Blackpipers

ONDON (AFP) – A diamond-encrusted skull by British artist Damien Hirst sold on Thursday for 100 million dollars (75 million euros), a record price for work sold by a living artist, a London gallery announced.

The work, entitled “For the Love of God,” is a skull cast in platinum and encrusted with 8,601 diamonds. Carbon dating has shown that the original skull on which Hirst’s work is modelled dates to the 18th century.

Hirst remains best known for earlier conceptual works in which creatures including a shark and a cow were pickled in formaldehyde inside glass tanks.

The diamond-encrusted skull was sold to an group of anonymous investors, a spokeswoman for the White Cube gallery in London, where it has been on display from the beginning of the summer, told AFP.

Death is one of the central themes in works completed by Hirst, 41, who once said that the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States were like a work of art, but later apologised.

Hirst also holds the record for the most expensive work of art by a living artist at auction — his “Lullaby Spring,” a three-metre (10-foot) wide steel cabinet containing 6,136 hand-crafted and individually-painted pills, sold for 19.2 million dollars in June.

Mysterious waves that help transport the sun’s energy out into space have been detected by scientists for the first time.

Researchers hope their discovery of the energetic ripples, known as Alfven waves, will shed light on other solar phenomena such as the sun’s magnetic fields and its super-hot corona, or outermost atmosphere. A new video shows the ripples in action.

“Alfven waves can provide us with a window into processes that are fundamental to the workings of the sun and its impacts on Earth,” said Steve Tomczyk, a space scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

Like a wave traveling along a string, Alfven waves run along the sun’s magnetic field lines and reach deep into space. While astrophysicists have identified the waves far away from the sun, they’ve never been detected close to our star-the ripples were too small and too fast to spot.

To observe the elusive waves, Tomczyk and his colleagues pointed the coronal multichannel polarimeter (CoMP) instrument, located at the National Solar Observatory’s Sacramento Peak Observatory in New Mexico, at the sun’s hot, hazy corona. Thanks to CoMP’s imaging speed of one picture every 15 seconds, the scientists captured the waves traveling at about 9 million mph (14.5 million kilometers per hour).

“The waves are visible all the time and they occur all over the corona, which was initially surprising to us,” said Scott McIntosh, a space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

The waves might help explain how energy is transferred to the sun’s corona, which is millions of degrees hotter than the solar surface.

Tomczyk and his colleagues’ findings will be detailed in the Aug. 30 online edition of the journal Science.