Já pensou em dar às suas fotos o visual característico de jogos em pixel art? Até existem alguns aplicativos com essa proposta na App Store, mas o NeoCam é uma nova solução do tipo que funciona em tempo real, permitindo ajustes instantâneos.
Ele oferece algumas opções principais de filtro: GamePal (visual de tela de Game Boy antigo), Mermaid (paleta de cores com tons de azul) e Hope (filtro em vermelho e azul). Em cada um deles, você pode ajustar a exposição, o nível de pixelização e a intensidade do dither (efeito de pontilhado).
Além disso, é possível criar seus próprios filtros com paletas de cores personalizadas e compartilhá-los com outros usuários, bem como obter criações de outras pessoas.
🚀👾🚀 NeoCam is officially LIVE on the App Store!
Turn your iPhone into a powerful 8-bit camera. Pixelate. Dither. Shoot. It's Game Boy Camera for the modern age.
Mas não para por aí pois o NeoCam também serve para gravar vídeos. Você pode, ainda, importar fotos existentes para editá-las como preferir.
O NeoCam está disponível gratuitamente na App Store para iPhone e iPad. A versão gratuita permite usar uma seleção de filtros; contudo, para gravar vídeos, ajustar o dither em fotos da sua biblioteca, capturar fotos em diferentes proporções de tela e remover a marca d’água, é necessário adquirir o NeoCam Plus — disponível por uma compra única de R$40.
European defense contractor Saft is set to supply lithium-ion battery systems for the next generation of naval submarines, replacing decades-old lead-acid technology with EV-style packs that promise higher energy density, faster charging, and superior underwater endurance.
Regulatory pressure over TikTok’s child safety measures continued to mount as the European Commission (EC) warned a preliminary look at the company’s protections found it wanting in various aspects.
The initial results of a formal probe into potential breaches of the Digital Services Act (DSA) show TikTok is falling short of the required standards. The EC explained a public-access setting means child accounts can still be viewed by all kinds of people whether they use the social media platform or not.
Another risk involves the content of 16- and 17-year-olds, which the EC found can be featured in recommendations to other users, presenting the risk of “unwanted contact” or cyberbullying.
It is inviting TikTok to view and respond to the preliminary findings and emphasised there is no prejudice to any final decisions in the investigation.
If TikTok is ultimately judged to be in breach of the DSA, the EC “may issue a non-compliance decision, which can trigger a fine”.
Other areas of concern the EC highlighted include an ability to view the profile pictures of children even when accounts are set to private mode, with discovery available if they are contacts of other users or by non-users of TikTok.
The EC explained the DSA requires platforms which children can use to “ensure a high level of privacy, safety and security”, a standard it considers TikTok may not be meeting.
The research team behind the discovery said the unusual object, which orbits a brown dwarf that orbits a large, Sun-like star, doesn’t fit normal astronomical categories, leaving them unsure what to name it.
If confirmed, the unusual space object would be the first moon without a host planet ever discovered. Such a confirmation would also make the newly termed “exosatellite” the first exomoon of any type discovered outside our Solar System.
Moon-Like Object Part of ‘Super Weird’ System
According to a statement announcing the moon-like object, ESO student Kevin Hoy had been monitoring the CD-35 2722 star system for months. The measurements that spotted the new, moon-like object were taken with the observatory’s CRIRES+ instrument using the radial velocity method that spotted the first planet around a Sun-like star.
During that time, the researcher and lead author of a study detailing the find said he noticed the system was “super weird” compared to our local Solar System. While the star at the center of the system, with a mass of about half of our Sun, was not unusual, they also determined that it is orbited by a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are astronomical objects too small to be a star, but too massive to be a planet, making the pairing unusual. Still, it was not unheard of.
The region in the sky around CD-35 2722, a star orbited by a brown dwarf, which is itself orbited by an object at least as massive as Jupiter. The ‘moon’ orbiting the brown dwarf is not visible, but it has been detected via the gravitational pull it exerts on the brown dwarf (Image Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2).
However, according to Hoy, when the team spotted a third, smaller object in the system, they were left confused. Measurements indicated it is at least as massive as Jupiter, suggesting it may be a moon orbiting the Brown Dwarf, only without a host planet.
“The satellite we report is a giant gaseous body orbiting a highly massive companion, itself several times the mass of Jupiter,” explained Alice Zurlo, Director of the Millennium Nucleus of Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS) in Chile project and collaborator on the study.
