One of the most popular hiking apps has made 27,000 trail maps available for download for free in a bid to increase hiker safety.
Most hikers, if they’re honest, will at some point have experienced this situation: they thought they needed to follow one trail, but instead they followed another. Seeking to reorient themselves, they timidly pulled out their smartphone and see, as they suspected, there was no reception of any kind.
Last year, search and rescue missions were up 32% across the US. This is mainly down to the hikers being inadequately prepared. Access to offline maps would help ensure that all hikers can be best prepared for their hike.
To that end, the Irish hiking app HiiKER has released all trail maps in its database for download free of charge. They can either choose to download them directly to their smartphone or as a GPX file to their smartwatch—saving the battery of their device while away from electricity access.
“Hiker Safety is our absolute priority. Offering hikers Free Offline maps on HiiKER, means that everyone can feel confident that they’re on track, regardless of mobile service,” said Paul Finlay, CEO and Founder of HiiKER.
The app team claims that other incumbent Hiking apps such as Alltrails, Strava, and OutdoorActive charge for access to offline maps. As this service is critical to hiker safety, HiiKER is offering it to hikers for free.
Now used by over 600,000 hikers worldwide, the app which began life on the Emerald Isle three years ago is now one of the most-used hiking apps on the market, with over 27,000 hiking routes available to users.
credits from left to right and top to bottom – Chandra: NASA/CXC/SAO, XMM: ESA/XMM-Newton; IR: JWST: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI, Spitzer: NASA/JPL/CalTech; Optical: Hubble: NASA/ESA/STScI, ESO; Image Processing: L. Frattare, J. Major, and K. Arcand
Looking for a cool way to get your kids involved in astronomy? Just show them this picture.
These images are composite pieces of technological artwork that would be invisible to the naked eye. Five space-based observatories teamed up with one down here on Earth to color in famous regions of space with X-rays and infrared light—neither of which can be seen by us.
The image in the top left is of NGC 346, a star cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 200,000 light years from Earth. The purple and blue haze on the left are X-rays, a form of high-energy light, left over from a supernova explosion. On the right, infrared data from the James Webb and the now-retired Spitzer space telescopes shows plumes of gas and dust that all those twinkling stars are either currently using, or have used to create their shining, burning forms.
The X-rays are being detected by the space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory, developed by Harvard, and humanity’s flagship X-ray observatory.
To the right side, NGC 1672 is a spiral galaxy, but one that astronomers categorize as a “barred” spiral, meaning that the arms close-in to the center appear more like straight bars rather than curved tentacles. Here, Chandra’s purple-colored X-rays reveal black holes amid the James Webb and Hubble telescopes infrared and optical light picture of this galaxy.
Messier 74 is also known as the “Phantom Galaxy” because it’s relatively dim and difficult to spot with telescopes in a region that is otherwise pretty close to Earth. It’s anything but dim in this image, captured face-on thanks to our planet’s position.
Webb outlines gas and dust in the infrared lights which we see as green, yellow, red, and magenta, while Chandra’s data spotlights high-energy activity from stars at X-ray wavelengths colored in Purple. Hubble’s optical data showcases additional stars and dust along the dust lanes.
Messier 16, also known as the Eagle Nebula, is a famous region of the sky often referred to as the “Pillars of Creation.” The Webb image shows the dark columns of gas and dust shrouding the few remaining fledgling stars just being formed. The Chandra sources, which look like dots, are young stars that give off copious amounts of X-rays.
Here, the X-rays are in red and blue, and highlight the huge activity given off by some stars in the area.
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Artist depiction of a pachycephalosaur named Platytholus clemensi – SWNS
Researchers say this strange, dome-headed, bristle-bristling dino from 68 million years ago has traces of keratin, what fingernails and rhino horn are made of, sticking up from its skull.
The paleontologists who discovered the beast completed a CT scan on the partially-completed skull and revealed these keratin bristles, described as giving the animal the appearance of having a “brush cut.”
The animal is called Platytholus clemensi, and is a type of pachycephalosaur discovered in 2011 in Montana’s Hell Creek Formation. It was a plant-eating dinosaur that grew up to 15 feet long and walked on two legs.
