The European Space Agency's Juice probe has blasted off on a landmark mission to Jupiter's moons, rising on a plume of white from its launchpad in Kourou, French Guiana, on the north-eastern shoulder of South America. From a report: The mission, which was delayed for 24 hours after lightning threatened to strike on Thursday, intends to uncover the secrets of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, its enormous polar auroras, and how its mighty magnetic field shapes conditions on the gas giant's nearby moons. It is the moons themselves that are the main attraction. Despite the frigid conditions that prevail, nearly half a billion miles from the sun, Juice will visit three of Jupiter's moons -- Europa, Callisto and Ganymede -- which harbour deep liquid water oceans beneath their icy surfaces.

The discovery of sub-surface saltwater oceans on Jupiter's moons has pushed them high up the list of solar system venues to explore for signs of life and habitability. If hydrothermal vents -- found on ocean floors all over Earth -- exist on the Jovian moons, they may provide enough warmth for life to thrive in the darkness. "I'm so thrilled to see Juice finally on its way," said Prof Andrew Coates, from the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, who helped build two instruments on Juice called Pep and Janus. "This is an excellent mission to look at habitability of Jupiter's moons."

A NASA probe sent to observe Jupiter's swarm of asteroids recently caught the first glimpse of its rocky targets, capturing deep-space images of four of the mysterious Trojans. Gizmodo reports: The Lucy spacecraft used its highest resolution imager, L'LORRI (Lucy LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager), to photograph four Trojan asteroids during a two-day period from March 25 to 27, NASA announced on Thursday. The first asteroids to be seen by Lucy are: Eurybates, Polymele, Leucus, and Orus. Those four are part of two large groups of rocky bodies that lead and follow Jupiter as it orbits the Sun. Lucy is still a long way from reaching its asteroid targets, which are currently about 330 million miles (530 million kilometers) away from the probe. That's more than three times the average distance between Earth and the Sun, according to NASA.

The initial set of images are the first in a series of observations to measure how the Trojan asteroids reflect light when seen from a higher angle than ground-based observations, according to NASA. The images will then help NASA decide on exposure times to use for Lucy's close-up observations of the asteroids.

The 2019 release of the first image of a black hole was hailed as a significant scientific achievement. But truth be told, it was a bit blurry -- or, as one astrophysicist involved in the effort called it, a "fuzzy orange donut." Scientists on Thursday unveiled a new and improved image of this black hole -- a behemoth at the center of a nearby galaxy -- mining the same data used for the earlier one but improving its resolution by employing image reconstruction algorithms to fill in gaps in the original telescope observations. From a report: Hard to observe by their very nature, black holes are celestial entities exerting gravitational pull so strong no matter or light can escape. The ring of light -- that is, the material being sucked into the voracious object -- seen in the new image is about half the width of how it looked in the previous picture. There is also a larger "brightness depression" at the center - basically the donut hole - caused by light and other matter disappearing into the black hole.

The image remains somewhat blurry due to the limitations of the data underpinning it -- not quite ready for a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, but an advance from the 2019 version. This supermassive black hole resides in a galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, about 54 million light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). This galaxy, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun, is larger and more luminous than our Milky Way. Further reading: The Black Hole Image Data Was Spread Across 5 Petabytes Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives (2019).

Sea levels on China's coastline have hit their highest on record for the second year in a row, rising more quickly than the global average and posing a serious threat to coastal cities such as the financial hub of Shanghai. From a report: In 2022, China's coastal sea levels were 94 millimeters (3.7 inch) higher than "normal," defined as the average over the 1993-2011 period, making it the highest since records began in 1980, an official at the Ministry of Natural Resources said Wednesday at a news conference. The swell was 10 mm higher than in 2021, when the previous record was reached. The temperature of China's coastal waters has increased significantly due to global warming, and the rise in sea levels has accelerated, said Wang Hua, head of the marine forecasting and monitoring department at the ministry.

China's sea levels have increased by an average of 3.5 mm per year since 1980, and an average of 4.0 mm per year since 1993 -- higher than the global rate over the same periods, Wang said. The global mean sea level has risen 3.4 mm a year over the past three decades, according to NASA. "In the last 11 years, from 2012 to 2022, China's coastal sea levels were the highest since observations were first recorded," Wang said at the news conference, which released the latest annual report on China's sea levels.

A historic mission to Jupiter is about to blast off. The European Space Agency's spacecraft nicknamed Juice -- for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer -- is set to begin an eight-year journey toward the planet and three of its largest moons. From a report: Juice is scheduled to launch Friday morning Eastern Time from a spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, after an earlier attempt was scrubbed because of lightning risk. Once it arrives at Jupiter, Juice will study some of the moons in great detail, mapping their icy surfaces and searching for subsurface oceans that could harbor life.

While the spacecraft can't detect life, the mission should help confirm whether the moons -- Europa, Callisto and Ganymede -- have the conditions necessary to sustain life. The trio, along with the volcanically active moon Io, were discovered by Galileo more than four centuries ago and are among the nearly 100 moons orbiting Jupiter, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. About half an hour after its launch, which will be livestreamed Friday, Juice will separate from its rocket and make contact with mission controllers on Earth. The solar-powered spacecraft will then deploy solar wings that measure roughly 900 square-feet and expand into a cross-like configuration on both sides of the craft. In the following 17 days, Juice is expected to deploy its antennas and instrument-containing booms and begin its cosmic sojourn, which people can follow on the agency's website.