Mysterious ‘Exosatellite’ Defies Traditional Classification
The team has temporarily named the moon-like object an “exosatellite.” However, Hoy said the object’s status as a ‘third wheel’ in the system makes them want to classify it as a moon, “even if it is nothing like the small, rocky moons we have in our system.”
“This system is somewhat hard to define using Solar-System-based words like ‘planet’ and ‘moon’,” the researcher explained. “The exosatellite is clearly massive enough to be a planet, but it does not orbit a star, though it orbits an object that orbits a star.”
Director Zurlo said the differences between the observed system and our own Solar System have added to the difficulty in labeling the moon-like object.
“We have a clear delineation between the planets and the Sun in the Solar System, so defining things like moons is simple,” Zurlo explained. “In the CD-35 2722 system, where we are blurring the lines between stars, planets, and moons, the whole thing becomes more complicated to describe.”
“This System is Truly Unique and Represents a Breakthrough”
When discussing the significance of the moon-like object, Director Zurlo said detecting satellites in other systems will help researchers better understand the diversity in formation and evolution of planets, moons, and other moon-like objects. The director also noted the historical nature of the detection.
“As exotic as it is, this system is truly unique and represents a breakthrough: the first plausible detection of an exosatellite,” the researcher explained.
Moving forward, the team said the increased sensitivity of the 39-meter mirror on the ESO’s in-development Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will allow for the detection of even smaller moons, including potentially spotting moons the size of Earth’s largest satellite. The researchers said such detections will likely force the astronomical community to reconsider how planetary objects are labeled, especially those in systems so radically different from our own.
The study “Planetary-mass exosatellite detected around the substellar companion of a star” was published in the journal Nature.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy NGC 4654, located 72 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden).
NASA, ESA/Hubble, D. Thilker, J. Lee, and the PHANGS-HST Team
The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a spiral galaxy struggling against titanic forces that appear on galactic scales in space. This is NGC 4654, an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden). It is classified as an “intermediate” because its overall shape lies between spiral galaxies that have a bar across their centers and those that don’t. NGC 4654 has a weak bar structure at its center and is located 72 million light-years from Earth in the Virgo Cluster, a particularly massive and populous galaxy cluster.
NGC 4654 is particularly asymmetric, with a rounded and clearly-defined edge on one side and a long tail of gas stretching out from the opposite side — outside the field of view captured in this image. This gaseous tail is the result of ram pressure stripping, a force that galaxies can experience as they plow through space. NGC 4654 moves with such high velocity that it sweeps up and rams through the hot, rarefied gas filling the space between the Virgo Cluster’s galaxies. This intracluster medium in turn exerts a “ram pressure” on the galaxy, compressing the galaxy’s leading edge and dragging its gas behind the galaxy, creating the elongated tail.
It’s not just the galaxy’s gas that is unevenly distributed: its stars are too, and this is more unusual for a spiral galaxy. While the spiral arm on its leading edge is rich with stars and gas, the opposite arm noticeably lacks stars, influencing the galaxy’s lopsided spiral shape. Astronomers think that ram pressure alone is unlikely to cause this effect. Rather, NGC 4654 was also subjected to the gravitational force of fellow Virgo Cluster galaxy NGC 4639. While the two galaxies are far apart now, it’s thought that a fly-by interaction between them around 500 million years ago ripped away NGC 4654’s gas along one side, limiting star formation there and creating the asymmetry in its shape.
Many galaxies that undergo ram pressure stripping suffer reduced star formation rates as the cold gas that collapses to form their stars is pulled away and lost. NGC 4654, however, is still forming nearly two Suns’ worth of stars every year, a rate comparable to other galaxies of similar size. The active star formation is visible in the latest Hubble data included in this image. The data picks up on a wavelength of red light emitted by the clouds of energized gas where newborn stars lurk. The bright pink bubbles that appear across NGC 4654 — from its forward spiral arm, to around its weak bar, and out to the edge of its disk — are areas where these newborn stars shine.
The data used in this image came from two observing programs (#15654, #17502) that aim to link the gas in galaxies with star formation. By observing many prominent galaxies in the vicinity of our own, researchers hope to better understand how gas moves in galaxies, where and when it collapses to form stars and star clusters, and what effect those new stars have on the gas around them.
