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The Independent
17-04-2025
- General
- The Independent
AP PHOTOS: Rain or shine, emotions run high at Seville's Holy Week processions in Spain
With tears of emotion often flowing down their faces, tens of thousands of faithful have packed the rooftops, bridges and narrow streets of this historic city in southern Spain to watch much-venerated images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary carried in hourslong processions throughout Holy Week. 'To see her in the street, I can't explain it,' said Modesta Montaña as she cried with her daughter when the statue of Our Lady of Sorrows was carried past them by the Hermandad del Cerro, one of Seville 's dozens of brotherhoods. 'It's the happiness that we have her here outdoors, that this quantity of people are turning out.' But this year, among the hundreds of brotherhood members charged with shouldering the massive floats and the crowd lined up to watch them, some also cried when more of the powerful storms that have wreaked havoc in the long drought-stricken country nixed their outing at the last minute. 'Another year without being able to see my brotherhood in the streets because of the rain. It's so sad,' said José Rodríguez, who had gone to watch the Hermandad de los Estudiantes procession on Tuesday, weeping while covering his face with his hands. Starting on Palm Sunday, a week before Easter, hundreds of 'costaleros' — solemnly robed and often hooded — carry huge floats with the sacred images in procession, in a tradition dating back centuries. Its fervor continues across Spain — and in many parts of Latin America — even as more people abandon organized religion. In Seville, elderly couples cheered from festively draped balconies, while one mom breastfed her infant daughter in the crowd as a float passed before them. ' Youth especially don't even think about faith. But popular devotion is a containment line,' said Jesús Resa, who leads the Hermandad de los Estudiantes — or students' brotherhood, since it was founded just over a century ago by faculty and students at the University of Seville. 'Many young people get close to religion because of it.' In weekly meetings throughout the year, the 6,000-member brotherhood prepares its seven-hour procession to be held on Tuesday of Holy Week. Some 150 people in rotation are to carry the two floats, accompanied by 300 children altar servers — to give it a sweet touch amid the 'very rigorous penitential seriousness,' Resa added. But this year, just like last year, rainstorms scrapped the procession at the last minute. The brotherhood couldn't risk damaging the 17th-century crucifix of 'Christ of the Good Death,' so they celebrated a Via Crucis instead, the prayer that commemorates Jesus' path to the cross. Starting in 2023, a persistent drought devastated Spain's countryside, only to be replaced by severe flooding, including not only spring outpours but a deluge near the city of Valencia last fall that killed more than 200 people. Some scientists say climate change can make such swings more extreme. Resa said that his brotherhood — like many religious groups across the country — had been praying for rain during the drought. This Holy Week, they switched to asking Jesus and the Virgin for world peace instead, he added with a chuckle. ___ This is a photo gallery curated by AP photo editors. ___ Dell'Orto reported from Minneapolis. ___ Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists create mind-blowing phenomenon inside first-of-its-kind energy device: 'We were all very excited'
Nuclear fusion has high potential as an abundant and clean energy source, but the industry still faces challenges in fully stabilizing the process and making it profitable. Tokamaks — an apparatus or fusion reactor used to produce and contain the nuclear fusion process — provide a promising setup. However, they still experience edge instabilities (also known as edge localized modes or ELM) akin to solar flares that lead to significant energy losses and damage on the reactor wall. Scientists at the University of Seville, Spain, have been studying how ELMs interact with energetic particles to help minimize ELM damage. For the first time, their Small Aspect Ratio Tokamak (SMART) fusion reactor, created with researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, successfully created plasma (the soup-like medium required for fusion in the tokamak). The reactor used an innovative method called "negative triangularity," which has been shown to minimize ELM damage on the tokamak, as reported by Interesting Engineering. Most tokamaks are configured with "positive triangularity," where the cross-section of the plasma medium is shaped like the letter D — the straight side of the "D" facing the center, and the curved edge on the outside, the Interesting Engineering report explained. The steep pressure on the outside plasma edges is what has been contributing to ELM instability and potential reactor wall damage. With negative triangularity, the "D" shape is inverted to face the center, minimizing plasma edge instability while maintaining the high performance of the nuclear fusion process. So far, only the SMART reactor has achieved plasma production with negative triangularity, which is a massive breakthrough for the nuclear fusion industry. "We were all very excited to see the first magnetically confined plasma and are looking forward to exploiting the capabilities of the SMART device together with the international scientific community," said Eleonora Viezzer, physicist and professor at the University of Seville, per Interesting Engineering. The world is one step closer to a cleaner and highly abundant energy source. Compared to its counterpart, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion does not produce dangerous radioactive waste that requires special management. