so Murray had to come up with another solution. He did so by studying the regulations and finding a loophole. The idea with the fan was to use it to create downforce – which it did, enormously – but because its 'primary purpose' was cooling it was not classified as a moveable aerodynamic device and was permitted within regulations. Getting it to last was problematic, though. 'We did some private testing at Donington and then Brands Hatch and the fans, which were composite plastic, all exploded,' Murray says. 'With only one week before the Swedish Grand Prix I had to recast all the blades in magnesium and machine the plastic hub for the fan in aluminium. When we got to Sweden I had no idea if it would work.' Although Niki Lauda and John Watson had to adapt their driving styles to get the best from the new car ('I had to explain to them that their approach to a corner – forget everything they knew') the Austrian won the race at Anderstorp by 34 seconds. However, after protests and wrangling between the teams and the sport's governing body, the fan concept was banned. Murray's time at Brabham ended in 1986 after two drivers' titles. By that point he decided he wanted out of F1. 'We lost Nelson Piquet, we lost the tyre contract, we lost the BMW engine contract. I thought I've just won two world championships… I should go and do something different. Bernie by then had definitely got his mind set on running Formula One,' Murray says. Ron Dennis at McLaren had eyed Murray to replace Ferrari-bound John Barnard. After some persuading, Murray took up the offer to become the team's technical director for 1987. At the time, McLaren had a reputation for stuffiness and rigid formality. Woking was a stark contrast to Brabham, partly down to the enormous difference in resources. Murray says he was still given latitude to operate, technically and personally. 'My contract said I had a completely free hand, even the way I dressed – so it didn't change much there. Likewise, just like Bernie, Ron Dennis gave me a completely free hand with the technical side of the business.' The result was a perfect end to a storied F1 career and 'a nice way to bow out': three double world championships, with Ayrton Senna taking two drivers' titles and Alain Prost the other. Of all the drivers Murray worked with, it is no shock that he rates Senna as fastest. But he has a lot of affection for another Brazilian – Nelson Piquet, who won two drivers' championships in 1981 and 1983 in Murray's cars. 'He had a bicycle and a flat nearby and he came in every day and sat at my drawing board and asked questions all day. The interaction I had with Nelson in those seven years was very, very special.' After leaving F1, Murray designed the McLaren F1, the company's first sportscar. Its revolutionary design, fittingly, utilised a carbon fibre monocoque. 30 years ago last weekend, a modified F1 GTR won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the last road car to do so. Of all Murray's achievements, he calls this 'top trumps'. 'Forget the fact that it was a GT car, not a prototype – it wasn't supposed to win. I think that is a much harder thing to do than winning a world championship in Formula One because you only get one shot at it. 'When I first thought about doing Le Mans in '72, I was terrified because I knew what went wrong in a grand prix car in two hours. That is like doing a whole season without stopping.'
Daily Mail
6 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Erectile dysfunction drug Viagra has surprise new health benefit, scientists find - offering new hope to 3million ageing Britons
A surprising new health benefit has emerged from the sex drug Viagra - which means three million ageing Britons can now also enjoy a harder skull. The little blue tablet was found to increase the production of vital bone cells, preventing back pain and fractures in old age. Sildenafil - also known as Viagra - can help human stem cells transform into osteoblasts which help the human skeleton regenerate as it is completely replaced roughly once every 10 years. As humans get older, they lose more bone than is built, increasing the risk of breaks or osteoporosis, which makes bones brittle and painful. Follow-up tests on mice by Peking University also suggested a prevention of bone loss. Dr Menglong Hu and Dr Likun Wu told MailOnline: 'Our findings offer new insights into the physiological effects of the medicine. 'Sildenafil enhanced stem cell osteogenic differentiation and inhibited bone loss — it may usefully treat osteoporosis.' Viagra was invented as a heart drug in the 1980s before being found to help with erectile dysfunction. Some studies suggest it may also help reduce the risk of dementia. However, the have been cautions over the years that the drug could have some negative side effects, in particular if taken too much. A large quantity of the drug could result in a painful, 'uncomfortably and disproportionately large erection' called a priapism which could go on for hours. Some experts also found regularly taking the common drug may raise the risk of three serious eye conditions. Common side effects may include headaches, hot flushes, nausea, indigestion, dizziness and a stuffy nose. Nearly half of men between the ages of 40 and 70 suffer from erectile dysfunction in the UK - this is more than 4.5 million people. Though, reports suggest Viagra is now even becoming increasingly popular with younger individuals in their 20s and 30s. Last year, it emerged Viagra may help prevent dementia by boosting blood flow in the brain. 'This is the first trial to show that sildenafil gets into the blood vessels in the brain in people with this condition, improving blood flow and how responsive these blood vessels are,'Dr Alastair Webb, a neurologist and study author at Oxford University said.
Times
6 hours ago
- Times
My famous father — the fraudulent, fantasist scientist
'When I was small,' Joanne Briggs writes touchingly. 'I believed my dad to be the only man who knew all science.' Michael Briggs had all but disappeared from her life in the early 1970s when she was seven after walking out on her mother, but she would correct anyone who showed pity for her as a fatherless child. Dad hadn't gone, she would tell them, he was just in another country being a very famous scientist in the fields of space, and poisons, and having babies. 'Anything you can think of, really, he's an expert in it.' She wasn't the only one to have this inflated view of her father's expertise. Indeed, the scientific establishment shared it, at least for a while. Michael was a Nasa space scientist turned pharmacologist, a renowned specialist in biochemistry, an adviser to the World Health Organisation and a university dean of sciences. He had written papers on topics ranging from human hormones to meteorites and intergalactic travel. The son of a typewriter mechanic from Manchester, he was a self-made man, bouncing round the world from Australia to Pasadena, taking on ever more prestigious positions, pushing at the boundaries of the scientific imagination and 'grabbing hold of everything the Jet Age had to offer'.
