At the centere of our galaxy, the Milky Way, there exists what must be a black hole. But detecting it has been challenging because of the cosmic dust around it.

Now, for the first time, a group of radio antennas knows as the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole four million times more massive than our Sun.

known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced "sadge-ay-star") it obviously can't be seen, that is built into the black hole name, but it can be inferred thanks to a dark central region (called a “shadow”) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole.

Despite shutting down its operations in 2011, data from an old experiment at the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) has pushed scientists to further rethink the Standard Model.

Mars doesn’t have tectonic plates like Earth, but it does have volcanically active regions that can cause rumbles, and one way to develop a better understanding of Mars’ mantle and core is to examine seismic active. In March, NASA’s InSight lander detected two strong, clear quakes originating in a location of Mars called Cerberus Fossae – the same place where two strong quakes were seen earlier in the mission. Those quakes have magnitudes of 3.3 and 3.1; the previous quakes were magnitude 3.6 and 3.5.

InSight has recorded over 1,300 quakes to date, but nothing like the magnitude 5 temblor that occurred on May 4, 2022. That is a medium-sized earthquake on Earth, they happen 5 times each day, but it is a size researchers only hoped to get during this mission on Mars.

A half-mile-long stretch of tunnel in California is now colder than most of the universe. It contains a new superconducting particle accelerator, part of an upgrade project to the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser, one of the last milestones before LCLS-II will produce X-ray pulses that are 10,000 times brighter, on average, than those of LCLS and that arrive up to a million times per second – a world record for today’s most powerful X-ray light sources. 

Crews have successfully cooled the accelerator to minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit – or 2 kelvins – a temperature at which it becomes superconducting and can boost electrons to high energies with nearly zero energy lost in the process.

Seeing a doctor can be crucial to managing and preventing chronic disease but there has long been a racial gap in routine visits that can't be explained by racism or income. 

Maybe people didn't like like going to the doctor because the COVID-19 pandemic caused use of telemedicine to rise sharply, and as that happened gaps in visits disappeared for black patients at Penn Medicine. 

Once “normal” in-office appointments returned, previous inequities stayed erased, indicating that telemedicine wasn’t just a stopgap solution but a potential long-term tool for equity. 

Astronomers have been assuming that real new knowledge of black holes might have to wait until 2030, when/if NASA’s gravitational wave detector, LISA, launches into space.

The Event Horizon Telescope may have something else in mind. They have called a press conference for Thursday and speculation is rampant about what it might mean.

By looking at the ‘shadows’ of two supermassive black holes in the process of colliding, astronomers may have a way to measure black holes in distant galaxies and test competing theories of gravity.

Three years ago, the first ever image of a black hole, at the center of galaxy Messier 87, came into focus thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of synchronized radio dishes acting as one giant telescope.

Now a new imaging technique could allow astronomers to study black holes smaller than M87’s, a monster with a mass of 6.5 billion suns, harbored in galaxies more distant than M87, which at 55 million light-years away, is still relatively close to our own Milky Way.

You never want to introduce a spoiler into an article so I am warning you now, before you read any farther, that a spoiler is inevitable if I am going to talk about the secret role I played in the new Disney MCU film "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness."

If you haven't seen it because you thought the first was rather generic, I am with you but you should go. It is completely bananas, in the way a Doctor Strange film should be. It has Sam Raimi written all over it and that makes it a blast.

In 2001, after the US World Trade Centers were destroyed in a terrorist attack, assaults on middle-eastern buildings and people in San Francisco went up. Yet the middle eastern people attacked were Jewish, not Muslim. A common sentiment among intelligentsia was that the attacks were due to Israel being created by the United Nations in 1948.

Anti-Semitism has gotten worse rather than better since, despite governments creating laws against hate crimes, according to the 28th Annual Report on Antisemitism Worldwide.