Webb found a hidden giant planet by detecting its atmospheric chemistry through a bright debris disk. For years, a third giant planet remained concealed within the bright dust surrounding Beta Pictoris, one of the most closely observed planetary systems in the Milky Way. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has now exposed the hidden world by [...]
Using NASA's long-serving Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that a stellar explosion in the Milky Way is blasting out cosmic bullets travelling at 20 million miles per hour.
The cosmic explosion in question is V445 Puppis, which erupted in 2000 and is the only known "helium nova" in our galaxy. Though astronomers have been studying V445 Puppis for two decades, much of the phenomena associated with it were shrouded in mystery due to a vast cloud of dusty debris that surrounded this nova.
When this debris finally cleared, a team of researchers was able to peer into V445 Puppis using Hubble, NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), and the Earth-based Very Large Telescope (VLT), along with an array of other instruments. This allowed them to discover not only the "bullets", clumps of potentially oxygen-rich gas it is firing, but also the true nature of this system. This revealed that V445 Puppis consists of a dead star hungrily feeding on a companion star that is, by itself, a rare find. Thus, this system offers scientists a rare chance to study one of the rarest types of binary systems and one of the rarest cosmic explosions.
"The origin of these 'bullets' is a mystery. We suspect that these originated post-outburst, but 'bullets' of this kind have not been observed in any other nova," team member John Mills, a researcher at the University of Warwick in the UK, said in a statement.
What is a helium nova?
Helium novas like V445 Puppis occur when a white dwarf dead star cannibalistically strips helium-rich but hydrogen-poor matter from a star that has already lost its outer layer of hydrogen, exposing inner layers of helium; forming a rare "helium star." By contrast, "ordinary" novas are explosions triggered by the buildup of stolen stellar matter rich in hydrogen, not helium.
As the material accumulates on the surface of the white dwarf (a type of stellar remnant left behind when stars around the mass of the sun die) it creates runaway pressures and temperatures that eventually trigger a thermonuclear explosion.
When V445 Puppis went nova back in late 2000, it launched vast, twin plumes of debris that resemble butterfly wings. Stretching out for more than a trillion miles, astronomers initially spotted this bipolar outflow in infrared. The nova also spawned a thick disc of dust that completely obscured the binary star system. That cloud persisted for over two decades, preventing astronomers who were investigating the expanding debris from determining what kind of stars the blast originated from.
Once the debris cleared, this team determined that the system contained a helium star, one of only a few thousand of these stripped stellar bodies to be discovered among the billions of stars that populate the Milky Way.
"The culprits behind this galactic eruption have been an enduring mystery over the past 25 years, which is why it is very exciting to confirm that this helium nova was the result of a helium star accreting onto a white dwarf," Mills said.
The findings also revealed cosmic "bullets" that are even more remarkable, as they have never been seen around any other novas. Intriguingly, the team also found that V445 Puppis may be about to go nova again, and this could lead to an entirely different type of cosmic explosion.
Is V445 Puppis about to blow its top again?
Mills found that the white dwarf in V445 Puppis has overcome its stellar indigestion and is once again feeding on its companion helium star.
This is the process that led to the initial helium nova, and could mean that another episode of this rare type of cosmic explosion is soon to occur.
That has implications for our understanding of another type of cosmic eruption, this time a type of supernova called a Type Ia supernova. These occur when white dwarfs overfeed on companions and are completely destroyed by the resultant explosion.
Scientists have long suspected that repeated helium nova eruptions could lead to final Type Ia supernovas.
An illustration of a white dwarf star feeding on a stellar companion prior to the eruption of a type Ia supernova (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))
A new Type Ia supernova would be exciting because these events are so regular in terms of their light emission that they can be used as so-called "standard candles" to measure cosmic distances and gauge the age of the universe.
This means that they can also be employed in the quest to understand how fast the universe's expansion is proceeding, and the influence of the mysterious force called dark energy on this process.
"I look forward to seeing how this result may help us uncover what powers other similar hydrogen-poor astronomical explosions, such as the famous Type Ia supernovas," Mills said.
JOHANNESBURG — The European Union has ordered a 24-hour delay in the release of some Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery following a request from the United States based on concerns that […]
Il y a 201 millions d’années, l’Europe aurait connu une période d’incendies sans précédent. Alimentés par d’immenses tapis de fougères apparus après une extinction massive, les feux se seraient répétés pendant des dizaines de milliers d’années, créant un véritable cercle vicieux entre incendies...
