Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope say they may have found a new class of object: a "black hole star," in which a black hole is wrapped in dense gas and radiates in ways that resemble an enormous star. The Guardian reports: The international team made the breakthrough after focusing their attention on a mysterious red spot in images of the early universe captured by Nasa's James Webb space telescope. The object was lurking in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale, billions of light years from Earth. It is thought to have formed 660m years after the big bang, astronomers' leading theory as to how the universe began. Measurements of the exotic body found that while it resembles an immense star, it releases 100bn times more energy than any known star can produce. The energy output is far closer to that observed from black holes than stars. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: Researchers have found a clever new way to map a part of Earth's upper atmosphere that is notoriously difficult to observe. Using orbital data from roughly 1,200 Starlink satellites, they reconstructed changes in atmospheric density about 500 kilometers above Earth. [...] The resulting density patterns also showed strong consistency with observations from the European Space Agency's SWARM satellites, which measure changes in atmospheric density along their orbital paths.

The work expands on an earlier study by the same team. In that research, scientists estimated how thermospheric density changed over time and altitude using general orbital information called Two-Line Element, or TLE, data from Starlink satellites. The new analysis adds another dimension by examining how density varies horizontally across latitude and longitude, revealing more of the thermosphere's geographic structure.

The findings could have practical benefits as the number of objects orbiting Earth continues to grow. More accurate information about atmospheric density can improve predictions of satellite motion, helping reduce the chance of collisions between satellites and between satellites and space debris. The technique could also eventually support near-real-time measurements of atmospheric density around satellites. Such monitoring could improve space weather forecasting and contribute to safer, more dependable satellite operations in the future.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Two days before tens of thousands of migrants surged into Ceuta, one of Spain's enclaves on Morocco's northern coast, a newspaper there posted a video on TikTok and Instagram showing two young women walking in the city in wet suits, their hair still damp. The posts didn't say so explicitly, but the implication was clear: The women had just swum across the border from Morocco. "Ceuta can't take it anymore," the newspaper, El Faro de Ceuta, declared in the posts. On the other side of the border, the video resonated very differently. Cropped and reposted in Arabic, the video seemed like an invitation. The women were smiling, flashing peace signs and thumbs up and, most of all, walking around freely. The video seemed to legitimize rumors that had percolated for weeks on social media suggesting that a recent ruling by Spain's Supreme Court meant migrants who arrived illegally by sea could stay in the country. As one account on Facebook put it, falsely, "Ceuta is turning into an open gate," when in fact migrants still faced expulsion after a judicial review. The responses to the posts about the swimmers were a critical part of a cascade of disinformation that experts described as one of the starkest instances in which social media contributed directly to a real-world tragedy.

Wired reports that consumer neurotechnology is rapidly moving from the lab into workplaces and homes, with companies including Apple, Meta, and Snap developing products that can monitor or interpret brain activity. Researchers warn that as these systems improve, neural data could become the next major privacy battleground. Some neuroscientists are already calling for a series of core rights, coined "neurorights," that protect "mental privacy," "identity," and personal "agency." Here's an excerpt from the article: Over the past two decades, researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks the iron in the hemoglobin supplying oxygen to neurons, have been building up increasingly detailed maps and inventories of the mammalian cortex. Thanks to huge advances in machine-learning artificial intelligence -- computer algorithms that are able to sort through enormous amounts of information and use statistical methods to make classifications and predictions -- fMRI scans can now be used to identify everything from depressive thoughts to the nuanced feelings of envy and schadenfreude. Other algorithms have been able to accurately piece together reconstructions of movie clips watched by subjects, just by analyzing their brain scans; or have detected, in probing the brain activity of swing voters in the US presidential election, responding to photographs and videos of presidential candidates, which candidates provoked anxiety or even disgust, and which elicited positive responses or feelings of empathy.

