Blizzard Entertainment's 'Diablo II' remains a classic game beloved by many gamers to this day.

In 2021, it gained new life with the release of 'Diablo II: Resurrected', which improved graphics and quality of life. Recently, however, a rather strange transformation has been occurring around the game. Moving beyond simply adding new items or classes, a series of attempts are emerging that alter the game's perspective, controls, and even its core genre...

...What they found was that within milliseconds after the two stars make contact, the neutron fluid within the region enters a Kelvin–Helmholtz instability. This is a physics way of saying the fluid becomes turbulent. You've likely seen such an instability before. If you gently blow out a candle, there is a smooth stream of smoke that rises off the wick. But as it rises, the stream becomes swirly and random. That transition is where it reaches the instability.

The thing about Kelvin–Helmholtz instability is that it can mix things up tremendously. In the simulations, this mixes the neutron material so fully and quickly that the magnetic field is amplified significantly. This mixing trickles through the rest of the material, dragging the magnetic field with it. As a result, the magnetic field of the merged neutron star can be more than 300 times stronger than the initial magnetic fields...

..."We initially set out to show that such a protocol might be impossible. To our surprise, our efforts led us to a quantum solution that could achieve exactly the deterministic energy transfer we were looking for. The shift from trying to prove a limitation to uncovering a viable solution was one of the most surprising and rewarding moments of the project," said Dahlsten...

...Flavor transitions—when one type of quark turns into another—can only take place via the weak interaction, one of the four fundamental forces. Quantum physics describes how other particles, not directly involved in a particular transition, can influence how that transition takes place. If a process happens differently than is predicted by the influence of the particles we know about, which make up the Standard Model, this difference could point to the existence of as-yet-undiscovered particles and interactions.

Some of these transitions are extremely rare, which makes them very sensitive to any potential contributions from particles that may exist beyond the Standard Model. The b→sμ⁺μ⁻ transition is one such process, only occurring approximately once in every 10 million decays of particles containing beauty quarks, known as beauty particles. Over the past decade, signs have begun to appear that this transition may not occur as expected...

...The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts’ beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins.

The discovery could help explain why scientists have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in the laboratory — and it opens new avenues for studying devastating diseases that affect the brain stem, such as spinal muscular atrophy (also known as SMA) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease).

“We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain,” said Kyle Loh, PhD, associate professor of developmental biology. “Our discovery means that we can now grow neurons from the back of the brain, the hindbrain, in a petri dish and study their functions.”...

...Under a power purchase agreement, Aethero will draw electricity on demand from Star Catcher’s planned orbital energy grid. The arrangement is designed to let spacecraft access additional power when computing loads rise, without having to carry enough onboard generation and storage to cover those peaks...

...The company says it can harvest solar energy and beam concentrated power directly onto existing satellite solar panels, allowing spacecraft to generate up to 10 times more power on demand without installing specialized receivers...

...The company is preparing for its first in-space power-beaming demonstration later this year, with another mission already in development...

Moderna's personalized mRNA cancer therapy, developed with Merck, reduced the risk of melanoma recurrence and spread when used in combination with the U.S. drugmaker's blockbuster treatment Keytruda in a late-stage ​trial.

The interim results showed statistically significant improvement versus Keytruda alone...

"It is a big deal for the field in general. If this trial was negative, the field of mRNA-based ​cancer therapies and cancer vaccination may never have recovered. With this positive study, there is hope (and likely ​investment to follow) that these approaches may change the way we treat cancer more broadly."...

"Expect the vaccine for melanoma to enter the market in 2027...

...manufacturing personalized vaccines at scale could be expensive and complex. Investors should therefore watch for next important steps, which will be detailed clinical results, ⁠regulatory progress ​and evidence that the technology works across other cancers."...

...Historically, scientists have viewed the cosmos as akin to a rock—complex, perhaps even beautiful, but formed through arbitrary events. Evolutionary cosmologists instead argue that universes, like living organisms, grow and reproduce, spinning off new universes with small variations from their progenitors. In doing so, these cosmic offspring are refined across generations into forms that maximize the number of universes yet to be born. Since the Big Bang, our universe, like any developing child, has been unfurling into an optimal shape.

Under this view, the universe is not a rock. It is an egg...

Smolin’s work was, in turn, inspired by physicists Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler, who proposed that singularities inside black holes, the places where matter is crushed into a point of infinite density, might expand to produce new universes that follow different physics from the universes that produced them. Every universe—including our own—would, under this logic, have emerged from a Big Bang within a black hole.

Smolin realized that this hypothetical process would allow universes to reproduce, in a way, by making more black holes. And if those new universes could inherit the physics of their parents with small differences—just as new organisms inherit the genes of their parents with small differences—then universes could also evolve with each generation. Specifically, a form of cosmic natural selection would favor universes that make as many black holes as possible. Less fertile universes could persist, but they would produce far fewer offspring. So over time, an increasingly high proportion of universes would be optimized for black hole production—which would imply that our universe, given the odds, is one of those...

New results from the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) suggest that gluons, the gluelike particles that hold quarks together inside protons, play a central role in the conservation of baryon number, an essential part of a particle’s quantum identity. The findings, published in the journal Science, suggest that baryon number is carried by a Y-shaped “junction” of gluons connecting the proton’s three main quarks, challenging a long-held view that baryon number is solely carried by those three quarks...

“Since the big bang, the number of protons and neutrons all together never changes as a function of time,” Lewis said. “The reasons for this conservation are not well understood. It’s one of the mysteries of the universe, related to why we have more matter than antimatter.” ...

According to the STAR team’s study, when the protons that make up nuclei collide at RHIC, the quark-connecting “gluon junction” or “baryon junction” can be stopped much more easily than the three quarks; all its energy is transformed into new baryons that spray out in perpendicular directions while the quarks it usually connects continue to fly down the beampipe...

...The setup starts with an idea from last year. Certain exotic forms of dark matter, arranged in a halo with a particular relationship between pressure and density, can produce black holes with no singularity at the center. These are so-called "regular black holes," where the equations stay sensible all the way to the center. Tan and Wang asked what happens if you drop an ordinary neutron star into the middle of one of these halos...

...The crucial point in this model is that nothing collapsed. The gravity making the horizon comes from the star and the halo combined, with the dark matter contributing roughly as much mass as the star itself...

...The dark matter densities this requires are far greater than anything astronomers actually expect dark matter to reach. This is not a claim about objects out there in the sky, but more of a thought experiment with the mathematics filled in. It says the inside of a black hole need not be the end of physics. There is at least one solution in which it's a place, with something in it...

...1. The Qatari Jet:...

...2. Corner-Cutting on Presidential Security...

...3. A Desperate Cover-up and Attack on Freedom of the Press...

...4. The Secret Flight — A Decoy and a Cover-up...

...5. The Still-Real Nuclear Risk and Failure of the War with Iran:... "he has left a standing order that if he’s killed Iran is to be obliterated by US nuclear missiles."