Simulations show aftermath of black hole collision

New simulations of two black holes colliding near the speed of light reveal the mysterious physics of what one astrophysicist calls "one of the most violent events you can imagine in the universe."

"It's a bit of a crazy thing to blast two black holes head-on very close to the speed of light," said Thomas Helfer, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University who produced the simulations. "The gravitational waves associated with the collision might look anticlimactic, but this is one of the most violent events you can imagine in the universe."

The work, which appears today in Physical Review Letters, is the first detailed look at the aftermath of such a cataclysmic clash, and shows how a remnant black hole would form and send gravitational waves through the cosmos.

Black hole mergers are one of the few events in the universe energetic enough to produce detectable gravitational waves, which carry energy produced by massive cosmic collisions. Like ripples in a pond, these waves flow through the universe distorting space and time. But unlike waves traveling through water, they are extremely tiny, and propagate through "spacetime," the mind-bending concept that combines the three dimensions of space with the idea of time.

Cells take on dual identities with competing factors trapped in the nucleus

Image showing one cellular response to Leptomycin B, with F-actin (pink), vimentin (yellow), and DAPI (cyan), in canine epithelial cells (MDCK I) cultured on soft hydrogels. This study demonstrates diverse epithelial-mesenchymal responses to nuclear export inhibition, including concurrent elevation of epithelial and mesenchymal cellular traits. The image was acquired on a laser-scanning confocal microscope using a 40X objective.
Image Credit: Carly Krull, Department of Biomedical Engineering

Cells migrate to different tissues for a variety of reasons, including organ development, tissue repair and the spread of cancer. Researchers in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has found unexpected activity in the nucleus of healthy cells that provides new insight into cell mechanics.

Amit Pathak, associate professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, working with Carly Krull, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering, and Haiyi Li, who earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science & engineering in 2022, found that when they gave the cancer drug Leptomycin B to healthy cells, the cells stopped growing, but several competing genes in their nuclei became active.

“All of a sudden, everything is happening in the nucleus,” Pathak said. “The factors that slow down the cells, the factors that make the cells faster, the factors that make the cells cohesive and the factors that generate forces in cells all became active. All of these factors are normally competing with each other, and they all became active together.”

NASA's Chandra Discovers Giant Black Holes on Collision Course

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory helped identify two pairs of dwarf galaxies on track to merge.  Dwarf galaxies, which are at least about 20 times less massive than the Milky Way, likely formed larger galaxies through collisions in the early Universe.  These newly-discovered merging dwarf galaxies can be used as analogs for more distant ones that are too faint to observe.  The dwarf galaxies are on collision courses and are found in the galaxy clusters Abell 133 and Abell 1758S.
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Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Alabama/M. Micic et al.; Optical: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA

Astronomers have discovered the first evidence for giant black holes in dwarf galaxies on a collision course. This result from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has important ramifications for understanding how the first wave of black holes and galaxies grew in the early universe.

Collisions between the pairs of dwarf galaxies identified in a new study have pulled gas towards the giant black holes they each contain, causing the black holes to grow. Eventually the likely collision of the black holes will cause them to merge into much larger black holes. The pairs of galaxies will also merge into one.

Scientists think the universe was awash with small galaxies, known as “dwarf galaxies,” several hundred million years after the big bang. Most merged with others in the crowded, smaller volume of the early universe, setting in motion the building of larger and larger galaxies now seen around the nearby universe.

New research reveals 12 ways aquaculture can benefit the environment

Researchers have identified 12 potential ecological benefits of aquaculture including species recovery, habitat restoration, rehabilitation and protection, and removal of overabundant species.
Photo Credit: John French

Aquaculture, or the farming of aquatic plants and animals, contributes to biodiversity and habitat loss in freshwater and marine ecosystems globally, but when used wisely, it can also be part of the solution, new research shows.

Published today in Conservation Biology, University of Melbourne researchers have identified 12 potential ecological benefits of aquaculture. These include species recovery, habitat restoration, rehabilitation and protection, and removal of overabundant species.

Lead author, University of Melbourne researcher Ms. Kathy Overton, said the potential environmental benefits of aquaculture have gone under the radar for many years.

“Most people around the world live near freshwater or marine ecosystems, and we rely on them as sources of food, tourism, recreation, culture, and livelihood,” Ms. Overton said.

“However, our impacts on freshwater and marine ecosystems are degrading important habitats and causing rapid declines in biodiversity. While the negative impacts of some types of aquacultures are well known, we can also use aquaculture as a tool to slow or stop these negative impacts and help restore ecosystems that have been largely lost over the last century.”

Infants Outperform AI in “Commonsense Psychology”

New Study Shows How Infants Are More Adept at Spotting Motivations that Drive Human Behavior

Infants outperform artificial intelligence in detecting what motivates other people’s actions, finds a new study by a team of psychology and data science researchers. Its results, which highlight fundamental differences between cognition and computation, point to shortcomings in today’s technologies and where improvements are needed for AI to more fully replicate human behavior. 

“Adults and even infants can easily make reliable inferences about what drives other people’s actions,” explains Moira Dillon, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Cognition. “Current AI finds these inferences challenging to make.”

“The novel idea of putting infants and AI head-to-head on the same tasks is allowing researchers to better describe infants’ intuitive knowledge about other people and suggest ways of integrating that knowledge into AI,” she adds.

“If AI aims to build flexible, commonsense thinkers like human adults become, then machines should draw upon the same core abilities infants possess in detecting goals and preferences,” says Brenden Lake, an assistant professor in NYU’s Center for Data Science and Department of Psychology and one of the paper’s authors.

