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One of Earth’s most powerful telescopes has witnessed a massive collision of galaxies sparked by one of the giant star systems traveling at two million miles per hour.
A new study led by a team of scientists at the University of Hertfordshire captured the celestial crash using the new 20 million euro William Herschel Telescope Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer wide-field spectrograph, which is based in La Palma, Spain.
Tech & Science Daily podcast is joined by authors Dr Marina Arnaudova and professor Dan Smith.
A sixth person has died after drinking fake alcohol shots suspected of being laced with poisonous methanol during a backpacking holiday in Laos.
Nineteen-year-old Australian Holly Bowles was confirmed as the sixth death linked to reportedly tainted shots at the popular tourist spot of Vang Vieng earlier this month - the hostel manager and owner have been detained by police.
The podcast asked Andrea Sella, professor of chemistry at University College London, about the dangers of methanol consumption and its impact on the human body.
Also in this episode:
Google’s UK boss claims artificial intelligence could help British businesses offset the soaring costs of recent budget measures by boosting productivity.
The world’s thinnest spaghetti has been created, which is about 200 times narrower than a human hair - report co-author, Dr Adam Clancy, from UCL’s department of chemistry, explains all.
Storm Bert is set to reach the UK on Saturday, moving its way in from the Atlantic, bringing freezing temperatures, heavy rain, and up to 70mph winds.
Plus, why has a baby orangutan, named Kiwi, travelled first-class across the English Channel?
Here’s an automated transcript of this episode:
Hey, welcome back, I'm Rachelle Abbott, and this is The Standard's Tech and Science Daily podcast.
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One of the Earth's most powerful telescopes has witnessed a massive collision of galaxies, sparked by one of the giant star systems traveling at two million miles per hour.
A new study led by a team of scientists at the University of Hertfordshire captured the celestial crash using the new 20 million euro William Herschel Telescope Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer, or WEAVE, wide field spectrograph, which is based in La Palma, Spain.
Using the information from it, we were actually able to locate, for the first time, the location of the shockwave that was produced from the galaxy, which is called NGV731AC, that is matching to the intergalactic medium of the system.
That's Dr Marina Arnaudova, lead author.
It was observed in Stephen's Quintet, a five-galaxy group first spotted around 150 years ago, and since then has been widely studied.
This kind of system is kind of a big debris field, and this kind of new observation that Marina has led the work on has been kind of able to dissect it in new detail and kind of learn what kind of went into the system in the first place.
So, you know, if you didn't have galaxies, if you had cakes instead, and all the cakes have been dropped on the floor, and one of the cakes is smashing through all the others, it's like Maria's been trying to reverse engineer the ingredients of the cakes.
That's Professor Dan Smith, co-author on the study.
They say the impact sparked an immensely powerful shock phenomena similar to a giant sonic boom from a jet fighter.
So we're seeing this as it appeared when the light was emitted about 300 million years ago, and this kind of galaxy, the new intruder, the 7318b that Marina mentioned, is flying through the gas cloud and kind of compressing it like a piston compresses air, except obviously it's not compressing air because it's in space.
So it's compressing the medium that it's come into and the cold gas that was there from the kind of the previous collisions between the system.
the kind of the weave observation is kind of the glue that enables us to kind of bring all these bits together by actually decomposing it and distinguishing between material that was being excited by the shock and material that's just been compressed.
The findings are published in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Journal and the researchers believe that Weave is set to revolutionise our understanding of the universe.
Next, a sixth person has died after drinking fake alcohol shots suspected of being laced with poisonous methanol during a backpacking holiday in Laos.
19-year-old Australian Holly Bowles was confirmed as the sixth death linked to reportedly tainted shots at the popular tourist spot of Vang Vieng earlier this month.
The hostel manager and owner have been detained by police.
It follows the death of 28-year-old lawyer Simone White from Orpington on Thursday, 19-year-old Bianca Jones, also from Australia, who was travelling with Bowles, a 56-year-old American and two Danish women aged 19 and 20.
All are thought to have died after allegedly ingesting tainted drinks at Nana Backpacker Hostel.
We asked Andrea Sella, Professor of Chemistry at University College London, about the dangers of methanol consumption and its impact on the human body.
Methanol is a surprisingly poisonous compound.
It is very, very similar in structure to ethanol, right, which is normal alcohol.
And as a result, it will essentially use the same biochemical metabolic pathways that ethanol does.