In just the last few years, neuroscience researchers have progressed from decoding images and emotions as they play across the cortex to sounds, words, phrases, and even language. In 2023, in a remarkable demonstration of this emerging technology, a woman called Ann Johnson, who had been paralyzed for 18 years by a brain-stem stroke, was able to speak again through the insertion of a grid of 253 electrodes onto the surface of her brain, which translated her neuronal signals into sentences, in real time, at a rate of 78 words per minute (just about half the speed of standard conversation). The research team at the University of California, led by neurosurgeon Edward Chang, had combined this brain-computer interface with an animated avatar of Johnson's head, which spoke in her own voice, as reconstructed from a recording of a 15-minute toast she had given at her wedding. Just as the avatar's mouth spoke Johnson's words as she thought them, so its expressions were similarly influenced by the nuances of her brain activity, which turned her thoughts about facial gestures into displays of emotion -- from smiles to pursed lips and frowns.

[...] The more invasive the recording equipment, the richer and more detailed the data. Surgical interventions are at the vanguard of neuroscience and remain very rare -- fewer than 100 people on the planet have brain-computer interfaces like Johnson's embedded beneath their skulls. Yet almost inevitably, a concerted trickle-down effect is occurring. In the summer of 2023, a team at the University of Texas demonstrated that they could use fMRI to translate brain scans into words and sentences, after subjects listened to 16 hours of the storytelling podcasts The Moth Radio Hour and The New York Times' Modern Love to train an AI model. When the subjects then listened to new podcasts, the algorithm was able to convert the gist of what they heard, as it manifested in their brains, into words, phrases, and sentences that roughly captured the stories. As the team's lead computational neuroscientist, Alexander Huth, put it in an interview with Science, "Our thought when we actually had this working was, 'Oh my God, this is kind of terrifying.'" Now noninvasive, wearable brain scanners are beginning to proliferate beyond the lab, making their way into our workplaces and, through the vast global consumer market, into our homes too.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Scientists from the Czech Republic have created microscopic cleanup robots that successfully removed microplastics from both soil and aquatic environments in the lab. Details of their work are published in the journal npg Asia Materials. To build the robots, researchers started with microscopic MXene particles made of ultrathin, stacked layers. The material has a large surface area and surface chemistry that help it attract and hold plastic. They then coated the particles with magnetic nickel nanoparticles so rotating magnetic fields could drive the tiny robots.

Then came the testing phase. The team placed swarms of these microbots into water and soil samples contaminated with plastic. The externally generated magnetic fields made the robots spin and tumble through the liquid and squeeze through tiny water-filled gaps in the soil. "In soil environments, the microrobots can navigate through water-permeated soil microenvironments, actively disrupt microplastic entrapment within soil matrices, and extract them," the study authors commented in their paper. As they moved, their sticky surfaces collided with microplastics, binding to them and dragging them along. The researchers then used a magnet to pull the microrobots, along with their trapped plastic cargo, out of the samples.

They performed well. In water, they removed about 94% of test polystyrene particles and 89% of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in around an hour. In the model soil, they removed about 81% of the polystyrene and 72% of PET. This outperformed the same MXene material used without magnetic motion, which relied on passive adsorption rather than actively moving through soil and water.

A new study argues that life may have emerged twice on Earth. "Two of the main lineages of life -- bacteria and archaea -- may have independently figured out the secrets of metabolism that upgraded them from non-living to living," reports ScienceAlert, citing a new study that "focused on the most rudimentary set of chemical reactions thought to enable this transformation." From the report: "The surprise is that the enzymes that catalyze those reactions are not conserved across the evolutionary divide that separates bacteria and archaea," says William Martin, a biologist at Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf in Germany.

"The new data leave only one conclusion. The bacterial and archaeal lineages made the transition to the free-living state independently. Only free-living cells are alive. "Let's call it by name: we are looking at one origin of the genetic code, but two origins of life." That's a huge claim to make, especially when defining what life even is can be surprisingly tricky. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Scientists have captured images of the sun's surface in the finest detail yet, revealing a strange and dynamic facade. It's dangerous to look directly at the sun without proper eye protection. But researchers were able to peek at its scorching surface with the help of the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located on the island of Maui in Hawaii.

Scientists originally took the images for a different reason: to fine-tune and test the limits of the telescope. But when they looked at the results, they realized they'd photographed the sun's bright outer shell at higher resolution than ever before. What's more, they saw strange feathery patterns rippling across the surface. "That reminds me of famous paintings, like the swirling skies in Van Gogh's Starry Night," said solar physicist Ruizhu Chen with Stanford University, who was not involved with the new research.

