Latest news with #UniversityofHamburg
MTV Lebanon
21-06-2025
- Politics
- MTV Lebanon
US Races to Defend Israel as It Burns Through Missile Interceptors
The U.S. is racing to reinforce Israel's defenses, sending more warships capable of shooting down ballistic missiles to the region as Iranian attacks drain Israel's stocks of interceptors. An additional U.S. Navy destroyer arrived in the eastern Mediterranean on Friday, joining three others in the area and two in the Red Sea. The ships are operating close enough to Israel to be able to intercept missiles fired by Iran, a defense official said. Most of the U.S.'s Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers are armed with a range of interceptors, known as SM-2, SM-3 and SM-6, that can shoot down ballistic missiles and other aerial threats. SM-3s, first used in combat last year to counter an Iranian attack, are designed to intercept missiles above the atmosphere in the middle of their flight paths. The U.S. has also replenished stocks of ground-based interceptors for the Thaad antimissile system it set up in Israel last year. Formally known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, the system is operated by the U.S. Army and designed to intercept missiles inside or outside the atmosphere during their final phase of flight, known as the terminal phase. The surge of seaborne- and ground-based missile defenses underscores the concerns about Israel's dwindling supplies of the armaments. Israel risks exhausting its supply of high-end Arrow 3 interceptors in the coming weeks if its conflict with Iran isn't resolved and Tehran continues to launch volleys of missiles, a U.S. official said. Israel uses several different systems to provide a multilayered defense of the country. The well-known Iron Dome works on shorter-range rockets and drones. David's Sling intercepts missiles, planes and drones at a greater distance. The Arrow 3 is the crown jewel, designed to intercept missiles above the Earth's atmosphere. It can neutralize threats before they cross into Israeli airspace and give other systems time to act if the first shot misses. 'Without Arrow 3, it's problematic,' said Timur Kadyshev, a researcher at the University of Hamburg who has studied the Arrow system. 'You have less time to shoot down an incoming missile because you're shooting them only in the terminal phase.' Israel Aerospace Industries, the company that makes Arrow interceptors, didn't respond to requests for comment. Israel's armed forces also declined to comment on interceptor stockpiles, but said the military is ready to handle any scenario. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an interview Thursday with Israel's public broadcaster Kan, declined to answer whether Israel was running out of Arrow 3 interceptors. 'I would always like more and more,' Netanyahu said. He estimated that Israel has destroyed around half of Iran's missile launchers since the current conflict began, thereby diminishing the threat posed by Iran's missile arsenal. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Trump had approved attack plans for Iran, but was holding off on giving the final order to see if Tehran would abandon its nuclear program through diplomacy. The waiting period will keep the onus on Israel to continue the fight even as its ability to defend against missile attacks runs down. 'There's no time to lose, and two weeks is a very long time,' said Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Israel is using its control of the skies over western Iran to take out more missiles before they are launched. Its air superiority could also force Iran to fire from farther away, which means using liquid-fueled missiles that take more time to get ready, making them more vulnerable to attack. Still, Tehran has continued to fire volleys of missiles at Israeli population centers. If Iran keeps up its attacks, Israel in the coming days might be forced to make difficult decisions about husbanding its resources and giving priority to which missiles to intercept, Kadyshev said. The U.S. is facing its own concerns about supplies of interceptors. Supplies diverted to the conflict in the Middle East are coming at the expense of those available in the event of a bigger conflict with China. 'We are concerned for the number remaining for the high-end fight,' said a U.S. officer who has operated in the Middle East. 'SM-3s will start running low at this pace of operations, cutting into reserves for the next kinetic engagement.' The U.S. might also face tough decisions about how many interceptors to exhaust if the fighting drags on. It rushed missile defenses to its Persian Gulf partners after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel kicked off what would become more than a year and a half of war. Those defenses are politically and militarily important. Gulf countries have pressed the U.S. to take a more active role in their defense, and Iran has threatened to hit American bases in the Gulf and elsewhere in the region if the U.S. joins Israel in the attack. Israel's conflict with Iran is costing the country hundreds of millions of dollars a day, according to early estimates, a price tag that could constrain Israel's ability to conduct a lengthy war.