But the result is very, very different, because what it does is it produces first a molecule called formaldehyde, which is really quite poisonous, and then something called formic acid, which is even more so.
And so the result is that methanol itself is not directly poisonous, but it's actually what happens to it once it goes through the liver.
And the liver is the place where normally things are processed and kind of cleaned up and got rid of.
And in the case of methanol, the molecule ends up producing something much more poisonous.
And that really has some pretty systemic effects, because it goes and blocks some of the crucial sort of energy processing faculties within cells.
And one of the first things that you see if you drink methanol is that you go blind.
It could be temporary, but more often than not, it will be permanent.
And then things rapidly get worse.
Next, artificial intelligence could help British businesses offset the soaring costs of recent budget measures by boosting productivity.
That's according to Google's UK boss.
Speaking to the PA agency, Debbie Weinstein reckons companies facing surging costs from higher national insurance contributions and the national minimum wage hike can use AI to run their businesses more effectively.
Google, who have their own Gemini AI, claim the super software could help small businesses boost productivity by 20 percent.
Let's go to the ads.
Coming up in part two, chemists create the world's thinnest spaghetti.
But why?
We speak to the author.
Welcome back, the world's thinnest spaghetti has been created, which is about 200 times narrower than a human hair.
This very skinny pasta is not intended to be cooked up in your kitchen, but has in fact been created because of the wide ranging uses that extremely thin strands of material called nanofibres have in medicine and industry.
So these sorts of spaghetti have been used lots already made of pure starch.
Our changes here are actually how to make it without the purification steps and make it directly from flour.
So while they're amazing for next generation bandages and drug delivery and all these applications, there's a big environmental cost of doing the first purification to get the starch out of your flour or your potato or wherever it comes from.
We show that we can do it directly from the plant matter itself.
The plant matter we chose was a bag of flour from Marks and Spencer's.
Co-author Dr Adam Clancy there, from University College London's Department of Chemistry.
This research was in collaboration with the Pharmacy Department.
There's lots of places that they can be used.
Medicine is definitely a big one because they let water pass through with the holes in between the strands of spaghetti, big enough for water to go through.
But they're small enough that bacteria can't, so it provides a barrier for bandages.
But they've got other applications as well.
You can put drugs inside them to release in a controlled manner.
You can even sort of burn them and you end up with these materials which are really useful for energy storage as well.
Dr Clancy describes how they made the spaghetti just 372 nanometres across, that's 200 times thinner than a human hair, using a technique called electro spinning.
If you start with normal spaghetti, you take flour and water and you push it through a hole, and then the size of your spaghetti is defined by the size of the hole you're pushing it through.
Here, we, instead of pushing, we pull it.
So, we take our solvent and flour and we pull it by applying a really big electrical field.
So, we have negatively charged flour and positively charged bits of metal, and it shoots across and the noodle flies through the air as this stream of liquid, and it dries on the way, and when it gets to the surface, it turns into our dry spaghetti.
The research can be found in the journal Nanoscale Advances.
Next, Storm Bert is set to reach the UK on Saturday.
Moving its way in from the Atlantic, bringing freezing temperatures, heavy rain and up to 70 miles per hour winds.
The Met Office says there are likely to be heavy outbreaks of rain throughout Saturday, which will fall as snow at times across northern parts of England and parts of Scotland.
An amber alert for heavy snow and ice will be enforced on Saturday morning in an area north of Scotland's central belt, where 10 to 20 centimetres is likely on ground above 200 metres, and potentially as much as 20 to 40 centimetres on hills above 400 metres.
And finally, it's first class travel for one very special baby orangutan.
Kiwi, who is nearly one year old, was rejected by her mother shortly after she was born at Rio Safari Alche near Alicante.
Kiwi's travelled first class across the English Channel on a P&O ferry to get special care at a Dorset monkey sanctuary.
One picture shows Kiki sat back in a very comfortable seat on board the ferry, chomping on apple slices.
Kiwi, who weighs more than five kilograms, is the second baby orangutan to join the Dorset creche for orphaned and rejected youngsters in a month, following three month Sibu, who moved to the site from Dublin Zoo after his mother was unable to feed him.
The pair will eventually move to the nursery full time with four other young orangutans.
You're up to date, come back at 4pm for The Standard podcast with Mark Blunden.
Tech and Science Daily will return on Monday.
For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk.
Have a very wonderful and relaxing weekend.
