Of all the numerous and wide-ranging types of stars astronomers and astrophysicists have discovered throughout history, perhaps one of the rarest is a star type known as the Wolf-Rayet, Court House News reported.

First discovered by Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet in the late 1860s, Wolf-Rayet stars are intensely bright and hot stars that, due to their unique makeup, are destined to ultimately collapse on themselves in a supernova explosion that will leave behind nothing but a dark void.

This violent and explosive death for the star type sets it somewhat apart from other forms of star decay, such as white dwarfs that experience a more drawn out and protracted death. The stars are so unique, in fact, that among the cosmos only one in a hundred million stars are classified as a Wolf-Rayet.

While these types of systems are rare enough in their own right, there exists a small and elite group among Wolf-Rayet stars that are even rarer.

These are binary pairs of Wolf-Rayet stars that can produce massive amounts of carbon-based dust that are whipped about by stellar winds, and as the binary Wolf-Rayet stars orbit around one another, the cosmic dust forms a glowing and luminous tail that wraps around the two sister stars.

This intensely rare and beautiful phenomena can only be made possible under the most precise and astronomically unlike conditions, explaining why only a small handful of them have ever been discovered.

Two years ago, this exclusive club welcomed a new member when researchers discovered a star system roughly 8000 light years from Earth that met this qualification, but after further examination, new research shows that it behaves in a way that is unlike any other Wolf-Rayet system experts have ever come across.

In a study published Sunday in the scientific journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers reveal that they have studied the newly discovered star system, dubbed Apep after the snake-like Egyptian god of chaos, using advanced imaging techniques at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal in Chile.

Their findings suggest that the Wolf-Rayet is aptly named.

This is due to the fact that like all binary pairs of Wolf-Rayet stars, Apep comes equipped with a swirling spiral of dust that surrounds it, but unlike other Wolf-Rayet systems the dust seems to have a mind of its own.

Rather than swirl with the speed of stellar winds that push it along, the cosmic dust around Apep floats along at a remarkably slower speed than the surrounding winds should dictate — an astrological anomaly.

Researchers made this perplexing discovery by constructing a detailed model that could replicate Apep’s complex spiral structure for the first time, a feat that allowed scientists to study its beautiful but unheard-of behaviors.

Yinuo Han, University of Sydney honors student and lead author of the study who completed the paper while on COVID-19 lockdown, said that the behavior of the newly discovered star left researchers mystified.

“Aside from the stunning image, the most remarkable things about this star system is the way the expansion of its beautiful dust spiral left us totally stumped,” Han said with the release of the study.

While this difference between the speed of the dust spiral and the speed of the surrounding winds is scientifically baffling, it is also extremely noticeable.

Using the newly created model, researchers calculate that the speed of the dust is around four times slower than the speeds of the stellar winds, a significant discrepancy that has never been observed in a star system until now.

A closer look at Apep’s makeup further solidifies the accuracy of its namesake. The two stars that make up the Wolf-Rayet system are around 10 to 15 times larger than the Sun, not to mention more than 100,000 times brighter.

The stellar winds themselves are also highly extreme in nature, with experts saying they are coming off Apep at around 12 million kilometers an hour, roughly 1% the speed of light.

Researchers suggest that it is perhaps the wind speed and the speed at which the stars rotate that could potentially explain the confusing dust movement.

“It likely means that stellar winds are launched in different directions at different speeds,” Han said. “The dust expansion we are measuring is driven by slower winds launched near the star’s equator.”

Researchers are also speculating on what the future of Apep may hold — a future that is likely to be quite destructive.

Data shows that on top of carrying all of the typically extreme characteristics of a Wolf-Rayet, Apep’s main star seems to rotate at remarkable speed, potentially giving it the ability to detonate a long gamma-ray explosion when the system ultimately goes supernova.

This potential future could prove disastrous for nearby systems, given that gamma-ray bursts are some of the most energetic natural events in the known universe.

These bursts are so potentially deadly that if such a burst were to ever strike Earth, the force from the blast could destroy the ozone layer around our planet that acts as a protective shield from the radiation of the Sun.

Researchers say, however, that there is no reason for anyone to fear Apep’s explosive potential. Due to the star system’s axis of rotation, any future blasts would not come within striking distance of Earth.

This unprecedented feat suggests there could be an alternative to DNA-based life, as we know it on Earth – a genetic system for life that may be possible on other worlds.

This new molecular system, which is not a new life form, suggests scientists looking for life beyond Earth may need to rethink what they are looking for. The research appears in Thursday’s edition of Science Magazine.

DNA is a complex molecule that stores and transmits genetic information, is passed from parent to offspring in all living organisms on Earth, and its components include four key ingredients called nucleotides – all standard for life as we know it. But, what about life on other worlds?

“Life detection is an increasingly important goal of NASA’s planetary science missions, and this new work will help us to develop effective instruments and experiments that will expand the scope of what we look for,” said Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division.

One way to imagine the kinds of foreign structures found on other worlds is to try to create something foreign on Earth. A team of researchers, led by Steven Benner at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida, successfully achieved the fabrication of a new informational molecular system that is like DNA, except in one key area: The new molecule has eight informational ingredients instead of four.

The synthetic DNA includes the four nucleotides present in Earth life – adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine – but also four others that mimic the structures of the informational ingredients in regular DNA. The result is a double-helix structure that can store and transfer information.

