REDMOND, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct 19, 2023--

Scientists have discovered one of the strangest exoplanets ever that is so light and fluffy that it is actually being compared to candyfloss (or cotton candy if you are American). The planet is called WASP-193b and is 1,232 light-years away and was discovered by researchers at the University of Liège in Belgium. The findings of their study, led by astronomer Khalid Barkaoui has been published on arXiv. The planet, which is believed to be a so-called gas giant is nearly 50 per cent bigger than Jupiter and is orbiting a Sun-like star named WASP-193, which the scientists believe is up to 6 billion years old. Although this star is slightly bigger than our sun it is still said to have the same temperature but compared to Earth, WASP-193b orbits its star just every 6.25 days. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter By studying the planet, Barkaoui and his team were able to determine that its density was around 0.059 grams per cubic centimetre. Earth's density per cubic centimetre for comparison, is 5.51 grams whereas candyfloss has a density of 0.05 grams. There are few other examples of a planet like this existing but its close proximity to a star may give an indication as to how it came to exist as its heat is likely to have warmed up the planet's puffy atmosphere, which is mostly made up of hydrogen and helium. This state of the planet is only set to last for around a few ten million years as the temperatures and winds emitted from the star are only likely to strip back the atmosphere further. Due to this scientists cannot fully recreate or determine what is causing WASP-193b's unique atmosphere but is it likely to be a continued source of study to try and determine the cause of this phenomenon. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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A restaurant in China that challenged its customers to eat more than 100 dumplings in return for a free meal has fallen foul of authorities, who are investigating whether it has violated the country's anti-food waste law.

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A lot of things in the chaos that is life have sparked comparisons to Netflix’s dark anthology series Black Mirror over the years. Its very first episode back in 2011 - “The National Anthem” – resurfaced in 2015 amid ‘Piggate’ and David Cameron, Apple’s Animojis drew parallels with the titular animated bear in “The Waldo Moment”, and just this week people thought Apple’s first AR headset looked particularly dystopian. Now, as both tech experts and political advisers warn of the threat of artificial intelligence (AI), and the AI chatbot ChatGPT continues to generate memes and news stories online, Black Mirror’s creator Charlie Brooker has revealed he’s had a go with the software – albeit with underwhelming results. He told Empire: “I’ve toyed around with ChatGPT a bit. The first thing I did was type ‘generate Black Mirror episode’ and it comes up with something that, at first glance, reads plausibly, but on second glance, is s***. “Because all it’s done is look up all the synopses of Black Mirror episodes, and sort of mush them together. Then if you dig a bit more deeply you go, ‘oh, there’s not actually any real original thought here.’” Shame – that would have been suitably meta. Brooker did, however, note some learnings from his experience with the chatbot, adding: “I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes, ‘oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!’ So I thought, ‘I’m just going to chuck out any sense of what I think a Black Mirror episode is.’ Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “There’s no point in having an anthology show if you can’t break your own rules. Just a sort of nice, cold glass of water in the face.” Although an AI-produced episode of Black Mirror is off the cards for now, fans of the show do have five new ones to look forward to when the hotly anticipated season six drops on Netflix on 15 June. Opening episode “Joan Is Awful” features a Netflix parody known as Streamberry in scenes akin to The Truman Show (and stars Scott Pilgrim actor Michael Cera and comedian Rob Delaney), episode two titled “Loch Henry” is reported to have elements of past episode “White Bear” in it, and Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul is up in space in “Beyond The Sea”. Meanwhile the penultimate episode “Mazey Day” appears to follow the scandal-hit celebrity in its title, and stage stars Anjana Vasan and Paapa Essiedu round off the series with “Demon 76” – a story which is reportedly about a sales assistant forced to do awful things. Yeah, that sounds about right. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

If you thought Australia’s spiders were scary, wait until you see the prehistoric version. Scientists have found a fossilised giant trapdoor spider in New South Wales, only the fourth specimen of its kind to be found in Australia. The creature would have roamed and hunted in the surrounding areas which were once a lush rainforest, researchers said in a recently filed report. Last year, scientists unearthed fossils of the rainforest area from millions of years ago, teeming with specimens including plants, trapdoor spiders, giant cicadas and wasps. Now the area is a grassland region known as McGraths Flat. Researchers have named the spider fossil ‘Megamonodontium mccluskyi’. It would have lived in the Miocene period 11m to 16m years ago. “Only four spider fossils have ever been found throughout the whole continent, which has made it difficult for scientists to understand their evolutionary history,” said palaeontologist Matthew McCurry of the University of New South Wales and the Australian Museum. “That is why this discovery is so significant, it reveals new information about the extinction of spiders and fills a gap in our understanding of the past. “The closest living relative of this fossil now lives in wet forests in Singapore through to Papua New Guinea. “This suggests that the group once occupied similar environments in mainland Australia but have subsequently gone extinct as Australia became more arid.” The spider was found among many other Miocene fossils. In some of them, the fossils were so well preserved that subcellular structures could be made out. “Scanning electron microscopy allowed us to study minute details of the claws and setae on the spider's pedipalps, legs and the main body,” said virologist Michael Frese of the University of Canberra. The details meant scientists could confidently place it near the modern Monodontium, or trapdoor spider. However, it is five times larger than its modern day relatives. Megamonodontium mccluskyi's body is 23.31 millimetres long – that is just over an inch. The discovery of the species also tells us something of the past climate of Australia, the report added. The fact that it was found in a layer of rainforest sediment means the region was once much wetter than it is now. That could, in turn, help scientists understand how a warming climate has already altered the country’s life forms – and how it might change them again. "Not only is it the largest fossilized spider to be found in Australia but it is the first fossil of the family Barychelidae that has been found worldwide," said arachnologist Robert Raven of Queensland Museum. "There are around 300 species of brush-footed trapdoor spiders alive today, but they don't seem to become fossils very often. "This could be because they spend so much time inside burrows and so aren't in the right environment to be fossilized." The findings were published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.