UrFU Chemists Found a Non-toxic Way to Obtain Piperine from Black Pepper

A new method of obtaining piperine from black pepper is more environmentally friendly than the traditional one.
Photo Credit: Anas Alhajj

An international research team of chemists from Russia (UrFU), the Republic of Congo, and India came up with an alternative to the traditional method of obtaining piperine from black pepper. The scientists used a natural solvent for extraction, which has no toxic properties because it consists of a composition from organic salts and acids that are well soluble in water. Moreover, the extract obtained using this technology has better antioxidant activity. The results of the study are published in the journal Sustainable Chemistry.

"Piperine is a bioactive substance that is found in black pepper. It has many useful properties. First of all, it causes that particular pungent taste. Piperine is used in food to increase the absorption of micro and macronutrients in the human body. For example, piperine may be added to yogurt and cheese. There are numerous studies about piperine, but the novelty of our work is the development of a new technology for extracting this substance from black pepper using natural, "green" solvents," - says Full Professor Elena Kovaleva from the UrFU Department of Organic Synthesis Technology.

Meteorite crater discovered in French winery

The “Trou du Météore": The crater at the “Domaine du Météore" winery really was caused by a meteorite impact.
Photo Credit: Frank Brenker, Goethe University Frankfurt

With the aim of creating an appealing brand, the name of the “Domaine du Météore" winery near the town of Béziers in Southern France points to a local peculiarity: one of its vineyards lies in a round, 200-meter-wide depression that resembles an impact crater. By means of rock and soil analyses, scientists led by cosmochemist Professor Frank Brenker from Goethe University Frankfurt have now established that the crater was indeed once formed by the impact of an iron-nickel meteorite. In doing so, they have disproved a scientific opinion almost 60 years old, because of which the crater was never examined more closely from a geological perspective.

Countless meteorites have struck Earth in the past and shaped the history of our planet. It is assumed, for example, that meteorites brought with them a large part of its water. The extinction of the dinosaurs might also have been triggered by the impact of a very large meteorite. 

Meteorite craters that are still visible today are rare because most traces of the celestial bodies have long since disappeared again. This is due to erosion and shifting processes in the Earth's crust, known as plate tectonics. The “Earth Impact Database" lists just 190 such craters worldwide. In the whole of Western Europe, only three were previously known: Rochechouart in Aquitaine, France, the Nördlinger Ries between the Swabian Alb and the Franconian Jura, and the Steinheim Basin near Heidenheim in Baden-Württemberg (both in Germany). Thanks to millions of years of erosion, however, for laypersons the three impact craters are hardly recognizable as such.

On the track of the big bang: The most sensitive detector for measuring radioactivity is now in dresden

Prof. Kai Zuber (right) and Steffen Turkat
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Technische Universität Dresden

The "Felsenkeller" underground laboratory in Dresden now hosts the most sensitive setup for measuring radioactivity in Germany and one of the most sensitive setups in the world. With the new detector, researchers at the Technische Universität Dresden and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) will in future be working at the highest international level on some of the most exciting questions in astrophysics, such as dark matter, stars or the Big Bang.

What is dark matter? What are neutrinos all about? How do stars work and what was actually going on in the universe in the first minutes after the Big Bang? To answer these questions, you need very sensitive detectors and a lot of skill. Only a few laboratories in the world have been able to perform such sensitive measurements so far. Recently, however, an ultra-sensitive detector has been set up in Germany, which will enable researchers to find answers to these questions in the future.

After long development work, researchers from the Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics (Technische Universität Dresden) and the Institute for Radiation Physics (HZDR) have now put the setup into operation in the underground laboratory "Felsenkeller" Dresden. From now on, they will be able to analyze samples of substances and materials with radioactivity in the range of 100 microbequerels, in other words, samples with 100 million times less radioactivity than is present in the human body. This puts the measurement setup in the Felsenkeller laboratory among the world's most sensitive measuring instruments for radioactivity.

Cohesion and connection drop in ageing population

A social network of macaques grooming each other on Cayo Santiago.
Photo Credit: Lauren Brent

Social cohesion and connection decline in an ageing population, according to a new study of one of humanity’s closest relatives.

For decades, researchers have been observing the rhesus macaques on Cayo Santiago (known as “Monkey Island”) in Puerto Rico.

Recent research showed that female macaques “actively reduce” the size of their social networks and prioritize existing connections as they age – something also seen in humans.

The new study, by an international team led by the University of Exeter, examines how this affects the overall cohesion and connection of the groups older monkeys live in.

While the observed macaque populations (which had no more than 20% “old” individuals) were not affected at group level, computer simulations showed higher proportions of old macaques would reduce cohesion and connection.

Salt Could Play Key Role in Energy Transition

Large underground salt formations can aid in the energy transition in myriad ways.
Illustration Credit: UT Jackson School of Geosciences.

A common ingredient – salt – could have a big role to play in the energy transition to lower carbon energy sources.

That’s according to a new study led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology.

The study describes how large underground salt deposits could serve as hydrogen holding tanks, conduct heat to geothermal plants, and influence CO2 storage. It also highlights how industries with existing salt expertise, such as solution mining, salt mining, and oil and gas exploration, could help.

“We see potential in applying knowledge and data gained from many decades of research, hydrocarbon exploration, and mining in salt basins to energy transition technologies,” said lead author Oliver Duffy, a research scientist at the bureau. “Ultimately, a deeper understanding of how salt behaves will help us optimize design, reduce risk, and improve the efficiency of a range of energy transition technologies.”

The study was published in the journal Tektonika.