2023-09-10 06:31:33
Ammon – Black holes are a complex and mysterious cosmic phenomenon. Black holes form as a result of the collapse of a large star or during the end-of-life phase of the star. This collapse results in a massive mass that far exceeds the mass of the sun, compressed into a very small point known as the black dot. Here are general outlines on how holes are formed. Black:1. End of the life of a massive star: The process of black hole formation begins when a massive star reaches the end of its life. At this point, the nuclear forces that work to resist stellar collapse stop.2. Star collapse: The star begins to collapse toward its center rapidly as a result of the cessation of anti-collapse nuclear forces. This collapse generates enormous pressure in the center of the star.3. Black hole formation: The mass and pressure at the center of the star increase tremendously until the collapse forces exceed the forces of nuclear fusion, leading to the formation of a black hole. This collapse compresses the matter in the center of the star to a point known as the black point, where the density is infinite and the point size is almost zero.4. Event Margin: Around the black dot, there is an area known as the Event Horizon. This is the place where nothing – not even light – can escape the immense gravity of the black hole. If anything entered the event margin, it would be doomed to fall towards the black point without returning. Black holes are considered one of the strangest and most complex physical phenomena in the universe, and they raise Many questions and scientific studies regarding its nature and properties. The study of black holes relies on a wide range of astronomical evidence and observations, and the phenomenon is still under ongoing research to understand it more deeply.
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#black #hole #formed #Mix
Daily Archives
September 10, 2023
Agriculture ministry lied to European Commission about agricultural land fraud
written by Alexandra Hartman Editor-in-Chief
2023-09-06 20:00:08
The Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality (LNV) lied to the European Commission in 2018 regarding the scale of fraud with agricultural plots in the Netherlands, with farmers wrongly applying for European subsidies for land that does not belong to them. The ministry knew this was widespread, but denied this to the European Commission. As a result, a more extensive investigation and recovery of subsidies by Brussels probably did not occur. This is according to an internal email exchange the Platform Investico for Fidelity , the Green Amsterdammer and other newspapers thanks to an appeal to the Open Government Act (Woo).
Reported in 2017 Fidelity that farmers added roadsides and green areas from the Gelderland municipality of Berkelland to their land without permission and wrongly received European subsidies and ‘manure space’ for this. The amount of subsidies and amount of manure that farmers are allowed to spread on their land depends on the size of their own agricultural land that they register with the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO). Farmers may only register other people’s land if the owner of the land gives explicit permission to do so. The farmers in Berkelland did not have that permission.
Internal emails from the ministry now show that the European Commission discovered this form of fraud in the Netherlands in the same year. The Commission therefore requested, and because of the reporting Fidelityfor a guarantee that the subsidies are provided lawfully in the Netherlands and threatened with recovery.
‘No insight into the scale of this problem’
The ministry had to answer to the European Commission in May 2018 regarding the possible fraud. In that conversation, LNV officials tried to present the problem as smaller than it actually was. “The Dutch authorities have replied that they are not aware of any cases from other municipalities where this problem also occurs,” the conversation report reads. Moreover, the Dutch delegation said that the extent of the problem in Berkelland was not known.
However, the published documents show that the ministry had been extensively informed regarding this months earlier. The municipality of Berkelland told the ministry in February 2018 that it had already mapped ninety hectares of occupied roadsides and larger plots. Moreover, the municipality of Hof van Twente and the municipality of Deventer have also already established this form of fraud.
‘Don’t use the word fraud!’
In an email to Berkelland, a ministry official stated that he was ‘not surprised’ that ‘the fraud problem’ occurred in more municipalities. However, officials omitted this information in communications to the press, the House of Representatives and the European Commission. ‘We must downgrade as much as possible here, also in view of the derogation discussion that is ongoing with the European Commission,’ they warned each other. And: ‘Please don’t use the word fraud!’
The unlawful registration of pieces of land, also known as ‘roadside fraud’, is possible because RVO and LNV do not check whether there is permission from the land owner. Even following the European Commission approached the ministry, the ministry refused. ‘To be able to determine that with certainty, you would have to check everything. We obviously want to stay far away from that,” a ministry official wrote.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality said in a response that its answers to the European Commission would not contradict the report from the municipality of Berkelland, because the authorities that Berkelland referred to had not yet reported to the ministry at that time. LNV cannot currently verify whether they have contacted the relevant authorities themselves. Moreover, the ministry is backtracking on previous statements regarding the ‘fraud problem’ in the municipality of Berkelland and now says that there was a ‘toleration situation’.
The European Commission said in response to questions that it was not yet aware of Berkelland’s email. She emphasizes that she takes the matter seriously and will ask the Dutch authorities for more information.
In association with the Groene Amsterdammer, Tubantia, De Gelderlander, de Stentor and the investigative editorial staff of the Brabant newspapers (Eindhovens Dagblad, Brabants Dagblad in BN DeStem).