Dinosaur skulls sport an amazing variety of bony ornaments, ranging from the horns of Triceratops and the mohawk-like crests of hadrosaurs to the bumps and knobs covering the head of Tyrannosaurus rex.
There is a theory that pachycephalosaurs bashed heads in courtship rituals much like some mammals do today. But despite a gash being discovered on the skull which had healed up, the researchers say there is no real evidence to support this, and the discovery of bristles is currently considered more like an elaborate headdress.
“We don’t know the exact shape of what was covering the dome, but it had this vertical component that we interpret as covered with keratin,” said Dr. Mark Goodwin of the University of California, Berkeley. “A bristly, flat-topped covering biologically makes sense. Animals change or use certain features, particularly on the skull, for multiple functions.”
The head wound is about half an inch deep but it could have been caused by anything from a falling rock to a chance encounter with a tree or another dinosaur.
“We see probably the first unequivocal evidence of trauma in the head of any pachycephalosaur, where the bone was actually ejected from the dome somehow and healed partially in life,” said Dr. Goodwin. “We don’t know how that was caused. It could be head-butting—we don’t dispute that.”
However his colleague and co-author of the paper describing the curious animal, Dr. John Horner at the University of California, Orange, believes that since Dinosaurs’ closest living relatives are birds, they should look at skull ornamentation among them, rather than their distant lizard precursors as a guide for what the purpose of these bristles was.
Artist depiction of a pachycephalosaur named Platytholus clemensi – SWNS
“That’s the first place everybody wants to go—let’s crash them together. And, you know, we just don’t see any evidence of it, histologically,” said Dr. Horner. “Any features, any accouterments that we find on the heads of dinosaurs, I think, are all display—it’s all about display.”
He said that reptiles and birds, the closest relatives to dinosaurs, have head ornamentation for display and rarely butt heads like mammals such as sheep. While crocodiles bash their heads together over territorial and mating disputes, sometimes for hours, dinosaurs diverged from crocodiles more than 200 million years before this animal was living.
Pachycephalosaurs also lack a pneumatic chamber above the braincase, as found in bighorn sheep, which protects their brain from injury.
“I don’t see any reason to turn dinosaurs into mammals, rather than just trying to figure out what they might be doing as bird-like reptiles,” Dr. Horner said.
The study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology said that blood vessels in the skull ended abruptly at the surface of the dome, indicating that the blood originally fed some tissue that was sitting atop the dome.
And as the vessels were perpendicular to the surface they most likely fed a vertical structure.
“What we see are these vertical canals coming to the surface, which suggests that there might be keratin on top, but it’s oriented vertically,” Horner continued.
“I think these pachycephalosaurs had something on top of their head that we don’t know about. I don’t think they were just domes. I think there was some elaborate display on top of their head.”
The authors added that it could have been high, colored, or even subject to changes in color depending on the seasons. It suggests they were used for sexual display and courting, though they may have been used to butt the flanks, as opposed to the heads, of male rivals.
Dr. Goodwin said he suspects that dinosaurs likely distinguished gender by color, as do most modern birds, such as cassowaries, peafowls, and toucans, which have bright integumental colors around the face and head for visual communication.
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One of the most popular hiking apps has made 27,000 trail maps available for download for free in a bid to increase hiker safety.
Most hikers, if they’re honest, will at some point have experienced this situation: they thought they needed to follow one trail, but instead they followed another. Seeking to reorient themselves, they timidly pulled out their smartphone and see, as they suspected, there was no reception of any kind.
Last year, search and rescue missions were up 32% across the US. This is mainly down to the hikers being inadequately prepared. Access to offline maps would help ensure that all hikers can be best prepared for their hike.
To that end, the Irish hiking app HiiKER has released all trail maps in its database for download free of charge. They can either choose to download them directly to their smartphone or as a GPX file to their smartwatch—saving the battery of their device while away from electricity access.
“Hiker Safety is our absolute priority. Offering hikers Free Offline maps on HiiKER, means that everyone can feel confident that they’re on track, regardless of mobile service,” said Paul Finlay, CEO and Founder of HiiKER.
The app team claims that other incumbent Hiking apps such as Alltrails, Strava, and OutdoorActive charge for access to offline maps. As this service is critical to hiker safety, HiiKER is offering it to hikers for free.
