Recordbreaking

The last 12 months proved a record-breaking year for female musicians in the British music industry, according to new figures from the British Phonographic Institute (BPI). Women spent an unprecedented 31 weeks atop the UK singles chart, and accounted for a record seven of the year’s 10 biggest singles, and more than half of the overall top 20.Ten of those weeks at No 1 belonged to Miley Cyrus, who had the year’s biggest single in Flowers and who kept company at the top spot with Dua Lipa, Ellie Goulding, Kenya Grace,…

The promotional image shows the project about the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) All Sky HI survey (FASHI). As the image illustrates, the powerful FAST telescope is observing distant galaxies, recording their HI emission, and revealing the detailed physical properties of the galaxies. Credit: ©Science China PressThe FASHI survey has mapped 35% of its target sky area with the FAST telescope, discovering over 41,000 extragalactic HI sources, and gaining acclaim in the astronomical community.The…

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a record-breaking small brown dwarf, only three to four times the mass of Jupiter. This finding challenges current understanding of stellar formation and has implications for the study of exoplanets and the classification of such celestial bodies. (Artist’s concept.) Credit: SciTechDaily.comDiscovery helps answer question: How small can you go when forming stars?Brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars, since they form like stars through gravitational collapse, but…

James Webb Space Telescope run by NASA has helped scientists discover various mysteries of the cosmic world going as far back in time that is extremely close to the Big Bang itself. In a recent groundbreaking discovery, James Webb Space Telescope has identified the smallest free-floating brown dwarf ever observed. NASA scientists have found this smallest object that can form in a star-like manner. Read here to know all about the newly discovered brown dwarf.What are brown dwarfs?As explained by NASA, Brown dwarfs are…

A newly discovered record-breaking object is posing a challenge to our understanding of how stars are born.It's a brown dwarf just hanging out in space, all by its lonesome – and, with a mass of just 3 to 4 times that of Jupiter, it appears to be the lowest-mass object of its kind discovered yet.This presents some interesting problems, not least of which is how the heck it even formed in the first place."It's pretty easy for current models to make giant planets in a disc around a star," says astronomer Catarina Alves de…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeThe Critics Choice Awards has announced the list of nominees for its 2024 ceremony.Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has dominated the competition with a record-breaking 18 nods. This surpasses the previous record of 14 nominations held jointly by 2022’s Everything Everywhere All At Once and 2017’s The Shape of Water.Oppenheimer and Yorgos Lanthimos’s sci-fi fantasy Poor Things trail behind Barbie…

A groundbreaking study published in Environmental Research Letters examined the record-breaking June heatwave in North China, which saw temperatures exceed 40°C in Beijing for three consecutive days. The study used empirical and model-based approaches to link the heatwave to human-induced climate change. Credit: IOP Publishing A new study links North China’s historic June heatwave to human-induced climate change, highlighting significant impacts on public health and the economy. Led by Cheng Qian, the research advocates…

Multiple Model Ensemble Prediction of Global Temperature Anomalies for the 2023/24 Winter. Unit: °C. Credit: Fei Zheng et al. The scorching heat waves of 2023's summer and autumn shook the world, raising a pertinent question: Will this lead to the warmest winter the globe has ever witnessed? After a summer and autumn marked by…

The southern hemisphere is facing a summer of extremes, say scientists, as climate change amplifies the effects of natural climate variability. This comes in the wake of a summer in the northern hemisphere that saw extreme heatwaves across Europe, China and North America, setting new records for both daytime and night-time temperatures in some areas.Andrew King, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne, Australia, says that there is “a high chance of seeing record-high temperatures, at least on a global average,…

Last month, a portion of the Negro River in the Amazon rainforest near Manaus, Brazil, shrank to a depth of just 12.7 metres — its lowest level in 120 years, when measurements began. In Lake Tefé, about 500 kilometres west, more than 150 river dolphins were found dead, not because of low water levels, but probably because the lake had reached temperatures close to 40 °C.These are symptoms of the unprecedented drought gripping the Amazon rainforest this year. Climate change is involved. But researchers who study the…