Phenomenon

On the cover of the American edition of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is a photograph by the late Peter Hujar. It shows a handsome young man who, with his eyes screwed shut and his head resting on his hand, looks utterly overcome with despair. Look at the small print and you see that the picture is called Orgasmic Man, one of a series Hujar made in 1969. The man isn’t crying. He’s coming.It’s a remarkably apt image for a book which has hit the commercial motherlode by wallowing in abject misery. Since it was published…

Amid this year's rally, Bitcoin has resumed one of its old habits: it's back to posting big moves on weekends, a phenomenon that's become an intriguing characteristic of the cryptocurrency market. Take last Sunday, when it gained 3.4%, a similar amount to what it notched the Saturday on the weekend prior. And the Saturday before that, the coin advanced 5.5%. That Bitcoin posts large moves is nothing new. But the token, like all other cryptocurrencies, trades around the clock, every day of the…

According to the researchers, this newly discovered behavior has implications for comprehending the function of phosphate ions in biocatalysis, energy balance in cells, and the formation of biomaterials.Scientists discover evidence of a previously unknown state involving one of the most common ions on Earth.During an otherwise straightforward investigation into the assembly process of calcium-phosphate clusters, a team of researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara and New York University stumbled upon an…

The green comet, Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), has begun showing a strange phenomenon known as the anti-tail. Know what it is. In the last few days, the ancient green comet, Comet C.2022 E3 (ZTF), which will soon reach its closest point to the Earth and that too after 50,000 years, has been showing some peculiar development. It all began on January 12 when the comet reached its perihelion (the point in its orbit which is closest to the Sun). As it moved away from the Sun, it was first struck by fast-moving solar winds which…

Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels and behaves. People with schizophrenia may experience hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking, and difficulty in expressing emotions or feeling pleasure.Researchers have discovered a strong correlation between the development of schizophrenia and a rare form of a genetic variant known as tandem repeats.In our cells, <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div…

Silently churning away at the heart of every atom in the Universe is a swirling wind of particles that physics yearns to understand.No probe, no microscope, and no X-ray machine can hope to make sense of the chaotic blur of quantum cogs whirring inside an atom, leaving physicists to theorize the best they can based on the debris of high-speed collisions inside particle colliders.Researchers now have a new tool that is already providing them with a small glimpse into the protons and neutrons that form the nuclei of atoms,…

The year of 1997 at the box office is largely remembered for James Cameron’s Titanic becoming both cinema’s biggest-ever hit and the first billion-dollar movie in history, but if you’re seeking the second-largest phenomenon of those 12 months, you may be surprised to discover the title arguably belongs to Bean. The feature-length adaptation of a British slapstick sitcom that had originally ended two years previously hardly sounds like the sort of project that would go on to carve a trail of commercial destruction, but…

The findings reveal a surprisingly selfish side to yeast behavior.A recently discovered phenomenon known as latecomer killing describes how yeast kills its own clones and other nearby microorganisms to survive when starved of glucose.Yeast is not the simple single-celled microorganism we always believed it was, but a competitive killer. When yeast is starved of glucose, it releases a toxin that can kill any other microorganisms that have entered its habitat, even clones of itself. This previously unknown venomous…

Scientists discovered a phenomenon created by a black hole merger. They believe the merger took place when two black holes collided as they passed by each other, creating something we’ve never seen before. The researchers published a paper on the discovery in the journal Nature Astronomy, and astronomers plan to continue studying the object in the future. What’s more intriguing about this discovery is that the researchers believe that the black hole merger was instantaneous. They believe this because the…

To be a sheep is to blindly follow the crowd. But is a sheep's sheepiness really enough to make an entire flock walk around in a circle non-stop for days on end?That's a mystery the internet has pondered for about a week now and solving it has proved more difficult than you'd expect.On 17 November, a news outlet run by the Chinese state, called People's Daily, shared an eerie video on Twitter of dozens of sheep in Mongolia strolling around in tight, almost perfect concentric circles.At the time the video was released,…