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Want an easy TV sound upgrade? Meet 3 budget-friendly Dolby Atmos soundbars that also save on space

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If you’re looking to improve the sound on your TV, one of the easiest ways is to add one of the best soundbars

These days, soundbars include more features than ever before. One of the most popular is Dolby Atmos. Some soundbars, such as the Samsung HW-Q990C, have evolved from a simple bar to an entire wireless surround sound package, creating a fully immersive experience without a complicated setup.

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meet the Oscar-winning movie’s specialist advisers

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Cillian Murphy in a scene from the Universal Pictures film Oppenheimer.

Cillian Murphy picked up the best actor award for his portrayal of Oppenheimer.Credit: Landmark Media/Alamy

Oppenheimer won big at last night’s Oscars, scooping 7 awards out of 13 nominations, including best picture. The film has been lauded for its accurate portrayal of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life, and its examination of both the human and scientific toll of the Manhattan Project, the research programme that developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s at Los Alamos in New Mexico.

To ensure the film was as accurate as possible, director Christopher Nolan turned to several science advisers for information on Oppenheimer and his life, and the project itself, which culminated in the Trinity Bomb nuclear test on 16 July 1945 and the subsequent bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, bringing the Second World War to a close at immense human cost.

Nature spoke to three of those advisers for some behind-the-scenes insight into the film’s creation.

Robbert Dijkgraaf, a theoretical physicist and currently the Dutch minister for education, was the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, from 2012 to 2022, a job Oppenheimer had also held, from 1947 to 1966. Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is a close friend of Nolan’s and had worked with him on a number of previous projects, including the depiction of the gargantuan black hole in the film Interstellar (2014). And David Saltzberg, a physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, worked as a scientific consultant for other productions, such as The Big Bang Theory, before applying his expertise to Oppenheimer.

What was your involvement in Oppenheimer?

Dijkgraaf: In 2021, Nolan wanted to come and visit, to see the place where Oppenheimer had lived and worked for almost 20 years. I also lived in that house and, for 10 years, worked in the same office that Oppenheimer once used. We had a long discussion about Oppenheimer, but also about physics, which I loved.

Thorne: I spoke with Cillian Murphy about his portrayal of Oppenheimer for the movie. I knew Oppenheimer when I was a graduate student at Princeton, from 1962 to 1965, and a postdoc from 1965 to 1966, so there was some discussion about Oppenheimer as a person.

Saltzberg: I was called in to help out with the production in scenes that were filmed in Los Angeles. I worked mostly with the prop manager. That involved things like deciding what was on the chalkboards, or what equations Oppenheimer handed to Einstein to show whether the atmosphere would catch fire.

Tell us about some of your interactions with the director and cast

Dijkgraaf: Nolan visited Princeton twice to tour the premises. I remember we walked from the house to the institute. It’s this beautiful walk with nice trees. I remember telling him it’s the perfect commute, because Einstein and [Austrian physicist] Kurt Gödel always walked along that path. In the movie, Lewis Strauss meets Oppenheimer and he points out the house and says “it’s the perfect commute”. I thought, ‘wait a moment — this is a very familiar scene!’

I was struck that Nolan was really, really interested in what it means to be a physicist.

I also remember he really appreciated the pond at the institute. Quite a few of the scenes in the movie are shot near the pond — it’s a favourite place for many people there. It’s a place to think and contemplate.

Saltzberg: I sometimes had to explain the physics of a line of dialogue to the actors, enough that they knew the emotional truth of the line and why they were saying it. There was one particular line in the script which was incredibly complicated, about off-diagonal matrix elements and quantum mechanics. Even when I read it I had trouble understanding exactly what it was saying. Cillian really wanted me to explain it to him. We got there, I think, but it was difficult.

A similar thing happened with Josh Hartnett, who played [American nuclear physicist] Ernest Lawrence. Every time he had a spare moment, he would come and talk to me about physics. It was uncanny because he was already in makeup and costume. I never met Lawrence, but I’ve seen plenty of pictures, and it was just eerie. He looked like Lawrence walking around the room.

What did you make of the science in the movie?

Saltzberg: It was wonderfully accurate. It’s really amazing. Christopher Nolan clearly understood the science.

There’s a scene in which Oppenheimer is writing on the chalkboard explaining that nuclear fission is impossible, when Lawrence walks in and says “well, [American physicist Luis Walter] Alvarez just did it next door”. So I had some equations put on the board that Oppenheimer might have had that proved fission is impossible. Most of the audience wouldn’t recognize that, but it made me feel good.

Dijkgraaf: It was really well done. I loved that the movie consistently looks through the eyes of Oppenheimer. The physics discussions were very good — the right equations were on the blackboards!

What was Oppenheimer like as a person?

Thorne: He was just a superb mentor, extremely effective. He had enormous breadth and an extremely quick mind. He had this amazing ability to grasp things very quickly and see connections, which was a major factor in his success as the leader of the atomic bomb project.