A favorite vacation option may be at risk because of rising temperatures. Even those sticking with their summer plans agree: More air conditioning would help.
WARSAW, Poland — The Polish government has agreed to invest around $745 million in the development of the planned IRIS² multi-orbit satellite internet constellation with the European Union. The money […]
Il existe plusieurs objets et phénomènes exotiques en astrophysique qui sont des serpents de mer, comme on dit. Des signes de leur existence apparaissent parfois et à répétition dans les observations, sans que l'on puisse aboutir vraiment à une conclusion. C'est le cas avec une nouvelle...
The European Commission (EC) slapped two fines on Google totalling €890 million for non-compliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and demanded the tech giant make changes to its search service and app store policies.
Decisions on the two probes follow investigations started in March 2024. Of the total, €460 million is for breaches on its search service and €430 million for app distribution restrictions on Google Play.
On the search charge, the EC determined Google gave its own services preferential treatment in rankings, either by having them at the top of a results page, or using enhanced visuals or filters.
This goes against DMA rules requiring “transparent, fair and non-discriminatory conditions” in rankings, the EC argued.
Its fine related to the Google Play app store was for not allowing developers distributing apps through the platform to inform customers of alternative offers and direct them to make purchases elsewhere.
The regulator acknowledged after what it termed constructive dialogue Google had begun testing changes to its services the regulator noted could “constitute substantial progress towards compliance”.
However, the EC stated the “fines imposed today on Google take into account the gravity and duration of the non-compliance”.
As part of the judgement, the EC demands Google ends the policies deemed in breach of the DMA.
Google has 60 days to comply, with the authority threatening periodic penalty payments of up to 5% of worldwide turnover if it does not.
The company has the right to appeal.
Breaking products Unsurprisingly Google is unhappy with the changes it is being forced to make to meet DMA obligations.
In a statement, president of global affairs at Google and its parent company Alphabet Kent Walker claimed the way the DMA is implemented “continues to break everyday products” and degraded the experience of businesses and consumers in the European Union.
“To comply, we are having to strip away real-time Search features Europeans love like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights and restaurants, and dismantle safety protections on Google Play,” he added.
“This isn’t fair competition, it’s product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants, with European businesses and consumers taking the hit. Regulation should improve products, not make them worse.”
GSMA Intelligence estimated the cost of replacing equipment made by so-called high risk vendors (HRV) from telecoms networks in Europe will cost between €30 billion to €40 billion, based on data from operators representing almost half of the market.
In the study, independently commissioned and sponsored by seven operator groups, GSMA Intelligence put the cost of replacing mobile networks at €16 billion to €22 billion, equating to around €30 to €42 per mobile connection. This is driven by high exposure to HRV equipment and the cost of replacing equipment such as base stations.
Fixed network costs will hit up to €5 billion, representing the costs of fibre terminals, gateways and fixed wireless equipment. Transport networks, which includes optical switches, multiplexers and amplifiers will cost between €9 billion and €12 billion.
The figures cover only direct equipment replacement and exclude write-offs of existing assets, disruption cost, capacity constraints and broader impacts on future investment plans.
Higher prices GSMA Intelligence further warned excluding HRV’s could reduce competitive pressure, leading to a 24% price increase in mobile network equipment, 19% in fixed network equipment and 10% in transport network equipment.
Higher prices would therefore raise operator investment costs by €8.5 billion between 2027 and 2030, with current budgets for mobile networks set at nearly €42 billion.
The European Commission outlined a proposal making it mandatory to “de-risk” European mobile telecoms networks from high-risk third party suppliers in January, as part of revisions to its Cybersecurity Act.
Over a five year period, it estimated phasing out equipment could lead to annual costs of €3.4 billion to €4.3 billion for operators, while investment in “trusted suppliers” could grow up to €2 billion per year.
Operators Deutsche Telekom, Fastweb, MEO, Orange, Telefonica, United Group and Vodafone Group took part in the GSMA Intelligence study, which was based on limited datasets provided by third parties.
Firm told to treat third-party services that appear in its results in ‘fair and non-discriminatory manner’
Google has been fined a total of €890m (£760m) by the EU for breaches of online competition laws by its search and app store services.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said Google had broken the Digital Markets Act by giving priority to its own services, such as shopping and hotel deals, in search results over those of its rivals.
