Ball Of Fire Research Articles

Great Balls of FIRE

Context. Despite the nearly hundred gravitational-wave detections reported by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration, the question of the cosmological origin of merging binary black holes (BBHs) remains open. The two main formation channels generally considered are from isolated field binaries or via dynamical assembly in dense star clusters. Aims. Here we focus on understanding the dynamical formation of merging BBHs within massive clusters in galaxies of different masses. Methods. To this end, we applied a new framework to consistently model the formation and evolution of massive star clusters in zoom-in cosmological simulations of galaxies. Each simulation, taken from the FIRE project, provides a realistic star formation environment, with a unique star formation history, that hosts realistic giant molecular clouds that constitute the birthplace of star clusters. Combined with the code for star cluster evolution CMC, we are able to produce populations of dynamically formed merging BBHs across cosmic time in different environments. Results. As the most massive star clusters preferentially form in dense massive clouds of gas, we find that, despite their low metallicities favouring the creation of black holes, low-mass galaxies contain few massive clusters and therefore make a limited contribution to the global production of dynamically formed merging BBHs. Furthermore, we find that massive clusters can host hierarchical BBH mergers with clear, identifiable physical properties. Looking at the evolution of the BBH merger rate in different galaxies, we find strong correlations between BBH mergers and the most extreme episodes of star formation. Finally, we discuss the implications for future LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational wave observations.

“Great Ball of Fire” giant sinus of Valsalva aneurysm resulting in coronary compression and functional mitral regurgitation related cardiomyopathy

“Great Ball of Fire” giant sinus of Valsalva aneurysm resulting in coronary compression and functional mitral regurgitation related cardiomyopathy

Great balls of FIRE II: The evolution and destruction of star clusters across cosmic time in a Milky Way-mass galaxy

ABSTRACT The current generation of galaxy simulations can resolve individual giant molecular clouds, the progenitors of dense star clusters. But the evolutionary fate of these young massive clusters, and whether they can become the old globular clusters (GCs) observed in many galaxies, is determined by a complex interplay of internal dynamical processes and external galactic effects. We present the first star-by-star N-body models of massive (N ∼ 105–107) star clusters formed in a FIRE-2 MHD simulation of a Milky Way-mass galaxy, with the relevant initial conditions and tidal forces extracted from the cosmological simulation. We select 895 (∼30 per cent) of the YMCs with >6 × 104 M⊙ from Grudić et al. 2022 and integrate them to z = 0 using the cluster Monte Carlo code, CMC. This procedure predicts a MW-like system with 148 GCs, predominantly formed during the early, bursty mode of star formation. Our GCs are younger, less massive, and more core-collapsed than clusters in the Milky Way or M31. This results from the assembly history and age-metallicity relationship of the host galaxy: Younger clusters are preferentially born in stronger tidal fields and initially retain fewer stellar-mass black holes, causing them to lose mass faster and reach core collapse sooner than older GCs. Our results suggest that the masses and core/half-light radii of GCs are shaped not only by internal dynamical processes, but also by the specific evolutionary history of their host galaxies. These results emphasize that N-body studies with realistic stellar physics are crucial to understanding the evolution and present-day properties of GC systems.

The Witch in Flight

The Witch in Flight

Great balls of FIRE – I. The formation of star clusters across cosmic time in a Milky Way-mass galaxy