Dijkgraaf: He was both a scientific leader and a government adviser. At that time, Einstein, who was quite crucial in starting up the atomic bomb project, really turned into a father of the peace movement. A character who wasn’t in the movie, [Hungarian-American mathematician] John von Neumann, wanted to bomb the Soviet Union, so he was completely on the opposite side. Oppenheimer was trying to walk the reasonable path between those two extremes, and he was punished for it. So I often feel his character generates these mixed feelings. It’s a fascinating example for anyone who wants to be a scientist and play a role in public debate.

Is it satisfying to see a science-based film get such recognition at the Oscars?

Thorne: It’s wonderful it’s got this level of attention. It’s a film that has messages that are tremendously important for the era we’re in. Hopefully it raises the awareness of the danger of nuclear weapons and the crucial issue of arms control.

Dijkgraaf: We often complain there’s no content in popular culture. For me, the biggest surprise was that this difficult movie about a difficult topic and a difficult man, shot in a difficult way, became a hit around the world. I feel that’s very encouraging. The hidden life of physicists has become a part of popular culture, and rightly so.

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Got milk? Meet the weird amphibian that nurses its young

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A ringed caecilian amphibian with newborn babies.

The worm-like caecilian Siphonops annulatus is the first amphibian described to produce ‘milk’ for offspring hatched outside its body.Credit: Carlos Jared

An egg-laying amphibian found in Brazil nourishes its newly hatched young with a fatty, milk-like substance, according to a study published today in Science1.

Lactation is considered a key characteristic of mammals. But a handful of other animals — including birds, fish, insects and even spiders — can produce nutrient-rich liquid for their offspring.

That list also includes caecilians, a group of around 200 limbless, worm-like amphibian species found in tropical regions, most of which live underground and are functionally blind. Around 20 species are known to feed unborn offspring — hatched inside the reproductive system — a type of milk. But the Science study is the first time scientists have described an egg-laying amphibian doing this for offspring hatched outside its body.

The liquid is “functionally similar” to mammalian milk, says study co-author Carlos Jared, a naturalist at the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazil.

An unusual diet

In the 2000s, researchers showed that in some caecilians, the young hatched with teeth and that they fed on a nutrient-rich layer of their mother’s skin2 around every seven days. “It sounded a little strange — babies eating just once a week,” says Marta Antoniazzi, a naturalist also at the Butantan Institute. “That wouldn’t be sufficient for the babies to develop as they do.”

Antoniazzi, Jared and their colleagues wanted to investigate these young amphibians’ bizarre feeding habits in more detail, so they collected 16 nesting caecilians of the species Siphonops annulatus and their young at cacao plantations in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. The researchers then filmed the animals and analysed more than 200 hours of their behaviour.

The footage revealed that as well as munching on their mother’s skin, S. annulatus young could get their mother to eject a fat- and carbohydrate-rich liquid from her cloaca — the combined rear opening for the reproductive and digestive systems — by making high-pitched clicking noises. The young would also stick their heads into the cloaca to feed.

The finding that S. annulatus is “both a skin feeder and now a milk producer is pretty amazing”, says Marvalee Wake, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. It is probably just one of the caecilians’ many biological quirks. “Most species have not been studied at this level of detail,” says Wake. “So, who knows what else they’re doing.”

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Meet the real-life versions of Dune’s epic sandworms

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The film Dune: Part Two might feature human actors Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, but the biggest stars — at least literally — are the sandworms. The sandworms are central to the desert ecosystem of the fictional planet Arrakis, the film’s main setting, and to the culture of its inhabitants, the Fremen. Sandworms live underground and excrete a substance that becomes the all-important drug called the spice, and the Fremen ride them like giant sandy freight trains. In the film’s first glamour shot of a sandworm, a house-sized mouth ringed with teeth erupts out of the sand to swallow a whole platoon of soldiers.

To find out whether the fictional worms in Dune have anything in common with real worms, Nature spoke to palaeontologist Luke Parry at the University of Oxford, UK. He studies worms from the Cambrian and Ordovician periods, which together lasted from roughly 540 million to 444 million years ago.

Dune’s sandworms can grow to at least 450 metres long, about 15 times the size of the longest blue whale. How big do real-life worms get?

There are annelid worms that get up to several metres in length called eunicid worms, a type of bristle worm. They’re pretty gnarly — they have big jaws, they look a bit like Graboids from the 1990 film Tremors. Some of them are ambush predators. They eat octopuses, squid, vertebrates.

There are some earthworms that get really big, as well. Megascolides reaches up to 2 metres. The biggest ones are from Australia.

A worm with iridescent pale body, lots of appendages and wide jaws emerges from sediment.

The ambush predator called the bobbit worm (Eunice aphroditois) can reach 3 metres long.Credit: Constantinos Petrinos/Nature Picture Library

Do any of them have teeth?

