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Four charged in death of boy, 5, in medical center blast

By Corey Williams | Associated Press Four people have been charged in the death of a 5-year-old boy who was “incinerated” inside a pressurized oxygen chamber that exploded at a suburban Detroit medical facility, Michigan’s attorney general said Tuesday. Thomas Cooper from Royal Oak, Michigan, was pronounced dead at the scene on Jan. 31 at the Oxford Center in Troy . His mother suffered burn wounds as she tried to save her boy. “A single spark it appears ignited into a fully involved fire that claimed Thomas’s life within seconds,” Attorney General Dana Nessel said. “Fires inside a hyperbaric chamber are considered a terminal event. Every such fire is almost certainly fatal and this is why many procedures and essential safety practices have been developed to keep a fire from ever occurring,” she said. The center’s founder and chief executive, Tamela Peterson, 58, is charged with second-degree murder. Facility manager Gary Marken, 65, and safety manager Gary Mosteller, 64, are charg...
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Two Protostars Work Together to Create an Hourglass Shape

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Young stars grow by gobbling up nearby gas and dust. Over time, they can become extremely massive. The most massive stars we know of have up to 200 solar masses. But the flow of matter isn't a one-way street. Instead, young protostars eject some of the matter back into space with powerful jets.
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Space Force's X-37B is Back After 14 Secretive Months in Orbit

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The U.S. Space Force's X-37B spaceplane (which looks remarkably like a Space Shuttle that someone forgot to put the windows in!) completed its seventh mission this week, touching down at Vandenberg Space Force Base after 434 days in orbit. Although the mission is classified, Space Force officials, said that it followed a highly elliptical orbital path while conducting various tests and experiments. They also described the mission as operating "across orbital regimes,” whatever that means…is classified!
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Webb Looks Right into the Flame Nebula

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Astronomers know the Flame Nebula well—a stellar nursery around 1,400 light years away. It’s less than a million years old and is teeming with brown dwarfs, objects that never quite accumulated enough mass to begin fusing elements in their core. When comparing the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) infrared observations with Hubble's visible light images of the Flame Nebula, the difference is, ahem - astronomical! The infrared wavelengths penetrate the obscuring gas and dust, revealing clusters where young stars and brown dwarfs are taking shape.
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Remember that Asteroid That Isn't Going to Hit Earth? We Could Send A Mission to Explore it!

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In a recent paper, Adam Hibberd and Marshall Eubanks explore the feasibility of sending a mission to rendezvous with YR4, the asteroid that may pose a hazard to Earth someday.
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Finding White Dwarf-Main Sequence Binaries in Gaia Data with Machine Learning

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Despite having recently officially ended its science operations in January, Gaia, one of the most prolific star explorers ever, is still providing new scientific insights. A recent paper pre-published on arXiv (which has not been peer-reviewed but was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal) took another look at some Gaia data to try to find a unique type of astronomical entity - white dwarf stars that are paired up in a binary with a main sequence one. By applying a machine learning technique called a "self-organizing map," they found 801 new white dwarf-main sequence (WDMS) binaries, increasing the total number ever found by over 20%.
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Quantum Entaglement Sensors Could Test Quantum Gravity

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Ask almost any physicist what the most frustrating problem is in modern-day physics, and they will likely say the discrepancy between general relativity and quantum mechanics. That discrepancy has been a thorn in the side of the physics community for decades. While there has been some progress on potential theories that could rectify the two, there has been scant experimental evidence to support those theories. That is where a new NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts grantee comes in - Selim Shahriar from Northwestern University, Evanston, was recently funded to work on a concept called the Space-borne Ultra-Precise Measurement of the Equivalent Principle Signature of Quantum Gravity (SUPREME-GQ), which he hopes will help collect some accurate experimental data on the subject once and for all.
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