ABSTRACT The properties of young star clusters formed within a galaxy are thought to vary in different interstellar medium conditions, but the details of this mapping from galactic to cluster scales are poorly understood due to the large dynamic range involved in galaxy and star cluster formation. We introduce a new method for modelling cluster formation in galaxy simulations: mapping giant molecular clouds (GMCs) formed self-consistently in a FIRE-2 magnetohydrodynamic galaxy simulation on to a cluster population according to a GMC-scale cluster formation model calibrated to higher resolution simulations, obtaining detailed properties of the galaxy’s star clusters in mass, metallicity, space, and time. We find $\sim 10{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ of all stars formed in the galaxy originate in gravitationally bound clusters overall, and this fraction increases in regions with elevated Σgas and ΣSFR, because such regions host denser GMCs with higher star formation efficiency. These quantities vary systematically over the history of the galaxy, driving variations in cluster formation. The mass function of bound clusters varies – no single Schechter-like or power-law distribution applies at all times. In the most extreme episodes, clusters as massive as 7 × 106 M⊙ form in massive, dense clouds with high star formation efficiency. The initial mass–radius relation of young star clusters is consistent with an environmentally dependent 3D density that increases with Σgas and ΣSFR. The model does not reproduce the age and metallicity statistics of old ($\gt 11\rm Gyr$) globular clusters found in the Milky Way, possibly because it forms stars more slowly at z > 3.

Balinese Calonarang in Performance

Balinese <i>Calonarang</i> in Performance

The Brown Commons in the Time of Pandemic

The Brown Commons in the Time of Pandemic

Great balls of fire: activation and signalling of inflammatory caspases.

Innate immune responses are tightly regulated by various pathways to control infections and maintain homeostasis. One of these pathways, the inflammasome pathway, activates a family of cysteine proteases called inflammatory caspases. They orchestrate an immune response by cleaving specific cellular substrates. Canonical inflammasomes activate caspase-1, whereas non-canonical inflammasomes activate caspase-4 and -5 in humans and caspase-11 in mice. Caspases are highly specific enzymes that select their substrates through diverse mechanisms. During inflammation, caspase activity is responsible for the secretion of inflammatory cytokines and the execution of a form of lytic and inflammatory cell death called pyroptosis. This review aims to bring together our current knowledge of the biochemical processes behind inflammatory caspase activation, substrate specificity, and substrate signalling.

Blue Balls of Fire and the Ethics of Spectatorship: Verlaine, Yeats, Beckett

This paper looks at three short dramatic scenes by Paul Verlaine, W. B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett which all pick up that most conventional of theatrical themes, thwarted love, only in a disturbing way, by shifting the focus from the torments of the soul to the painful embodied experience of sexual frustration, and by having it performed not by youthful “star-crossed lovers”, but by ambiguously incarnated revenants, or by decrepit, nearly dead old people. I first suggest that a certain filiation, conscious or not, runs from one of Verlaine’s most famous poems, “Colloque sentimental”, through the dance of the ghosts in Yeats’s “play for dancers” The Dreaming of the Bones, to the “love scene” played out by Nagg and Nell out of their respective dustbins in Beckett’s Endgame. More importantly, I argue that the three pieces ask uncomfortable questions about the ethics of spectatorship and invite us to think critically about the conceptualising of theatre as a “face-to-face encounter with the Other”, a notion inspired by Levinas which has gained currency since the “ethical turn” hit theatre studies in the mid-2000s. This paradigm, I further suggest, is applied inaccurately to the theatrical encounter, especially in such contemporary productions as Milo Rau’s 2019 show Orestes in Mosul, which rather rests on a problematic ethics of empathy, a notion foreign to Levinas. The three scenes by Verlaine, Yeats and Beckett, on the other hand, offer an alternative model of unempathetic spectatorship which, paradoxically, may go further towards allowing the presence of radical Others on the stage.

Great balls of fire

The source of ball lightning has been a mystery for centuries. Are we any closer to an explanation, asks Eric Canan

From practitioner to patient - My COVID journey

It was on Wednesday the 24th of June when I started to feel fluish. Considering the pandemic that the world is currently facing, my first thought was that it may be COVID-19 yet there was another part of me that dismissed it. Within a few hours of these first symptoms, my throat felt like I had swallowed a ball of fire, I was coughing, had a severe headache, and I was feeling very cold despite sitting in front of the heater.&#x0D; I self-medicated and went to bed early and took a decision to self-isolate for 7 days. The next day I woke up feeling much better, so I told myself it may not be COVID-19 since it responded to the previous night's remedies. I continued using some over-the-counter preparations, however on Friday I woke up and realized I lost my senses of taste and smell and I had no appetite. By Saturday I started to feel weak and lethargic and I couldn't even get myself out of bed. I tried to eat but food nauseated me.