The worms in Dune have lots of teeth around their mouths, and that’s what the Fremen use to make their crysknives. There are worms like that, called priapulids. These are the sorts that were making the first complex burrows in the early Cambrian. They use all of these teeth, called scalids, on a proboscis to drag themselves through burrows. Alitta worms — sandworms — and ragworms have teeth for catching prey. Some leeches have teeth.

The sandworms in Dune have totally changed their planet by excreting the valuable drug called the spice, making the weird blue liquid called the Water of Life and more. Have worms on Earth changed our planet?

Worms on Earth were responsible for burrowing into sediments over half a billion years ago and changing marine ecosystems forever. It’s part of what we call the Cambrian explosion, one of the most profound changes on the planet.

Before the advent of worms, the sea floor would have been smothered with what are called microbial mats. All the sediment would have been anoxic, without oxygen. If you’ve ever gone swimming in a river or a lake and it’s muddy and you plunge your foot into it, and it’s smelly and anoxic, that’s basically what the entire sea-floor environment would have been around the world.

Then, all of a sudden, some animals evolve a wormy body plan that allows them to move in three dimensions. They start burrowing into sediments, and that means that oxygen can get into the sediments and complex animal life can live there. It opens up new ways of making a living. Worms are part of this fundamental restructuring of the world.

When the Fremen in Dune want to ride a sandworm, they summon one with a device called a thumper that drums the ground. Do real worms sense vibrations?

Yeah, a common thing that birds do for catching earthworms is drumming on the ground, to bring them to the surface of the soil. Seagulls do it. Unfortunately, I don’t think the seagulls ride around on them.

If you were the right size to ride on a worm, do you think it would be similar to riding a sandworm in Dune?

It depends what sort of worm it was and where it was going. There are lots that crawl around on the surface of sediments — maybe you could ride those around. For worms that burrow, I think you’d find it quite uncomfortable and confining.

Any other favourite worm facts?

There are about 30 animal body plans — what we call the animal phyla, the big groups that we chop up animal diversity into — and more than half of them are worms. It’s a really good, versatile way of making a living. Lots of things that didn’t start off as worms just become worms. There are groups of lizards that lose their limbs, like snakes and amphisbaenians, worm lizards. There are worms that live in hydrothermal vents in the deep sea.

How do you feel about having the organisms you study portrayed on screen?

I think it’s awesome. Although there’s nothing like the worm in Dune that’s alive today, some of the things that it does, or some of the ways it looks, are actually like some of these really unfamiliar organisms that we find in the ocean. If a handful of people find out about those animals as a result of watching Dune, I think that’s awesome, because these things are — life is — amazing and diverse.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Deals: OBSBOT Meet 4K AI-Powered 4K Webcam

OBSBOT Meet

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Creative Live! Meet 4K web camera €350

Creative Live Meet 4K webcamera

The Creative Live! Meet 4K web camera is designed to enhance the quality of virtual interactions, whether they be formal meetings, educational classes, or recreational activities. The Meet 4K web camera is equipped with a host of advanced features that collectively deliver a superior video conferencing experience.

One of the standout features is its 4K UHD resolution, powered by a cutting-edge Sony STARVIS IMX415 CMOS imaging sensor. This combination ensures vivid, detailed visuals that bring a new level of clarity to virtual interactions. The high-definition resolution, coupled with the advanced imaging sensor, provides a level of detail and color accuracy that is truly remarkable.

Equally impressive is the webcam’s wide-angle field of view. With up to 115° of coverage, the Creative Live! Meet 4K web camera is ideal for large meetings or presentations, ensuring all participants are clearly visible. This broad field of view is complemented by an adjustable digital zoom feature, which allows users to focus on important details without compromising image quality. With 7X digital zoom, users can highlight key points or individuals, adding another layer of versatility to the device.

4K web camera

The Creative Live! Meet 4K web camera doesn’t compromise on audio quality either. It features four pairs of ultra-sensitive omni-directional microphones that provide comprehensive audio capture. This is further enhanced by an automated microphone gain that picks up sound from a distance, ensuring clear audio from all participants, regardless of their location. The inclusion of 40 mm Neodymium magnet speaker drivers further bolsters audio clarity and depth, providing a rich, immersive audio experience.

Creative 4K web camera

Other articles we have written that you may find of interest on the subject of web cameras :

In addition to its impressive visual and audio capabilities, the Creative Live! Meet 4K web camera boasts built-in AI tracking and framing technology. This feature uses facial recognition to keep the subject centered in the frame, eliminating the need for manual adjustments and ensuring the speaker is always the focus of attention. The webcam also responds to hand gestures, allowing users to trigger specific actions with a simple wave of the hand.

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The Creative Live! Meet 4K web camera is a versatile, high-quality device that offers a range of advanced features designed to enhance the virtual conferencing experience. With its superior visual and audio capabilities, user-friendly design, and smart communication features, it provides an unparalleled level of clarity and engagement in the virtual communication space.

Source : Creative

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