Researchers saw ripples of instability on the sun's surface caused by bits of magnetized plasma moving past each other at different speeds -- similar to waves that stir when a gust of wind blows over water. It's a well-known phenomenon that guides how fluids move. This has been glimpsed on Earth and other planets like Jupiter and Saturn, but "it has not been observed ever at that level on the solar surface," according to study co-author Friedrich Woger with the National Solar Observatory. The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

A four-ton SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage left drifting after a 2025 lunar mission is expected to crash into the Moon at about 5,400 mph, likely striking Einstein Crater. The impact should occur at approximately 2:35 a.m. ET (0635GMT). Reuters reports: Such stages typically fall back into Earth's atmosphere and burn up or plunge into the ocean after boosting the rocket's payload to a precise spot in orbit. But because the January lunar lander mission required more thrust than missions closer to Earth, the rocket's second stage remained in space, floating aimlessly among thousands of other pieces of space junk that active satellites must steer clear of. It was not until earlier this year that astronomers determined that the rocket stage, which had dumped its remaining fuel and cannot be controlled, was on an orbital trajectory ending at the moon.

"What has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path toward the moon," Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX director of NASA science and Dragon programs, told reporters on Monday. "This may be of some -- probably minor -- scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it," said Bill Gray, creator of widely used astronomy software who published a report on the stage's impact in April. "It doesn't present any danger to anyone, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of." You can try to watch the impact via a livestream on YouTube; however, the area it's expected to hit (Einstein Crater) is on the moon's western limb, "which is often difficult to see from Earth," notes Reuters. It will also likely "kick up a plume of lunar dust that will likely be illuminated by sunlight but difficult to spot with the naked eye from Earth."

"Scientists say they have detected promising signs that a planet orbiting a star 49 light-years from Earth could have an atmosphere," reports CNN, "making it potentially suitable for life." Called LHS 1140b, the object is about five times the mass of our planet, or a "super-Earth." This planet orbits around its star in the "Goldilocks zone," also known as the habitable zone, meaning its surface temperature is not too hot or too cold for liquid water to exist... "It appears to be consistent with Earth, meaning it might have an iron core and a silicate mantle, plus some sort of low-density component, which is probably a combination of water and, now we know, an atmosphere," [said Collin Cherubim, a planetary scientist and lead author of a paper on the finding, published July 16 in the journal Science]... If further observations confirm the findings, LHS 1140b would mark the first discovery of an atmosphere on a rocky planet in the habitable zone of another star...

There is no evidence of life or a life-supporting atmosphere on LHS 1140b now, but Cherubim said he believes it's a formidable candidate for potential signatures of extraterrestrial life. "I think it's the best place to look for life outside the solar system at this point," he said. "It's mostly rocky, it's at the right temperature to support liquid water on the surface, and it has an atmosphere — those are the three key ingredients we look for..." Confirming the existence of an atmosphere on a rocky planet orbiting a red dwarf would be particularly exciting, Cherubim said, because the possibility of that happening is an open question in astronomy. "Can rocky planets have atmospheres around red dwarfs? This is the first bona fide yes," he said. "It's kind of a sigh of relief for a lot of us. But the jury's still out. Maybe this is a weird planet, and it's an oddball, or maybe it's the first of many. We don't know yet."
Now "The James Webb Space Telescope is going to look at it," Cherubim told CNN, and "Hubble's going to look at it. Basically, everybody who can see it is going to be training their eyes on it."

Michaël Gillon, research director of the Astrobiology Research Unit at Belgium's University of Liège warned CNN that no definitive proof exists that LHS 1140b possesses a substantial atmosphere. But if the detection of helium can be confirmed, the implications would be profound. "Until now, we had only limited evidence for atmospheres on temperate rocky exoplanets. Demonstrating that LHS 1140 b has retained a substantial atmosphere over billions of years would show that at least some habitable zone Super-Earths around red dwarfs can survive the intense early activity of their host stars."