Mint
20-06-2025
- Politics
- Mint
US races to defend Israel as it burns through missile interceptors
The U.S. is racing to reinforce Israel's defenses, sending more warships capable of shooting down ballistic missiles to the region as Iranian attacks drain Israel's stocks of interceptors. An additional U.S. Navy destroyer arrived in the eastern Mediterranean on Friday, joining three others in the area and two in the Red Sea. The ships are operating close enough to Israel to be able to intercept missiles fired by Iran, a defense official said. Most of the U.S.'s Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers are armed with a range of interceptors, known as SM-2, SM-3 and SM-6, that can shoot down ballistic missiles and other aerial threats. SM-3s, first used in combat last year to counter an Iranian attack, are designed to intercept missiles above the atmosphere in the middle of their flight paths. The U.S. has also replenished stocks of ground-based interceptors for the Thaad antimissile system it set up in Israel last year. Formally known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, the system is operated by the U.S. Army and designed to intercept missiles inside or outside the atmosphere during their final phase of flight, known as the terminal phase. The surge of seaborne and ground-based missile defenses underscores the concerns about Israel's dwindling supplies of the armaments. Israel risks exhausting its supply of high-end Arrow 3 interceptors in the coming weeks if its conflict with Iran isn't resolved and Tehran continues to launch volleys of missiles, a U.S. official said. Israel uses several different systems to provide a multilayered defense of the country. The well-known Iron Dome works on shorter-range rockets and drones. David's Sling intercepts missiles, planes and drones at a greater distance. The Arrow 3 is the crown jewel, designed to intercept missiles above the Earth's atmosphere. It can neutralize threats before they cross into Israeli airspace and give other systems time to act if the first shot misses. 'Without Arrow 3, it's problematic," said Timur Kadyshev, a researcher at the University of Hamburg who has studied the Arrow system. 'You have less time to shoot down an incoming missile because you're shooting them only in the terminal phase." Israel Aerospace Industries, the company that makes Arrow interceptors, didn't respond to requests for comment. Israel's armed forces also declined to comment on interceptor stockpiles, but said they are ready to handle any scenario. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an interview Thursday with Israel's public broadcaster Kan, declined to answer whether Israel was running out of Arrow 3 interceptors. 'I would always like more and more," Netanyahu said. He estimated that Israel has destroyed around half of Iran's missile launchers since the current conflict began, thereby diminishing the threat posed by Iran's missile arsenal. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Trump had approved attack plans for Iran, but was holding off on giving the final order to see if Tehran would abandon its nuclear program through diplomacy. The waiting period will keep the onus on Israel to continue the fight even as its ability to defend against missile attacks runs down. 'There's no time to lose, and two weeks is a very long time," said Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Israel is using its control of the skies over western Iran to take out more missiles before they are launched. Its air superiority could also force Iran to fire from farther away, which means using liquid-fueled missiles that take more time to get ready, making them more vulnerable to attack. Still, Tehran has continued to fire volleys of missiles at Israeli population centers. If Iran keeps up its attacks, Israel in the coming days might be forced to make difficult decisions about husbanding its resources and giving priority to which missiles to intercept, Kadyshev said. The U.S. is facing its own concerns about supplies of interceptors. Supplies diverted to the conflict in the Middle East are coming at the expense of those available in the event of a bigger conflict with China. 'We are concerned for the number remaining for the high-end fight," said a U.S. officer who has operated in the Middle East. 'SM-3s will start running low at this pace of operations, cutting into reserves for the next kinetic engagement." The U.S. might also face tough decisions about how many interceptors to exhaust if the fighting drags on. It rushed missile defenses to its Persian Gulf partners after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel kicked off what would become more than a year and a half of war. Those defenses are politically and militarily important. Gulf countries have pressed the U.S. to take a more active role in their defense, and Iran has threatened to hit American bases in the Gulf and elsewhere in the region if the U.S. joins Israel in the attack. Israel's conflict with Iran is costing the country hundreds of millions of dollars a day, according to early estimates, a price tag that could constrain Israel's ability to conduct a lengthy war. The biggest single cost is the interceptors, which can run up tabs of tens of millions to even $200 million a day.