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, fusion produces helium as a byproduct, which is not harmful to the environment. In addition, nuclear fusion sources its fuel, deuterium and tritium, from hydrogen — one of the most plentiful elements on Earth, per the Department of Energy. Should the government be paying people to hunt invasive species? Definitely Depends on the animal No way Just let people do it for free Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Nuclear fusion is a promising source of efficient, clean energy, which could save homeowners and governments money on energy costs while transitioning to a clean energy source. Adopting clean energy sources reduces harmful gas pollution that contributes to a warming planet. Scientists are continuing to research how to make nuclear fusion a viable energy solution. A team of scientists from the United Kingdom's Joint European Torus facility produced 69 megajoules of energy with temperatures reaching 150 million degrees — 10 times hotter than the sun. One U.K. company is building a fusion reactor that can generate enough nuclear fusion energy to power 70,000 homes. Join our free newsletter for weekly updates on the latest innovations improving our lives and shaping our future, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Elaborate burial site of ‘The Ivory Lady' and her descendants contains more than 270,000 shell beads
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Archaeologists investigating a roughly 5,000-year-old tomb in southwestern Spain say the women laid to rest there were buried with a staggering number of white beads that would have been threaded together to form elaborate, shimmering outfits. Beads appear regularly in the archaeological record as a form of adornment, currency and social exchange, but the collection from the Montelirio grave, part of the Valencina archaeological site near Seville, is the largest ever recorded worldwide, according to new research. The researchers estimated the collection contained 270,769 round beads made predominantly from seashells that would have taken 10 people working eight hours a day for 206 days, or about seven months, to make. That estimate doesn't include the time it would have taken to collect the scallop-like shells from the seashore. 'We think the beads formed ceremonial clothing that was worn by these women, who were very important socially or religiously, at special occasions or special ceremonies,' said lead study author Leonardo García Sanjuán, a professor of prehistory at the University of Seville. 'These things must have been pretty heavy. Not something you wore in your everyday life.' He added that many of the shells might have appeared iridescent because some of the shells still retained a mother-of-pearl effect. A comprehensive analysis of the bead collection sheds light on the formidable status of women in the society that once lived at the Valencina site, according to the study published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday. The team found the majority of the beads in a large chamber of the Montelirio tomb, which held the remains of 20 people, including 15 women and five individuals whose sex wasn't determined. A smaller chamber where two women were buried also contained beads. Excavators have unearthed beads for years at the tomb, but the study is the first time the collection has been analyzed in its entirety. The researchers identified what they believe to be threaded beads that could have formed two full-body beaded tunics, skirts and other clothes or cloths of undetermined shape. Study coauthor Marta Díaz-Guardamino, an associate professor in archaeology at Durham University in the United Kingdom, said many of the beads appeared aligned in rows that covered large areas of the bodies, suggesting the beads formed some kind of attire. Plant remains within the beads' perforations also suggested the use of thread, she added. 'I think that the efforts to produce these beaded robes far exceed those required to produce a couture red carpet garment today,' she said via email. 'You would need many more hours and people invested in the production of the beads. Indeed, it would have been, altogether, an enterprise on a whole different scale with no parallels in the world yet.' Some of the circular beads had been kept by the researchers in storage jars, while others were encased in large chunks of sediment excavated from the tomb. The team cleaned, weighed, quantified, measured and studied the beads, which were fairly uniform in size and shape, to understand how and why they were made, García Sanjuán said. 'They would have been extremely glittery under the sunlight and that would have been a very powerful effect to see these women standing in front of a crowd performing whatever rituals they were in charge of performing,' he added. The Montelirio tomb was built around 4,875 years ago and used for 100 to 200 years. The grave is about 100 meters (328 feet) away from that of 'The Ivory Lady,' whose skeletal remains were found buried with an elephant's tusk, an ivory comb, a crystal dagger, an ostrich eggshell, and a flint dagger inlaid with amber and other valuable objects. Initially, scientists thought the remains belonged to a man, but a July 2023 study that used a new molecular method involving a sex-specific peptide called amelogenin revealed the Ivory Man was in fact a woman. García Sanjuán coauthored the report with colleagues from the University of Seville and the University of Vienna. Researchers used the same technique to identify the sex of most of the remains at the Montelirio tomb, García Sanjuán said, adding that the tomb was likely built by people who revered and claimed descent from the Ivory Lady. Unfortunately, the team has not been able to get high-quality ancient DNA samples from the remains to understand how the individuals buried there might be related. 