Grape balls of fire

Grape balls of fire

An early record of ball lightning: Oliva (Spain), 1619

Abstract. In a primary documentary source we found an early record of ball lightning (BL), which was observed in the monastery of Pi (Oliva, southeastern Spain) on 18 October 1619. The ball lightning was observed by at least three people and was described as a “rolling burning vessel” and a “ball of fire”. The ball lightning appeared following a lightning flash, showed a mainly horizontal motion, crossed a wall, smudged an image of the Lady of Rebollet (then known as Lady of Pi) and burnt her ruff, and overturned a cross.

Моделі оцінювання техногенних чинників під час виникнення пожеж на сховищах нафтопродуктів

Наведено деякі моделі оцінювання техногенних чинників під час виникнення пожеж на сховищах нафтопродуктів, які враховують розсіювання шкідливих викидів у атмосфері та навколишньому середовищі з використанням нормального розподілу Гауса. Виявлено основні чинники техногенного впливу, які виникають при аваріях і катастрофах на сховищах нафтопродуктів. З'ясовано особливості розсіювання шкідливих викидів у атмосфері, визначено розподіл концентрації забруднювачів у атмосфері під факелом точкового джерела, а також висоту початкового підйому димового факела. Наведено моделі прогнозування процесу розсіювання шкідливих викидів у навколишньому середовищі, які є інструментами для кількісного оцінювання небезпечних чинників техногенного впливу й навантажень на людину та навколишнє середовище.

Impossible Photographs: Images of War from Rossellini to dOCUMENTA 13

Impossible Photographs:Images of War from Rossellini to dOCUMENTA 13 Domietta Torlasco (bio) I How can a critical practice of the image affect the way we make war visible? How can it not only increase the visibility of war-related events but also rearticulate the very frames through which war acquires visibility? Here I adopt the term "frame" to name the aesthetic and political parameters according to which certain regions of the visible are included in (or excluded from) a given image and, concomitantly, a certain past or present comes into view while another remains in obscurity. I am thus concerned with the system informing the relationship between the visible and the invisible—what Jacques Rancière has called "the distribution of the sensible"1—to the extent that it also regulates the relationship between different temporalities as well as our relationship to what we might describe as the time of war. To make war visible is also to make time visible. It is to abide by or disturb the chronological, linear order that has too often taken hold of our sense of history. In particular, the obsession with the instant and the instantaneous—chronology [End Page 110] as a mere succession of instants or points in time—has played a crucial role in the fields of both audiovisual media and warfare, leading to the development of a "vision machine," in Paul Virilio's apt formulation, for which speed constitutes the new law of profit.2 The critical practice of the image I am tracing counters the conflation of visibility and acceleration, truthful documentation and instantaneity. It refuses to aim at the visible as if it were a target to be destroyed and, concurrently, forgoes "capturing" the moment as if it were an entity to be isolated and secured. By doing so, such a practice also refuses to place images within a determinate context—as if they were here and not beyond, now and not then, incapable of haunting us, the viewers, from more than one place and more than one time. As critics answering the October questionnaire on art and antiwar opposition have remarked, any attempt at making war visible today must confront the logic of the media spectacle of the September 11 attacks.3 The RETORT collective, following Guy Debord's critique of capital's new power of accumulation and control over images, has argued that the attacks constitute an example of image warfare—for the United States, a defeat in the very domain of spectacular visibility that has sanctioned its symbolic and material dominance on the world stage. Significantly, RETORT refuses to separate these horrific events from a long history of aerial bombing, a history of terror from the air that begins with the Italian assaults on Libyan territories in 1911, culminates in the atomic blasts that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and continues after World War II through a series of allegedly pacifying military interventions around the globe. "Bombing," they maintain, "is a constitutive feature of modern life."4 In fact, the spectacle operates by isolating discrete events and making them hypervisible at the expense of other variously related occurrences. We are all too familiar with the images that were produced during the attacks on the World Trade Center, and indeed, this very familiarity betrays a logic of mediatic enclosure. Writing in Artforum only a few months after the attacks, Sarah Boxer observed that "the events of September 11, 2001, were beyond measure. But when the day ended, the visual limits were fixed. The editors of news agencies and newspapers had their film."5 I interpret her comments as a way of signaling that these images had become intractable in their very specificity—self-identical and immediately expressive—and as such had already entered the arsenal of the war to come. "For all time," Boxer explains, "there would be certain balls of fire, certain bits of debris, certain last views of the World Trade Center, certain running crowds, certain spectators, certain firefighters, certain oxygen tanks, certain [End Page 111] ruins, and certain shirts."6 She also notices that most front pages of newspapers "decided to focus on the instant that the second plane hit," as if by...