Google has integrated its Nano Banana 2 image generator into Google Earth, allowing users to place AI-generated events and objects onto real satellite imagery. The company says its AI-generated images contain invisible watermarks detectable through Gemini or Lens, but the BBC found those safeguards and some third-party detection tools can be fooled into labeling manipulated Google Earth images as real. From the report: A collapsed Eiffel Tower, a sinkhole swallowing the Great Pyramid of Giza and Russian tanks in Ukraine's capital were among the images BBC Verify was able to create when testing the feature, which was rolled out on Thursday. Google has not yet responded to questions based on BBC Verify's tests, but in a social media post the company said they "take misinformation seriously" and that "we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections."

AI and misinformation expert Henk van Ess has highlighted the risks this feature poses, creating fake images of a non-existent nuclear power plant in Iran, a refugee camp on the US-Mexico border and a fake hospital in Gaza with a bomb crater next to it. He said Google was allowing "invented" imagery to be "welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery." "The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on," van Ess added. UPDATE 7/31/26 10:54 AM: Google is rolling back the image generation inside of Google Earth: "We know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world. We've seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we've also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we're rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails. It's important to note that generated images didn't appear in the main Google Earth experience for others to see and were watermarked as AI generated."

A new analysis of 89 major geological events over the past 260 million years found evidence that mass extinctions, volcanic eruptions, ocean crises, and other upheavals may cluster around a roughly 27.5-million-year cycle. The cause remains unknown, with possibilities ranging from mantle activity and orbital changes to speculative galactic influences. Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: One possibility lies deep within Earth itself. The planet's mantle is constantly circulating through convection, albeit at an almost unimaginably slow pace. Periodic changes in mantle convection, or the initiation of mantle plumes, could influence volcanism, plate tectonics, mountain building, and other large-scale geological processes. Because these systems are closely interconnected, disturbances originating deep within Earth could eventually ripple through the planet's surface, oceans, climate, and biosphere.

Another hypothesis focuses on interactions between Earth's surface and interior. Long-term orbital variations influence climate and sea level, periodically redistributing enormous amounts of water, ice, and sediment across the planet. [New York University geologist Michael Rampino] discusses the possibility that these changing surface loads subtly modify stresses within Earth's crust and upper mantle, potentially influencing tectonic and volcanic activity over geological timescales.

Rampino also considers possible influences beyond Earth, an idea he has been weighing up since the 1980s. As the Solar System orbits the center of the Milky Way, it oscillates above and below the galaxy's mid-plane, with the timing of these passages aligning with that of Earth's major upheavals. These crossings, other researchers have suggested, could also gravitationally perturb comets in the distant Oort Cloud, increasing the likelihood of large asteroid impacts.

Another, even more speculative, hypothesis suggests that if dark matter is concentrated near the galactic plane, a fraction of it could occasionally be captured by Earth. Over millions of years, this process could generate small amounts of internal heat, potentially influencing geological activity. At present, however, there is no direct evidence supporting either mechanism, so they remain very controversial.

Large asteroid impacts are discussed separately in the paper. Although they were not included in the statistical analysis of the 89 geological events, the timing of several of Earth's largest known impact craters appears broadly consistent with the proposed 27.5-million-year rhythm, as Rampino has discussed in earlier papers. Rampino suggests this correspondence may warrant further investigation, but stops short of claiming a causal relationship.

270,000 people have been displaced by wildfires in France and Spain, reports the Guardian. A wildfire even forced evacuations in Scotland.

And wildfires "have now scorched four million acres of land in the U.S.," reports NPR, as tens of millions of people in North America "are continuing to endure hazardous smoke from out of control wildfires burning across Canada and the Western U.S."

At America's National Interagency Fire Center, NPR's wildfire correspondent says all of America's firefighting resources have now been deployed across the country. "So if we get another big fire, we're in trouble... International aid could be harder to come by if the situation in Southern Europe gets worse and firefighters are going to be needed there."

