Briefly

Deadly bus fire caused by exploding battery

A preliminary investigation has revealed that a bus fire that killed two passengers was caused by the spontaneous combustion of a lithium battery that one of them was carrying, according to information released on the official WeChat account of Nanjing's Jiangbei New Area on Sunday. An intercity bus traveling from Lai'an county in Anhui province to Linchang station caught fire at around 11:42 am on Sunday on a national road in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. The fire was extinguished at around noon. The incident resulted in the death of two passengers and left five others with minor burns. The injured were taken to hospital for medical treatment and are not in critical condition.

Telescope reveals new pulsar emissions form

Chinese scientists have discovered a new form of pulsar emissions, called dwarf pulses, using the country's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope. The discovery was recently published in the journal Nature Astronomy. According to the study, pulsars radiate radio signals when they rotate. However, some old pulsars often cease radiating for some periods, a phenomenon called "nulling".The underlying mechanism remains unknown, as the magnetosphere during the nulling state is hard to probe due to the absence of emission measurements. With the ultrahigh sensitivity of the FAST, scientists from the National Astronomical Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences have detected sporadic, weak and narrow pulses in the nulling state of pulsar B2111+46. They named the new form of pulsar emissions dwarf pulses, which are difficult to be observed by other radio telescopes.

China Daily - Xinhua