Paleontologists now know that many of the dinosaurs didn't disappear but instead evolved into modern birds, and new research suggests that "cosmic dinosaurs" observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) didn't go extinct either. Rather, they may have evolved into familiar sights in the modern universe: vast conglomerations of densely packed stars called "globular clusters."
Little Red Dots became quite the puzzle for astronomers in 2022, when the JWST began to routinely spot them in abundance around 600 million years after the Big Bang. That is because these objects seemingly disappear before the cosmos gets to around 2 billion years old.
Astronomers have proposed many different explanations for Little Red Dots, including the suggestion that they could be "black hole stars," or black holes wrapped in vast shrouds of dense gas and dust. This team theorizes that a forming globular cluster with a supermassive star, a hypothetical short-lived stellar body with between 1,000 and 10,000 times the mass of the sun, would also look a lot like a Little Red Dot at its heart.
"These may not be just a strange new JWST population with no connection to the universe around us today," team leader John Chisholm of the University of Texas Austin said in a statement. "Instead, Little Red Dots may persist past the early universe, evolving into something relatively familiar.
"Little Red Dots could be galaxies, they could involve black holes, or they could be something even more unexpected. Our work shows that forming globular clusters with supermassive stars should be part of that conversation."
An unfamiliar side to a familar sight
Globular clusters are generally seen in large galaxies and are densely packed with up to many millions of ancient stars. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is host to at least 150 globular clusters, and though familiar, astronomers still aren't quite sure how they form.
"We usually see them [globular clusters] after billions of years of evolution, at a time when their massive stars are gone, their gas has been cleared out, and dynamical processes have changed their masses and structures," team member Danielle Berg of UT Austin said in the statement. "That makes it very hard to reconstruct the original conditions they formed in."
It is thought that the stars in globular clusters all formed at the same time in the early universe. However, at this time the cosmos should only have had hydrogen, helium and a smattering of heavier elements (which astronomers call "metals") available for star construction. Yet, many stars in globular clusters are strangely abundant in helium and metals like nitrogen, sodium and aluminum, while lacking the expected levels of carbon, oxygen and magnesium.
"This specific pattern indicates nuclear fusion at very high temperatures, much higher than in the cores of even massive normal stars," team member Mike Boylan-Kolchin of UT Austin said in the statement. "A supermassive star is precisely the kind of environment that could produce this combination."
Globular cluster NGC 6638, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Cohen)
Supermassive stars capable of generating this kind of heat would form in the dense environments of early globular clusters in which stellar collisions and mergers would be expected to occur over and over again. The resultant supermassive stars would be short-lived, lasting just around 1 million years (remember the sun is middle-aged at 4.6 billion years old) — but this would be sufficient time to forge the elements needed to explain the peculiar chemistry of globular clusters.
When these supermassive stars die in supernova explosions, the elements they forged would be blasted out to become the building blocks of the next generation of stars. This would provide the stars of modern globular clusters with their unusual chemical fingerprints.
"In our model, the supermassive star that helps make the object look like a Little Red Dot would live for only a short time," Chisholm continued. "Once that star dies, the object may no longer look like a Little Red Dot, even if the cluster itself survives billions of years."
Just some of the "little red dot" galaxies discovered by the JWST. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College))
Strange chemistry isn't the only thing linking early globular clusters with Little Red Dots, however. Not only does the team propose that the distribution of Little Red Dots in the early universe matches the distribution of modern globular clusters, but they also say models of Little Red Dot evolution show that their estimated masses could easily lead to the masses of globular clusters seen in the recent universe.
There is also the issue of timing. Little Red Dots appear around 600 million years after the Big Bang, and that is also the time that scientists estimate that globular clusters would have begun to form.
"There's no single smoking gun at this point that says Little Red Dots are globular clusters, but it would explain a lot of diverse and surprising observations," said Boylan-Kolchin.
This study is currently available to view as a pre-print on the paper repository arXiv.
In a new study of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), scientists found that embraces, touches and other reassuring gestures before competition for food were linked to more peaceful sharing, suggesting the roots of human social touch stretch back at least six million years.
France’s Transport Minister, Philippe Tabarot, says the country won’t authorize Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (Supervised) “as it currently stands,” pointing to two safety problems: the system lets drivers speed, and it doesn’t keep them attentive enough in cities.
But this isn’t France slamming the door on Tesla. It’s France refusing to rubber-stamp the Netherlands’ national approval and holding out for a proper EU-wide sign-off.
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