Meanwhile Toronto was blanketed this week "with eye-watering, cough-inducing soot," writes a climate-change reporter for the Toronto Star newspaper, "briefly giving us the worst air quality in the world." But looking to the future after a wildfire that's 50% larger than any in Ontario's history (315,000 hectares or 778,331 acres), he had this to say about the eye-watering smoke. "It will be back." The article's headline warned of "Our smoke-filled future" and how Canada "must prepare for bigger wildfires, every summer — forever." Even if global carbon emissions were cut dramatically, so long as any greenhouse gases are being put into the atmosphere, climate scientists say the world will continue to get hotter. And as the temperature rises, the forests dry out and the wildfires will get bigger, stronger and more frequent. "It's not going to get better. It's going to get worse," said Edward Struzik, a fellow with the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen's University and the author of Dark Days at Noon: the Future of Fire . "These fires aren't going away. Toronto is going to get smoke every summer...."

The best solution would have been to dramatically cut emissions years ago. The harsh scientific reality is there's nothing we can do to stop wildfire smoke from blanketing cities for a few days every summer — and it's going to continue for decades to come. We're all going to need to buy air purifiers and masks and get used to it....

"The idea that we can thin our way through the boreal forest boggles the mind," [says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, an independent non-profit research organization]. "There aren't enough people in Canada to do that." The boreal forest in Canada is an enormous and largely roadless expanse bigger than the entire European Union. In comparison, America's much smaller forests are criss-crossed by roads, making firefighter access much quicker and easier. And the nature of the forests is fundamentally different as well, said Hausfather, who wrote an article summarizing research on the subject. "Western U.S. forests have evolved for frequent low-level fires that burn out the undergrowth — usually every five to 30 years," he said. "Historically, before fire suppression, fires would burn through, and they wouldn't actually kill the trees. They'd just kill smaller trees and clear out the brush."

"The boreal forest is a fundamentally different beast," he said. "It's an ecosystem designed to burn." With smaller, more densely packed trees, the boreal is wetter and colder and doesn't burn anywhere near as often — every 100 to 200 years on average, Hausfather said. But when fire does erupt, it's often much more intense, burning up into the canopy and levelling everything in its path... Clearing out the dead wood on the ground wouldn't prevent, or even slow, the canopy fires that sweep the boreal, said Hausfather.

"Welcome home!" NASA posted on X.com, sharing footage of a successful "parachute-assisted" landing on a Kazakhstan steppe for the Soyuz MS-28, carrying three astronauts who'd spent 241 days on the International Space Station. (And YouTube has a full two-hour video with NASA's coverage of the landing.)

A NASA web page notes they orbited Earth 3,856 times and traveling more than 102 million miles after docking with the Space Station on November 27. It was the first mission for NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergei Mikaev (and the second mission for Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov). "After routine post-landing medical checks, recovery teams will fly the crew by helicopter to Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Williams then will board a NASA aircraft bound for the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston."

Big news from Comic-Con 2026:

• "Coyote vs. ACME" debuted its long-awaited final trailer. CNET calls it "an animation-meets-live-action story," with the Coyote catapulting into theaters this August 28. (The film began development back in 2018, but was shelved for a tax write-off in 2023 by Warner Bros. until a backlash led to its sale to Ketchup Entertainment.) "Fed up with Acme's unreliable products, Wile E. Coyote decides to hire a lawyer and sue the company..." writes CNET. "The movie also features Lana Condor along with a host of Looney Tunes characters like Porky Pig, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn and Granny (who gets dinged by an anvil)."

• In other movie news, CNET says Johnny Depp also "made a surprise appearance at Comic-Con, donning a costume as Ebenezer Scrooge" to promote his November 13 movie about the miser from Charles Dickens' famous Christmas novella. (Ian McKellen and Daisy Ridley are also in the movie.)

But several geek favorites are being filmed as TV series...

• There's big news for William Gibson fans, reports Entertainment Weekly. "Two years after Apple TV announced production on the first-ever series adaptation of William Gibson's seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer, the lucky few hundred who attended the studio's Hall H panel at Comic-Con 2026 got to watch the first teaser.

• For Amazon's Prime Video, the Tolkien-derived "Rings of Power" series released a season 3 trailer that CNET said "successfully hides the best parts with fire... The trailer suggests that Sauron is building an army, and all of Middle-earth is trying to find ways to stop him... Rings of Power season 3 will start dropping weekly episodes on Nov. 11, meaning this show will be airing at the same time the Peter Jackson films will be celebrating their 25th anniversary."

