envelope

The Oscars – winner!Academy organisers promised a short and snappy ceremony – and the rest of us rolled our eyes. Don’t they do that every year? Well this time they meant it, delivering a ceremony that felt tightly scripted when needed, but enjoyably loose when there was capacity for it. The result was the most watchable Oscars in years, full of mischief and frivolity – John Cena streaking, I’m Just Ken – but never undercutting moments of real weight either. It helped that the big names turned up, by and large – where…

Oppo's Find X6 series is here, bringing upgrades across the board and what could well be the most impressive camera setup around. Oppo Find X6 Pro Let's start off with the Find X6 Pro, which Oppo says is ushering in the 'Three Main Camera era'. All three of the cameras on the back of the Find X6 Pro feature the largest sensors in the smartphone world in their respected positions. The wide camera has the 1-inch type Sony IMX989 sensor found in the Xiaomi 13 Pro and Vivo X90 Pro, behind a 23mm f/1.8 lens. The…

A team of astronomers from the Yunnan Observatories (YAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Australian National University have jointly discovered a binary system that is ejecting a common envelope. The scientists have managed to observe a common envelope evolution, which has long been thought to be a key step in binary star system formation, for the first time. Binary stars are systems where two stars orbit each other at a close distance. The observations were published in a research paper that was published in…

The FMV mystery box of Immortality feels masterful Whatever happened to Marissa Marcel? That’s the question at the core of Immortality, the latest from Sam Barlow’s Half Mermaid. It’s the third mystery from Barlow and co. told in full-motion video, or FMV, but it’s much more than a retread. In some ways, Immortality‘s match-cut deduction feels like it was inevitable. I recently had a chance to both chat with the crew at Half Mermaid and play a short snippet of Immortality. And what’s striking about Immortality at first…

Jupiter is composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. The amounts of each closely conform to the theoretical quantities in the primordial solar nebula.But it also contains other heavier elements, which astronomers call metals. Even though metals are a small component of Jupiter, their presence and distribution tell astronomers a lot.  According to a new study, Jupiter's metal content and distribution mean that the planet ate a lot of rocky planetesimals in its youth.Ever since NASA's Juno spacecraft reached Jupiter…