Now used by over 600,000 hikers worldwide, the app which began life on the Emerald Isle three years ago is now one of the most-used hiking apps on the market, with over 27,000 hiking routes available to users.
Hadassah University Medical Center credit AVI HAYOUN
An experimental cancer treatment developed in Israel has become so effective for an incurable form of cancer, the hospital administering it has a waiting list more than 6 months long.
Oncologists at the immunology department at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem used the revolutionary CAR-T, or Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell Therapy, to achieve remission of multiple myeloma in 90% of the 74 patients who undertook the experimental treatment.
Multiple myeloma is a kind of bone marrow cancer that distinguishes itself by developing in several areas at once, including the pelvis, ribs, skull, and spine. It accounts for one-tenth of all blood cancers.
CAR-T cell therapies are changing the world of cancer treatments by utilizing the patient’s own immune system to target and kill cancer tumors. Until the 1990s, it was almost completely unknown how to accomplish this, since cancers disguise themselves to avoid immune responses.
“We have evidence of a very positive overall response rate with minimal side effects, and they are mild,” Professor Polina Stepensky, head of the department at Hadassah. “These are dramatic results. This is a huge hope for patients with a disease that has not yet had a cure.”
Jerusalem Post reports that the treatment will also be available across the US in the coming months, quoting Dr. Stepensky.
“IMMX Bio has acquired a patent license, and we are about to open a clinical trial in the US,” Stepensky said. “The plan is to reach commercialization and FDA approval as a drug within a year.”
The way this particular CAR-T cell therapy treatment works is by taking donated blood and separating out the red blood cells from the white blood cells. Then, a genetic engineering procedure is undertaken in which a deactivated virus is filled with the necessary signals to train the white blood cells, in particular the immune weapon known as a T cell, how to target the cancer tumors.
Hadassah is actually the second institution to make headlines recently over a multiple myeloma CAR-T cell treatment. GNN reported on the development at a state-run hospital in Barcelona in 2021 that achieved a 75% remission rate.
credits from left to right and top to bottom – Chandra: NASA/CXC/SAO, XMM: ESA/XMM-Newton; IR: JWST: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI, Spitzer: NASA/JPL/CalTech; Optical: Hubble: NASA/ESA/STScI, ESO; Image Processing: L. Frattare, J. Major, and K. Arcand
Looking for a cool way to get your kids involved in astronomy? Just show them this picture.
These images are composite pieces of technological artwork that would be invisible to the naked eye. Five space-based observatories teamed up with one down here on Earth to color in famous regions of space with X-rays and infrared light—neither of which can be seen by us.
The image in the top left is of NGC 346, a star cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 200,000 light years from Earth. The purple and blue haze on the left are X-rays, a form of high-energy light, left over from a supernova explosion. On the right, infrared data from the James Webb and the now-retired Spitzer space telescopes shows plumes of gas and dust that all those twinkling stars are either currently using, or have used to create their shining, burning forms.
The X-rays are being detected by the space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory, developed by Harvard, and humanity’s flagship X-ray observatory.
To the right side, NGC 1672 is a spiral galaxy, but one that astronomers categorize as a “barred” spiral, meaning that the arms close-in to the center appear more like straight bars rather than curved tentacles. Here, Chandra’s purple-colored X-rays reveal black holes amid the James Webb and Hubble telescopes infrared and optical light picture of this galaxy.
Messier 74 is also known as the “Phantom Galaxy” because it’s relatively dim and difficult to spot with telescopes in a region that is otherwise pretty close to Earth. It’s anything but dim in this image, captured face-on thanks to our planet’s position.
Webb outlines gas and dust in the infrared lights which we see as green, yellow, red, and magenta, while Chandra’s data spotlights high-energy activity from stars at X-ray wavelengths colored in Purple. Hubble’s optical data showcases additional stars and dust along the dust lanes.
Messier 16, also known as the Eagle Nebula, is a famous region of the sky often referred to as the “Pillars of Creation.” The Webb image shows the dark columns of gas and dust shrouding the few remaining fledgling stars just being formed. The Chandra sources, which look like dots, are young stars that give off copious amounts of X-rays.
Here, the X-rays are in red and blue, and highlight the huge activity given off by some stars in the area.
SHARE This Stunning Work With Your Friends On Social Media…