Platform Investico, in collaboration with Trouw and De Groene Amsterdammer, among others, will soon publish an extensive study into the extent of unlawful registration of land in the rest of the Netherlands. Do you have any tips or experiences you would like to share? Email us at [email protected]
This publication was made possible with the support of the Special Journalistic Projects Fund
Also read:
Fraud on the roadside
It seems convenient and innocent: a farmer who mows the roadside. But the Gelderland municipality of Berkelland is taking action once morest it, because it damages nature. Moreover, farmers commit fraud.
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#Agriculture #ministry #lied #European #Commission #agricultural #land #fraud
2023-09-10 06:29:19
The other day I remembered an interview that years ago was done with Edgardo Cozarinsky in which, recounting his arrival in Paris in the mid-70s, he noted: “It was still the last moments of May 68 (…) Foucault was read a lot, and it was the beginning of Deleuze and Guattari. Literature, the purely fictional, was, on the other hand, a desert. There was practically nothing that interested me in contemporary French imaginative literature.” This reminds me of a long conversation I also had many years ago with the French editor Christian Bourgois, who died shortly followingwards. Bourgois directed the publishing house that bears his name for almost forty years, where he edited much of the best world literature. At that lunch, for a moment the talk diverted towards contemporary Latin American literature (Bourgois published Aira, Bolaño, Pauls, among others. And much before, Copi, of course) and, amidst various comments, there was silence and he said: “How curious, now I almost only publish fiction, who would have thought that in the 70s?” In those years, Bourgois also participated in the edition of 10/18, a crucial pocket collection in the history of French publishing, which rarely published novels; On the other hand, he published much of the post-68 theoretical debate, including the crisis of Marxism, and texts in tune with the rise of interest in libidinal economy. Between us, Walsh’s condemnation of the novel genre as a petty bourgeois impediment to the revolutionary cause is not unrelated to this plot.
Returning to the topic (To what topic? To theory? To revolution? To literature?) it happens that, at the risk of sounding like a joke, the great novel of the 60s and 70s was theory. Little by little, the theory itself was discovering its fictional character, and several of the most extreme theorists made the mistake of jumping into the novel: from Kristeva to Sontag, many others made the leap towards the literature of the imagination, as Cozarinsky would say (for not to mention several whose novels, fortunately for them, went unnoticed: Palais Royal, by Richard Sennett, or the novels of George Steiner). Kristeva and Sontag did not have that star (going unnoticed is something that only a select few have access to) and their novels insisted on being the subject of formidable literary disaster marketing campaigns. Barthes, in the wake of Benjamin (whom, however, he almost never cites) knew how to stop in time: he took theory towards that edge where it borders on fiction, but without ever taking the step towards nonsense. Ultimately, Barthesian elegance rests on demonstrating that the figure of the écrivain is much more seductive than that of the romancer.
And following another silence, Bourgois smiled. It was the smile of someone who felt happy for having been defeated. The novel had triumphed once more. And I, perhaps encouraged by the kindness of good French wine, dared to ask in the opposite direction, almost as a critical suspicion regarding the current state of narrative: “But is the contemporary novel in a position to think regarding the world?” Bourgois answered: “It is the opposite: the novel still has some possibility precisely if it does not allow itself to be thought by the world”, a phrase with new Benjaminian and even Fogwillian echoes (“I write so as not to be written”) in which I am still thinking, so many years later.
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#years #Profile
Optimizing Cognitive Aging: Sleep, Lifestyle, and Risk Factors for Alzheimer’s Disease
written by Alexandra Hartman Editor-in-Chief
2023-09-10 06:10:00
The many risk factors involved in cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s disease do not always overlap, but are often common. Since 2017, researchers from GIGA-CRC-In Vivo Imaging at the University of Liège have been carrying out a vast study on the subject. Called CoFitAge (Cognitive Fitness in Aging), it distinguishes between the factors of cognitive aging over which we have no control (sex, age, certain genetic characteristics) and those which we can influence.
Among these, the “cognitive reserve”, made up of different elements supposed to intervene in a crucial way: having a high educational level, having an active lifestyle, exercising a profession of a certain complexity, engaging in culturally enriching, exercising, having an extensive social network, speaking several languages… These ingredients would promote mental flexibility, thus offering alternative pathways when, under the weight of aging or illness, the brain pathways traditionally used previously fill less well or no longer fulfill their function. More prosaically, we might speak in terms of “spare parts”.
The key issue of sleep
“But the emotional state also plays a roleexplains Professor Fabienne Collette, co-director of GIGA-CRC-In Vivo Imaging. Depressive symptoms or very high anxiety are associated with increased risk, including Alzheimer’s disease.” She also emphasizes what is commonly called “allostatic load”, a global biological wear and tear resulting from the constant adaptation of our body to the environment. The price to pay can be heavy, in the form of hypertension, diabetes, excess cholesterol, chronic inflammation or even excessive functioning of the sympathetic nervous system, which prepares the body for action, notably by increasing blood pressure and accelerating cardiac and respiratory activity. “Our studies show that two of the markers of allostatic load – poor lipid metabolism and excessive sympathetic nervous system activity – are most closely associated with poorer cognition.”, reports Fabienne Collette. Not eating too much fat and relaxing would be a weapon once morest cognitive aging.