TimesLIVE
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- TimesLIVE
African prisoners made sound recordings in German camps in WW1: this is what they had to say
His recorded voice speaking in Wolof travelled back home in 2024, as a sound installation I created for the Théodore Monod African Art Museum in Dakar. Chapter two listens to Mohamed Nur from Somalia. In 1910 he went to Germany to work as a teacher to the children of performers in a so-called Völkerschau (an ethnic show; sometimes called a human zoo, where 'primitive' cultures were displayed). After refusing to perform on stage, he found himself stranded in Germany without a passport or money. He worked as a model for a German artist and later as a teacher of Somali at the University of Hamburg. Nur left a rich audiovisual trace in Germany, which speaks of the exploitation of men of colour in German academia as well as by artists. One of his songs comments on the poor treatment of travellers and gives a plea for more hospitality to strangers. Stephan Bischoff, who grew up in a German mission station in Togo and was working in a shoe shop in Berlin when the war began, appears in the third chapter. His recordings criticise the practices of the Christian colonial evangelising mission. He recalls the destruction of an indigenous shrine in Ghana by German military in 1913. Also in chapter three is Albert Kudjabo, who fought in the Belgian army before he was imprisoned in Germany. He mainly recorded drum language, a drummed code based on a tonal language from the Democratic Republic of the Congo that German linguists were keen to study. He speaks of the massive sociocultural changes that mining brought to his home region, which may have caused him to migrate. Together these songs, stories and accounts speak of a practice of extracting knowledge in prisoner of war camps. But they offer insights and commentary far beyond the 'example sentences' that the recordings were meant to be. Why do these sound archives matter? As sources of colonial history, the majority of the collections in European sound archives are still untapped, despite the growing scholarly and artistic interest in them in the past decade. This interest is led by decolonial approaches to archives and knowledge production. Sound collections diversify what's available as historical texts, they increase the variety of languages and genres that speak of the histories of colonisation. They present alternative accounts and interpretations of history to offer a more balanced view of the past. • Anette Hoffmann: senior researcher at the Institute for African Studies and Egyptology, University of Cologne.
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Dark matter may escape, but dark photons can't. Here's how MADMAX could catch them
Everything we visualize about space, including stars, planets, gases, and even galaxies, make up just a small fraction of the universe's total mass. The rest is invisible, silent, and frustratingly elusive, famously known as dark matter. Scientists have tried numerous ways to catch this mysterious form of matter, but it has managed to allude researchers almost every time. However, the latest results from MADMAX (MAgnetized Disc and Mirror Axion eXperiment) suggest we're closer than ever to detecting dark matter. MADMAX is a special setup that focuses on detecting axions and dark photons, two supposed particles that are believed to form the dark matter. "These two hypothetical particles are popular candidates for what dark matter might consist of. In our recent paper, we describe the results of a search for dark photons using a small-scale prototype," Jacob Mathias Egge, first author of the study, and a PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg, said. The challenge of detecting dark matter is not just that it is invisible—rather that it interacts so weakly with normal matter that we might never notice it unless we build incredibly sensitive instruments. Traditional detectors have mostly come up empty-handed, especially when looking for heavier, slow-moving dark matter particles. That's why scientists have been turning their attention to lighter, more ghost-like particles like axions and dark photons. MADMAX tackles this challenge with a clever setup. The main highlight of its design is a dielectric haloscope, a kind of detector that uses special materials and mirrors to amplify the tiny signals that dark matter particles might produce. The MADMAX prototype uses three round discs made of sapphire, a pure and insulating material known for its excellent properties at high frequencies. These discs are spaced carefully in front of a mirror. If dark photons exist, they might occasionally transform into ordinary photons (particles of light) when passing through materials with the right properties. The layered discs and the mirror are arranged so that this transformation is amplified at specific frequencies, similar to how tuning a radio to the right station turns a faint signal into a clear one. Any resulting microwave photons from this process are then directed into a horn antenna, where an ultra-sensitive receiver tries to detect them. 'In our case, we tried to detect these excess photons with a frequency around 20 GHz," Egge said. Although the researchers did not find a signal, they were able to rule out the presence of dark photons in this mass range at an unprecedented level of sensitivity, many many times better than previous efforts at similar frequencies. "This is the first physics result from a MADMAX prototype and exceeds previous constraints on χ in this mass range by up to almost three orders of magnitude," the study authors note. What makes this result especially exciting is that the MADMAX team has now proven that their approach works. This is the first time a prototype like this has been successfully used to probe dark photons, and it delivered impressive results. "Since the core detector concept has now been proven to work, we can now easily expand our reach in the next upgraded iterations, increasing our chances of a detection," Egge added. The biggest upgrade that is underway is to cool the entire detector down to just 4 Kelvin (-269°C). At such extremely low temperatures, thermal noise drops significantly, making the detector even more sensitive to tiny traces of dark matter. Moreover, the current experiment only focuses on dark photons, but in future experiments, scientists will operate MADMAX under strong magnetic fields so that it could also detect axions at the same time. The study has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Telegraph