“Meteors, Ships, Etc.”: Native American Histories of Colonialism and Early American Archives

In his 1893 book Life and Traditions of the Red Man, the Penobscot Abenaki man Joseph Nicolar offers an account of Penobscot encounters with colonists in the seventeenth century. In the book, the Penobscots confront a mystifying fog that covers the earth and creates a famine, during which time the people suffer poor health and altered access to resources, becoming increasingly “desperate” and “disheartened” in their attempts to find food (99). They discover with the help of their “spiritual men” and an elderly woman who temporarily takes the form of a loon that the fog is caused by the “spiritual power” of unfamiliar men traveling west across the ocean (99, 101). The loon woman advises the Penobscots in their knowledge of and preparations for these travelers’ appearance. Shortly before the Penobscots sight the Europeans traveling on the ocean, the loon woman transforms into a ball of fire that appears in the sky and falls into the water, a sign, Nicolar writes, that the Europeans are on their way to Wabanaki lands.1 Yet as the ball of fire falls into the water, it stands in the text as a phenomenon that changes the Penobscots’ material world by providing new “implements” or tools for obtaining sustenance and ending the famine (105).

Space Technology As Binoculars For Life On Earth In The 21st Century

Abstract Man’s romance with Space remains one of the wonders of all ages. In material terms, it has inspired quantum leaps in the technology of flight and transportation; on the metaphysical or spiritual plane our imagery of heaven and hell are both conjured and inspired by space and the myriad balls of fire and dark holes that define and decorate its spacescape. Biblical account of the divine act of creation merely confirms its pre-eminence in man’s thoughts when it says: "And God said, Let there be light in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night: and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years; And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day; and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good". (Genesis 1:14-18) For it was against the forboding vastness of space and the warmth, and mystery of the beckoning stars that man discovered both his identity and consciousness. Homo Sapien’s early confrontation with nature must, most probably, have been so traumatic and intimidating as to make him seek refuge in the caves to contemplate his frailty and helplessness and in the process fashion out a survival kit. Such a survival kit evolved over just a few millions of years to transform him, not only into a master of his planet, but also in recent times, into a space adventurer. His survival kit was built around two central themes viz:- (a) the need to know himself and everything about anything around him . (b) the use of what he knows to improve and manage his present condition of life on the one hand and predict and plan for the future on the other. After all, physical and scientific or metaphysical explorations and discoveries are predicated in the need to know, whereas innovation and technology merely reflect the ends and use to which man has put what he knows.

A Timely Reflection: What Really Matters

Remember 1999? Doomsday was nigh. Many people stockpiled food and water. Those gifted with the power of foresight predicted that soon a great ball of fire would descend and destroy all, or nearly a...