Another element is at the heart of the debate: sleep. A modifiable factor which occupies a prominent place in the CoFitAge study. Insufficient or of poor quality, it also goes hand in hand with an increased risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. A reality that scientific work has well documented today even if the mechanisms at play remain little understood. However, many people, including an increasing number of young people, consult for chronic insomnia. At the origin of adolescents’ complaints: behaviors described as “socio-electronic” linked to the use in the evening, or even at night, of smartphones, tablets, etc. Exposure to the light of screens at late hours disrupts biological sleep-wake rhythms, while activity on social networks and consultation of information on the Internet maintains wakefulness and risks making the bed – if the we can say – a form of dependence. By reducing their sleep, are younger generations accelerating the cognitive aging that will affect them sooner or later? The question needs to be asked.
Will younger generations, more exposed to screens, be affected more quickly by cognitive aging? © Adobe Stock
Brain Drain
The theory that most challenges researchers in the field of the links between sleep and Alzheimer’s disease is certainly the one that proposes the existence of a sleep function that remained in the shadows until recently. Called glymphatic, it would consist of the elimination during sleep, through the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid (which bathes our brain), of toxic substances accumulated in the central nervous system during wakefulness due to the cellular activity which is associated. These may include, among others, lactate, enolase, carbon dioxide, but also beta-amyloid proteins and tau proteins, whose involvement in Alzheimer’s disease is well known when they form aggregates in the brain.
Proposed in 2013 by the group of Lulu Xie, from the University of Rochester in the United States, the theory of glymphatic function of sleep has been confirmed and further developed by other laboratories. Xie and his team discovered that the space between neurons increases during sleep and under anesthesia, alongside a reduction in their volume. In other words, the “evacuation pathways” being more widely open during sleep, this is when the neurons “empty” themselves of their toxins. Therefore, insufficient or poor quality sleep would prevent the proper elimination of toxic proteins at the origin of the lesions characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease and would promote their occurrence.
Get old, but like a young person
According to Gilles Vandewalle, qualified researcher at the FNRS and also co-director of GIGA-CRC-In Vivo Imaging, the link between sleep and Alzheimer’s disease seems to go in both directions. In other words, the presence of amyloid and tau proteins in the brain disrupts sleep while disrupted sleep promotes the accumulation of toxic proteins. “A vicious circle”, he summarizes. In addition, epidemiological data tends to make insomnia a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Sleep apnea would represent another. For what? Two explanations, undoubtedly complementary, are possible. Through the frequent micro-awakenings (and awakenings) that they induce, apneas are not only the cause of sleep fragmentation, but are also associated with reductions in the quantity of oxygen available in the blood, which which is potentially damaging to the brain.
Furthermore, ULiège researchers have shown that the closer the dynamics of the brain functioning of elderly people remains to that of young individuals, the better their cognitive abilities appear to be during aging and the lower the risk of progressing towards death. Alzheimer’s disease. “In young subjects, the brain becomes more and more reactive to stimulation as the day goes byexplains Gilles Vandewalle. And in the event of prolonged wakefulness, that is to say when we remain active during the night, this reactivity continues to increase, sometimes beyond the optimum. In the elderly, things are different. Indeed, we observe an increase in the excitability of the cortex in some of them, but a decrease in others. However, we see that the cognitive performance of the latter is less good.”
Lifestyle
Gilles Vandewalle nevertheless wants to be the bearer of good news. According to his team’s work, the way the brain reacts in an awake person is not solely dependent on the amount of clumps of amyloid proteins or tau proteins that have formed there. “Although the accumulation of such clusters which constitute the pathological signature of Alzheimer’s disease has a negative impact on sleep, our cognition may partly depend on elements on which we can act.” It is conceivable that lifestyle measures, such as practicing physical exercise, going to sleep at a fixed time or consuming less caffeine or other stimulants in the evening, would be likely to promote better quality sleep regardless of the presence of protein clusters in the brain. Such measures might then positively influence the dynamics of brain functioning when awake – a dynamic as close as possible to that observed in young subjects – and thus improve cognitive performance.
Another point, quite intriguing: according to studies coordinated by Christina Schmidt, a qualified FNRS researcher within GIGA-CRC-In Vivo Imaging, daytime naps practiced by elderly people might have deleterious effects on the cognitive level if they is relatively long and established as a life habit. This chronic intrusion of periods of sleep during wakefulness would harm the cognitive performance of seniors, particularly in terms of episodic memory, this component of memory which allows us to remember events that we have personally experienced, such as a dinner at a restaurant. with friends.
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#brain #younger #longer #essential #role #sleep