• Later in November Amazon's Prime Video will also debut Blade Runner 2099, an eight-episode series that's a sequel to 2017's film Blade Runner 2049, reports CNET. "Set in an alternate version of LA where replicants run things and the humans play second fiddle, the series sees Yeoh's replicant Olwen chasing down outlaw replicants who've gone missing. With her own shelf life on a ticking clock, the stakes are high for her and for her human fugitive partner, Cora..."

• Paramount Plus will debut Avatar: Seven Havens in October, a new animated series from the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender which CNET says "follows a pair of twin avatars, one of whom is Korra's successor."

• Disney+ has season 3 of Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

• Kevin Feige said Marvel's television slate will include more seasons of "X-Men '97" and the upcoming "VisionQuest" TV series.

• HBO Max will launch a new Green Lantern series called Lanterns on August 16.

Northrop Grumman has launched a private satellite-servicing mission to attach life-extending "jetpacks" to aging communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit. "It's the second satellite-saving mission to launch this month, all part of a growing, money-saving effort to keep spacecraft running as long as possible," reports Phys.org. From the report: Launched by SpaceX, Northrop Grumman's mission robotic vehicle -- dubbed MRV -- and its jetpacks will spend the next year angling into the proper orbit 22,300 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth. Hundreds of satellites orbit at this so-called geosynchronous orbit, where they match the speed of Earth's rotation and keep to the same part of the sky for continuous coverage. Once in place by mid-2027, the minivan-sized spacecraft will use its 10-foot (9-meter) arms to attach a jetpack to an aging communication satellite. Then it will zip off to two more satellites in need.

For its debut flight, the spacecraft was accompanied by three electric-propelled jetpacks that peeled away separately following liftoff. Like the MRV, the jetpacks will use their own xenon gas thrusters to get to the desired orbit. Once in place, the jetpacks will wait for the robot to grab them, one at a time, and plug them into their designated satellites. Each jetpack -- the size of a washing machine -- will provide the necessary oomph for an out-of-gas satellite to keep operating for several more years instead of retiring. If it works, it will be a boon for satellite operators SES of Luxembourg and Optus of Australia, saving them millions of dollars in replacement costs.

"Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have been given a glimpse of the mechanisms that supermassive black holes use to feed themselves," reports Space.com: The powerful cosmic titans get really puzzling when astronomers using the JWST spot them before the universe was even 1 billion years old. That's because the mechanisms by which black holes devour matter to grow and then merge to create even more massive black holes should take at least 1 billion years to achieve supermassive status. This is even more confusing because theories also say the most ravenously feeding black holes (and thus the fastest growing) should also push the matter they use for this growth away, in effect putting themselves on a diet. So, with all this in mind, how did supermassive black holes grow so rapidly in the early universe?

One explanation suggests supermassive black holes push away gas, starving themselves as predicted, but also that this matter eventually cools and falls back to the black hole. That would allow for another period of feeding and thus growth. This explanation further suggests that as this gas cools down, it forms "streamers," or filaments, of gas just a few hundred light-years wide but which stretch thousands of light-years long. These would fall back to the center of the galaxy and form a swirling disk around its incumbent black hole, once again feeding it and triggering a new period of growth. This would then restart the jets from the black hole, which would again cut off the cosmic titan's food supply, allowing the whole process to begin once more. The process would in essence be a self-regulating cycle of feasting followed by fasting. However, the connection between these filaments and supermassive black holes has been elusive, meaning this mechanism has resisted confirmation.

To solve the mystery of feasting black holes, the JWST turned its attention to a relatively close AGN situated at the heart of the central galaxy of the Centaurus Cluster, NGC 4696, located just 145 million light-years from Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope previously studied this galaxy, uncovering a strange, hook-shaped swirl of gas near the central supermassive black hole of NGC 4696. The JWST followed up this discovery by producing a detailed map of gas flowing at the heart of the galaxy. This revealed the hook-shaped feature is around 800 light-years wide and is composed of gas moving at incredible speeds of around 1.3 million miles per hour (600 kilometers per second). More excitingly, the swirl of gas appears to be connected to a vast filament of material falling in toward the central supermassive black hole.