02-05-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Father ‘who imposed Covid horror house lockdown' was philosopher
A German father who allegedly imposed an almost four-year Covid lockdown on his three children in a squalid 'house of horrors' was a HR manager with a doctorate in philosophy, it has emerged. Christian Steffen, 53, and his wife Melissa Ann, 48, are accused of imprisoning their eight-year-old twin boys and 10-year-old son in their rented villa in Oviedo, northern Spain, since October 2021. Officers raided the property on Monday and found a cesspit of a home in which the children were allegedly forced to wear nappies and three medical masks on top of one another. The guest bedroom had been turned into a dumping ground for the children's soiled nappies, and the bathroom by the twins' bedroom was occupied by a one-eyed cat with a huge tumour, the El Español newspaper reported. The married couple were allegedly terrified of catching Covid, and investigators said they found five oxygen-purifying ozone generators that were plugged in for 24 hours a day. It is claimed that Mr Steffen was the only person allowed to open the house's front door, where he picked up food orders delivered by the local supermarket. He was reportedly assisted in enforcing the restrictions by his wife, who Spanish press said weighed almost 22 stones and had 22 jars of Vaseline on her bedside table. All the blinds in the house were closed apart from those in the children's bedrooms, which had to be shut at 5.10pm every day. Children 'astonished at release' When officers led the children out of the home, they were astonished that they were finally allowed outside. One of them is said to have knelt on the grass, touching it with amazement. 'They had three masks each on top of each other. They were oblivious to any contact with reality,' one investigator said. 'They were very scared around the mother, who told us all the time that the little ones had serious pathologies and that we should not approach them.' Medical examinations conducted by a paediatrician found that all three children were suffering from 'severe constipation' as they would avoid defecating in their nappies for hours. A large number of used sanitary pads and tampons were said to have been found underneath the couple's double bed. Photos published in Spanish media show how the twins were allegedly kept in cribs meant for infants, on which they had drawn pictures of monsters. Images also reveal the parents had converted a guest room on the first floor into a classroom with a table, three chairs, human anatomy books and a world map. An online CV for Mr Steffen says he graduated in 2003 from the University of Hamburg with a doctorate in philosophy and a degree in 'pedagogics' that supposedly allowed him to teach at secondary schools. He was the author of a book released in 2005 called 'Heidegger as a Transcendental Philosopher: His Fundamental Ontology in Comparison with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason'. A Linkedin profile says he freelanced as a HR manager from April 2015 and had previously worked as a recruiter for a number of companies in Germany . The beginning of the end for the family's self-imposed lockdown began on April 14, when police launched an investigation into the children's welfare following a complaint from a neighbour. Police became increasingly suspicious when they realised the food deliveries dropped at the family home were too large for a single person. Neighbours thought house was empty After his force rescued the children, Chief Supt Francisco Javier Lozano described the property as a 'house of horror'. 'What could have led to this situation?' he told a press conference. 'Could the masks worn by parents and children be merely an incident? What motivated the arrival in Oviedo and this lifestyle?' Before the shocking discovery, neighbours believed the house was totally abandoned. Its landlord told the Spanish press: 'This news is a scandal. In the four years I've rented the house to this German couple with three children, I never saw anyone, not a man, a woman, the children, a dog, or a cat. 'As far as I could see, there was no one there, and therefore no activity Just a few metres from the house is the convent of the Discalced Carmelites, home to a community of cloistered nuns whose sole contact with the outside world is through selling doughnuts, cakes, and biscuits. One of the nuns, Sister Teresa, said: 'We thought it was empty because the garden wasn't maintained, and there was no sign of life inside. 'A married couple with children had previously lived in that chalet, and later a couple with greyhounds, but since the latter left, we thought no one was living there any more.' Marta del Arca, the regional welfare minister, said the General Directorate of Children and Families has assumed custody of the three children. The couple are being investigated on suspicion of domestic violence, psychological mistreatment and child abandonment, and have been remanded into custody following their arrest.