'The Ivory Lady' was not initially buried with beads, although a number were later added to her grave, García Sanjuán added. As part of the study, García Sanjuán's coauthor Samuel Ramirez-Cruzado, of the University of Seville, attempted to make beads using the same types of shell and tools available during that period. The length of time depended on the type and thickness of the shell. On average it took him 55 minutes. However, the study authors reasoned that the craftspeople who made the beads during that time would have been more skilled than present-day archaeologists. With practice, the team estimated an individual bead would have taken an artisan 11 minutes to make. Crafting the hundreds of thousands of beads found in the Montelirio tomb took a considerable amount of time and labor — akin to that needed to build a megalithic monument such as Stonehenge, García Sanjuán said. 'That means that this society had the resources available to it to divert people from the primary production of food to work on this,' he explained. 'These women were very relevant, socially relevant, otherwise no such investment of labor would have been devoted to them. Not only that, but these women were allowed to take these very costly, very expensive costumes with them into the grave.' Andrew Jones, a professor of archaeology and classical studies at the University of Stockholm who wasn't involved in the research, said the site was 'extremely significant' and agreed that the bead collection was the largest documented cache in prehistory. 'We do see more or less equal treatment of men and women through the Neolithic and Copper Age in Europe, but this burial site is important for the unusual treatment of women,' Jones said via email. 'There were clearly differences in the way men and women were honoured in burial, but it is hard to say whether this is reflected in social structure.' García Sanjuán said he wanted to investigate whether the society at Valencina was a matriarchy during this period, a time when a more hierarchical society was beginning to emerge in Europe. 'Matriarchy has been a very controversial concept in history and anthropology, but I am quite keen now to tackle it head-on, because I think it's just not chance that we are seeing repeatedly these cases at this time, you know, between 2900 and 2600 (years BC) of all these great, very, very high standing, powerful women.'
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
A Brand New Kind of Fusion Reactor Just Went Online
Many tokamaks use what is called positive triangularity plasma to produce energy, but past experiments have found that the inverse of this triangularity could be more stable. A new compact tokamak designed to contain negative triangularity plasma is officially online in Spain. Called the SMall Aspect Ratio Tokamak (SMART), this reactor is part of the University of Seville's effort to not only make fusion energy possible, but also economically competitive for grid applications. Bottling the Sun—a.k.a. fusion energy—comes in many shapes and sizes. Some of these shapes rely on 192 lasers to blast a small pellet of fuel, while others use donut-shaped (or toroidal) monster machines to try and maintain super-hot plasmas long enough to induce fusion. But the differences are more than just mechanical—even the very shape of the plasma can have profound differences in performance. Engineers of tokamaks (those donut-shaped monster machines) use a term known as 'triangularity' to describe the plasma's deviation from an oval shape. Most tokamaks use positive triangularity—the plasma's cross-section looks like the letter 'D,' with the curved part of the plasma occurring along the outer wall. However, some tokamaks, including the DIII-D tokamak in San Diego, have now experimented with the inverse shape known as negative triangularity. 'This research showed that negative triangularity plasmas are free of potentially damaging instabilities in the edge region of the plasma without sacrificing fusion performance,' the U.S. Department of Energy reported in March of 2024. 'This suggests that negative triangularity shaping stabilizes instabilities in the plasma edge.' Now, a new and compact fusion reactor in Spain—the SMall Aspect Ratio Tokamak, or SMART—is further experimenting with negative triangularity at the Plasma Science and Fusion Technology Laboratory of the University of Seville. The reactor has officially achieved first plasma, and preliminary results have been reported in the journal Nuclear Fusion. The core concept behind nuclear fusion is keeping plasma hot enough for long enough to bootstrap nuclear fusion reactions—pumping out more power than the reactor originally invests. However, at high temperatures and densities, the plasma can develop gradients that can evolve into full-blown instabilities known as edge localized modes (ELMs), which can damage the reactor wall. With the discovery that negative triangularity limits the development of these highly-energetic ELMs, the hope is that reactors using this technique will be able to maintain high temperatures for longer. This is where SMART comes in, as it's the first compact tokamak designed to operate at fusion temperatures using negative triangularity. While that may seem like a pretty esoteric accolade, its operation is drawing interest around the world. 'This is an important achievement for the entire team as we are now entering the operational phase of SMART,' Manuel García-Muñoz, principal investigator of the study, said in a press statement. 'The SMART approach is a potential game changer with attractive fusion performance and power handling for future compact fusion reactors.' SMART is part of the University of Seville's Fusion2Grid strategy, which aims to design fusion energy for future power plants. While achieving this initial plasma is only a first step, the team also hopes to make fusion energy economically viable, which is likely a goalpost many years into the future. But as more and more fusion reactors come online, humanity's fusion future is beginning to take shape. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