The team tested the JWST observations against a computer simulation, finding gas in the infalling filament scenario would indeed take a shape similar to that seen in NGC 4696. "JWST is now showing us the final link of this closed loop," team member Helen Russell of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. said in the statement. "The vast filamentary network of gas flows ultimately funnels gas down to a disk that fuels the black hole."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (July 16) in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"We are finally seeing this self-sustaining cycle in action," team leader Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of the Université de Montréal said in a statement.

Launched in 2006, NASA's New Horizons probe flew by the planet Pluto in 2015. But this week it "awakened from its longest sleep ever," reports CNN. It's now 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth... NASA's New Horizons spacecraft went into a planned hibernation mode on August 7, 2025, and woke up on June 23 using commands stored on its main computer. The mission's flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed that New Horizons is in great shape and ready to transmit a stream of science data gathered during hibernation from its location in the region of icy objects known as the Kuiper Belt.

Pluto is the largest of thousands of frozen, rocky bodies called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, that exist in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system — remnants from its formation 4.5 billion years ago... The spacecraft is capturing data about the rotation rates, orientations and shapes... The measurements provide insights into how planets are born from dust and pebbles, said Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "There seems to be more paired, snowman-shaped bodies, like Arrokoth, out there than anyone expected," Brandt wrote in an email. "Are such binaries the most common planetesimal and is this how larger planets have been built in our own and other stellar systems? These are very deep questions that New Horizons can help answer."

The spacecraft also measures the distribution of gas in the outer heliosphere, the expansive, protective bubble formed by a steady stream of particles that release from the sun called the solar wind. Meanwhile, an instrument called the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation is measuring galactic cosmic rays, extremely fast particles created when stars explode. The particles pose one of the more severe threats for human activities in space, Brandt said, but the boundary of the heliosphere acts as a shield to protect our solar system from 70% of them. New Horizons' data could help scientists learn more about how this puzzling shielding works, he said.

Another instrument, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, has collected data that has thrown New Horizon's team a curveball, Brandt said. The team expected dust abundance to be high within the Kuiper Belt due to the significant presence of small objects. But New Horizons has traveled beyond the known boundary of the Kuiper Belt — and it's still in a dusty environment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As smoke from hundreds of burning wildfires spread across Canada and the United States, the first three operational satellites in the Google-backed FireSat program successfully launched into orbit. The satellites will begin providing wildfire detection capable of spotting even small fires in the United States, Australia, and Europe before the end of the year. The launch of the microsatellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 7, 2026 marks a transition to "initial operational capability" for the FireSat constellation managed by the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance. After a three-month testing period, the three satellites will begin actively providing data to fire agencies while covering every fire-prone region on Earth at least twice per day.

FireSat represents the first satellite constellation purpose-built for detecting wildfires, including spotting smaller fires that other satellites may miss. The satellites were designed by California-based satellite manufacturer Muon Space and have received over $15 million from Google to support initial deployment. Other notable financial supporters include the Bezos Earth Fund that committed $26 million. Each satellite is equipped with multispectral imaging that can peer through smoke and clouds and detect fires as small as five by five meters -- about 16 by 16 feet. That capability was proven by a FireSat Protoflight satellite that launched in March 2025 and collected more than one million images, while showing it could detect low-intensity blazes invisible to existing satellites.

The "early adopter" organizations that will start using FireSat data this year include fire agencies in California, Colorado, Australia, and Portugal. As more satellites launch, the FireSat program aims to provide the latest imagery anywhere in the world on an hourly basis by 2029. Such imagery would eventually become available every 20 minutes once the full constellation of more than 50 satellites is launched by the early 2030s. Detection of small wildfires before they burn out of control could prove extremely helpful. The Earth Fire Alliance has projected that even an hourly revisit rate by the FireSat constellation could help save more than $1 billion in fire damage costs and prevent nearly 22 million tons of carbon emissions, along with protecting 3,500 homes and 1.3 million acres of land.

To assist with that capability, Google Research plans to use the company's AI models to compare operational FireSat data with historical images in order to accurately identify very small fires and to inform predictive modeling of wildfires. Google celebrated the launch of the first operational FireSat satellites by describing the event as "another tangible step forward in putting practical AI to work for climate resilience."