Benner’s team, which collaborated with laboratories at the University of Texas in Austin, Indiana University Medical School in Indianapolis, and DNA Software in Ann Arbor, Michigan, dubbed their creation “hachimoji” DNA (from the Japanese “hachi,” meaning “eight,” and “moji,” meaning “letter”). Hachimoji DNA meets all the structural requirements that allow our DNA to store, transmit and evolve information in living systems.

“By carefully analyzing the roles of shape, size and structure in hachimoji DNA, this work expands our understanding of the types of molecules that might store information in extraterrestrial life on alien worlds,” said Benner.

Scientists have much more to do on the question of what other genetic systems could serve as the foundation for life, and where such exotic organisms could be found. However, this study opens the door to further research on ways life could structure itself in environments that we consider inhospitable, but which might be teeming with forms of life we haven’t yet imagined.

“Incorporating a broader understanding of what is possible in our instrument design and mission concepts will result in a more inclusive and, therefore, more effective search for life beyond Earth,” said Mary Voytek, senior scientist for Astrobiology at NASA Headquarters.

One of NASA’s goals is to search for life on other planets like Mars, where there was once flowing water and a thick atmosphere, or moons of the outer solar system like Europa and Enceladus, where vast water oceans churn under thick layers of ice. What if life on those worlds doesn’t use our DNA? How could we recognize it? This new DNA may be the key to answering these questions and many more.

This work also interests those interested in information as part of life.

“The discovery that DNA with eight nucleotide letters is suitable for storing and transmitting information is a breakthrough in our knowledge of the range of possibilities necessary for life,” said Andrew Serazin, president of Templeton World Charity Foundation in Nassau, The Bahamas, which also supported this work. “This makes a major contribution to the quest supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation to understand the fundamental role that information plays in both physics and biology.”

If the system fulfils its initial promise, we could be looking at another four or five days of weather forecasts that are actually useful – that is, that have a reasonable likelihood of sticking somewhere close to reality.

The secret to this new extra-long range weather forecast lies in the recording of initial observations: the state of the weather as it is now, ScienceAlert reported.

By reducing the variables in real time readings, researchers have been able to get supercomputers to produce forecasts that stay accurate for up to two weeks.

“Reducing the current-day initial-condition uncertainty by an order of magnitude extends the deterministic forecast lead times of day-to-day weather by up to five days,” explains the team behind the study.

“Achieving this additional predictability limit can have enormous socioeconomic benefits but requires coordinated efforts by the entire community to design better numerical weather models, to improve observations, and to make better use of observations with advanced data assimilation and computing techniques.”

Every weather forecast is based around conditions as they are right now. The further you go into the future, the harder it becomes to predict which way the weather will go, because of the countless variables involved.

These initial conditions are compiled from satellites, balloons, and weather stations, but they’re not perfect – and so forecast models tend to run multiple scenarios based on different variations of the initial conditions, then get a consensus from all the results.

The researchers behind the new study changed this approach, and assumed the initial conditions were near-perfect, using 10 times fewer variations to begin with for midlatitude weather (the systems that affect most of the world’s population).

By testing the new technique with historical weather events from 2016, the team found that a reasonable level of accuracy was maintained up until the two-week mark, at which point the models bore no real resemblance to what actually happened in 2016.

Plenty more work is required on this intriguing new approach, but that’s a longer range weather forecast than we’ve ever had before, and a decent jump from the 10-day limit that meteorologists currently work with.

While certain sources may give you weather forecasts that stretch beyond two weeks, meteorologists will tell you that these are too speculative to be of any use.

That 14-day mark also matches up with previous research into atmospheric models stretching back half a century – that research also suggested a two-week limit before predictions became virtually useless, but it’s never before been put to the test in the supercomputers of the 21st century.

Computing power and forecasting models are improving all the time of course, and some experiments have already shown we might break the two-week barrier. For now though, 14 days looks as far into the future as we can peer, weather-wise.

“Two weeks is about right,” lead researcher Fuqing Zhang, from Pennsylvania State University, told Paul Voosen at Science. “It’s as close to be the ultimate limit as we can demonstrate.”

Hospitals and universities in Shanghai and Shenzhen, Guangdong province, are the main participants in the joint study commissioned by the Shanghai Research Center for Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Intelligence. They will carry out clinical studies into brain development, cognitive learning processes and brain-related diseases, said Zhang Xu, vice-president of the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and executive director of the research center, in a recent interview with China Daily.

The center employs some of China’s leading brain research experts, some of whom participated in the breakthrough cloning of two monkeys using somatic cells last year.

Bai Chunli, president of the CAS, said at the unveiling ceremony of the research center in May that brain science had become a popular international discipline in recent years, and the world’s major technological powers have invested a lot of resources in the field of study.

The establishment of the research center is an important measure to strengthen the country’s international status in the field.

The center was established “with the ultimate goal of gaining more understanding of the human brain and improving social development and people’s well-being”, Zhang said in the interview during the recent 2018 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China Daily reported.

Scientists in the United States are also working on human brain mapping, Zhang said. The Shanghai center will focus more on unique Chinese elements, such as the correlation and influence of the Chinese language and calligraphy on the brain, and the identification of functional areas and their roles in neural networks and disease.

Zhang said there has been scientific research demonstrating that the functional areas of the brain stimulated when speaking Chinese and English are different.

“There will also be brain research for infants and children to find answers to various questions, such as the best time to start language learning and whether the learning processes of children are different from those of adults,” he said, adding that research groups in education and psychology will participate in such studies.