Great Balls of Fire: A probabilistic approach to quantify the hazard related to ballistics — A case study at La Fossa volcano, Vulcano Island, Italy

We present a probabilistic approach to quantify the hazard posed by volcanic ballistic projectiles (VBP) and their potential impact on the built environment. A model named Great Balls of Fire (GBF) is introduced to describe ballistic trajectories of VBPs accounting for a variable drag coefficient and topography. It relies on input parameters easily identifiable in the field and is designed to model large numbers of VBPs stochastically. Associated functions come with the GBF code to post-process model outputs into a comprehensive probabilistic hazard assessment for VBP impacts. Outcomes include probability maps to exceed given thresholds of kinetic energies at impact, hazard curves and probabilistic isoenergy maps. Probabilities are calculated either on equally-sized pixels or zones of interest.The approach is calibrated, validated and applied to La Fossa volcano, Vulcano Island (Italy). We constructed a generic eruption scenario based on stratigraphic studies and numerical inversions of the 1888–1890 long-lasting Vulcanian cycle of La Fossa. Results suggest a ~10−2% probability of occurrence of VBP impacts with kinetic energies ≤104 J at the touristic locality of Porto. In parallel, the vulnerability to roof perforation was estimated by combining field observations and published literature, allowing for a first estimate of the potential impact of VBPs during future Vulcanian eruptions. Results indicate a high physical vulnerability to the VBP hazard, and, consequently, half of the building stock having a ≥2.5×10−3% probability of roof perforation.

Private Dispute Resolution in International Business: Negotiation, Mediation, Arbitration, (3rd revised ed.), by Klaus Peter Berger

Private Dispute Resolution in International Business: Negotiation, Mediation, Arbitration , (3rd revised ed.), by Klaus Peter Berger, Kluwer Law International, 2015, includes Case Study (Volume I) (159 pp), Interactive USB Card , and Handbook (Volume II). Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Jerry Lee Lewis’ 1957 song Great Balls of Fire !1 reflects this reviewer’s impression of Professor Klaus Peter Berger pounding the keyboards of three separate laptop computers during his ‘Comparison of Negotiation, Mediation, Arbitration’2 at his ‘brain-rattling’ 2014 Cologne Academies for which the Private Dispute Resolution in International Business ( PDRIB ) beta-test version was used. After reviewing the PDRIB third edition, this reviewer can only affirm his initial Cologne Academies impression of highly effective and fun learning and add ‘Chapeau!’ to the author and his 2015 redesign team.3 PDRIB third edition’s main focus—the advocacy skills required from practitioners to be successful in international business negotiation, mediation, or arbitration—is innovatively advanced through the interactive multi-media realization of its three goals, which go beyond reading for maximum learning efficiency. 1. Update and revise ‘the text of the Handbook to take into account … recent developments in the law and practice of ADR in international business’. 2. ‘Improve user friendliness of the Handbook, which now serves a dual purpose. [It] continues to function as a complement to the Case Study in that it contains Answers to the Questions posed in the Case Study at the end of each Scenario’ and ‘may now be also used … as a stand-alone reference manual for international ADR’ due to ‘a new and comprehensive Table of Contents and a much more detailed [Subject] Index’. 3. ‘Improve the usability and graphical interface of the digital content … a switch … from DVD to USB technology [with] case-related documents contained on the USB Card … revised or rewritten … to adapt them to the standards of contemporary international ADR practice’.4 Part I of this review summarizes the PDRIB third edition. Part II assesses how well the above goals are achieved. Part III examines the third edition’s place within international legal scholarship and why it is … [↵][1]* Principal, PhilRay-IDR, ; Senior Counsel (Retired 2012), Siemens AG, Erlangen, Germany; Adjunct Professor, Georgia State University Law School (1989–1991); University of Erlangen-Nurnberg Law School, Erlangen, Germany (1996–97); Chairman, State Bar of Georgia’s Drafting Committee, Georgia International Transactions Arbitration Code of 1988. phil{at}philray-idr.com [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1