Researchers say a meteorite that crashed through the roof of a Hillsborough, New Jersey, home in 2024 contains unusually pristine evidence of salty fluids and organic chemistry from near the surface of a primitive asteroid. "A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a primitive asteroid, where it experienced concentrated salty fluids -- a process not previously known from this type of protoplanet world," said lead author and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. Phys.org reports: According to paper co-author Mike Zolensky, a meteoriticist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, analysis of the Hillsborough meteorite found fragments that were more extensively altered by water on the meteorite's parent asteroid than is typically seen in CM2 carbonaceous chondrites. The analysis classified the specimen as a CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite, an intermediate classification between petrographic types CM1 and CM2. [...] Zolensky and colleague JangMi Han found small salt-rich CM1 fragments within the Hillsborough meteorite, suggesting they originated from a near-surface region of the parent asteroid where liquid water evaporated and concentrated salts. They are now working to identify the salt minerals for comparison with similar phases found among samples returned to Earth from asteroids Ryugu and Bennu.

The high concentration of salt in briny fluids can potentially create molecules crucial to life on Earth. Brines allow phosphate to remain in solution and can catalyze chemical reactions between organics and precipitate minerals. "Isotope studies of carbon and nitrogen suggest that primitive carbonaceous chondrites, including CM types, delivered organic matter to the early Earth," said cosmochemist Queenie Chan of Royal Holloway University of London, England, and biogeochemist Nana Ogawa of the Biogeochemistry Research Center at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. "The Hillsborough meteorite contained 1.8% by weight of carbon and 0.07% of nitrogen, and had carbon and nitrogen isotopes typical for CM-type meteorites."

The meteorite contained a wide variety of soluble organic compounds, and its compositional range confirms that the Hillsborough meteorite was more altered by water than most other CM-type meteorites. "A high fraction of compounds were the product of organic chemistry with minerals," said organic mass spectrometry specialist Phil Schmitt-Kopplin of Technical University Munich. "We do not know if these magnesium organic compounds were contributed by brine chemistry or were simply left over from earlier impact shock processes." In living organisms, organometallic compounds are found in blood and used in photosynthesis. Among the soluble organic compounds were many amino acids, similar to those found in more moderately altered CM2 chondrites.

Astrobiologist Danny Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and his team in Goddard's Astrobiology Analytical Lab concluded that the delivery of amino acids, carboxylic acids and other soluble organic molecules by CM-type bodies may have contributed to the prebiotic organic inventory that preceded the emergence of life on Earth. Their analysis suggests the complex distribution of amino acids observed in the Hillsborough meteorite formed within the parent body, likely assisted by brine fluid chemistry. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Australia will require large data centers powering artificial intelligence to generate as much power as they consume, and ensure that creative professionals retain control over work that may be used to train A.I. systems, as the government sets up guardrails over the rapidly growing industry. The announcements on Wednesday in a speech by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came as Australia draws significant interest from A.I. companies because of its size and the availability of renewable energy, and as resistance to data centers builds in many parts of the United States and Europe.

Major A.I. companies have opened offices or announced investments in Australia in recent months. The Australian government is trying to balance capitalizing on the A.I. boom with setting parameters on a fast-changing industry that has sparked backlash over environmental impacts, energy use and lack of contribution to local economies. "Every country on earth is grappling with these challenges right now. Australia will be the first country in the world to bring these issues into a single, national framework," Mr. Albanese said Wednesday, laying out the standards his government will pursue.

The details of what exactly the requirements will look like and how they will be enforced remain to be seen, and the government will need to secure the backing of individual states for its plan. The government said it would introduce legislation on the standards early next year, and establish an "Office of A.I." directly reporting to the prime minister to coordinate implementation. The "Australian Standards for A.I." will include a "legal obligation" for companies to ensure they do not drain the power grid and be as water efficient as possible, the government said. Mr. Albanese also said creators of books, music, art or news in Australia should retain control of the price and value of their work when used to train artificial intelligence systems. "Anything less is theft," he said. "No country has got this right yet."