The journey will be a roundabout one. Juice will complete flybys of Earth, the moon, and Venus over the next six years to adjust its trajectory and gain enough speed to get to Jupiter. Jupiter is, on average, about 444 million miles from Earth, yet Juice will travel nearly 4 billion miles before getting there, according to Mr. Sarri. It will also have to withstand temperatures from close to 500 degrees Fahrenheit around Venus to nearly minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit at Jupiter. If all goes well, Juice is scheduled to arrive at Jupiter by July 2031. Once there, the craft will complete flybys of the three moons before entering Ganymede's orbit to collect further data, which are sent back to Earth using an 8-foot antenna.

Researchers have discovered that in the exotic conditions of the early universe, waves of gravity may have shaken space-time so hard that they spontaneously created radiation. Universe Today reports: a team of researchers have discovered that an exotic form of parametric resonance may have even occurred in the extremely early universe. Perhaps the most dramatic event to occur in the entire history of the universe was inflation. This is a hypothetical event that took place when our universe was less than a second old. During inflation our cosmos swelled to dramatic proportions, becoming many orders of magnitude larger than it was before. The end of inflation was a very messy business, as gravitational waves sloshed back and forth throughout the cosmos.

Normally gravitational waves are exceedingly weak. We have to build detectors that are capable of measuring distances less than the width of an atomic nucleus to find gravitational waves passing through the Earth. But researchers have pointed out that in the extremely early universe these gravitational waves may have become very strong. And they may have even created standing wave patterns where the gravitational waves weren't traveling but the waves stood still, almost frozen in place throughout the cosmos. Since gravitational waves are literally waves of gravity, the places where the waves are the strongest represent an exceptional amount of gravitational energy.

The researchers found that this could have major consequences for the electromagnetic field existing in the early universe at that time. The regions of intense gravity may have excited the electromagnetic field enough to release some of its energy in the form of radiation, creating light. This result gives rise to an entirely new phenomenon: the production of light from gravity alone. There's no situation in the present-day universe that could allow this process to happen, but the researchers have shown that the early universe was a far stranger place than we could possibly imagine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Red sand shifts under the boots of the crew members. In the distance, it appears that a rocky mountain range is rising out of the Martian horizon. A thin layer of red dust coats the solar panels and equipment necessary for the year-long mission. This landscape isn't actually 145m miles away. We are in a corner of the Nasa Johnson Space Center in Houston, in a large white warehouse right next to the disc golf course and on the tram route for tourists and school groups. But starting this June, four volunteer test subjects will spend a year locked inside, pretending to live on Mars. Nasa researchers say they're doing everything they can to make it as realistic as possible so they can learn the impact that a year in isolation with limited resources has on human health. "As we move from low Earth orbit, from moon to Mars, we're going to have a lot more resource restrictions than we have on the International Space Station and we're going to be a lot further from Earth or any help from Earth," said Dr Grace Douglas, the principal investigator for the Crew Health Performance Exploration Analog, or Chapea for short.

The four crew members will live in a small housing unit that was constructed using a huge 3D printer to simulate how Nasa may create structures on the Martian surface with Martian soil. They'll conduct experiments, grow food and exercise -- and be tested regularly so scientists can learn what a year on Mars could do to the body and mind. "This is really an extreme circumstance," said Dr Suzanne Bell, who leads the Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory at the Nasa Johnson Space Center. "You're asking for individuals to live and work together for over a one-year period. Not only will they have to get along well, but they'll also have to perform well together."

Watching four people spend a year in a 3D-printed box is Nasa's next small step toward landing humans on the surface of Mars. Nasa says it hopes to send humans to the red planet as early as the 2030s. The first mission could be a nine-month trip one-way, and could leave the astronauts on the surface for two and a half years before starting the long trip back home. Preparations for that trek are already well under way with the agency's Artemis program. Artemis is sending astronauts back to the Moon for the first time since 1972, including the first person of color and woman to walk on another celestial body. As part of the Artemis missions, Nasa is also launching Gateway, a space station that will orbit the Moon and serve as a pit stop for Mars-bound missions. Getting to the Moon means getting to Mars, and getting to Mars means testing the physical and behavioral health of a crew in isolation. That's where Chapea comes in.

Earth's water could have originated from interactions between the hydrogen-rich atmospheres and magma oceans of the planetary embryos that comprised Earth's formative years, according to new work from Carnegie Science's Anat Shahar and UCLA's Edward Young and Hilke Schlichting. Their findings, which could explain the origins of Earth's signature features, are published in Nature. Phys.Org reports: "Exoplanet discoveries have given us a much greater appreciation of how common it is for just-formed planets to be surrounded by atmospheres that are rich in molecular hydrogen, H2, during their first several million years of growth," Shahar explained. "Eventually these hydrogen envelopes dissipate, but they leave their fingerprints on the young planet's composition." Using this information, the researchers developed new models for Earth's formation and evolution to see if our home planet's distinct chemical traits could be replicated.

Using a newly developed model, the Carnegie and UCLA researchers were able to demonstrate that early in Earth's existence, interactions between the magma ocean and a molecular hydrogen proto-atmosphere could have given rise to some of Earth's signature features, such as its abundance of water and its overall oxidized state. The researchers used mathematical modeling to explore the exchange of materials between molecular hydrogen atmospheres and magma oceans by looking at 25 different compounds and 18 different types of reactions -- complex enough to yield valuable data about Earth's possible formative history, but simple enough to interpret fully.

Interactions between the magma ocean and the atmosphere in their simulated baby Earth resulted in the movement of large masses of hydrogen into the metallic core, the oxidation of the mantle, and the production of large quantities of water. Even if all of the rocky material that collided to form the growing planet was completely dry, these interactions between the molecular hydrogen atmosphere and the magma ocean would generate copious amounts of water, the researchers revealed. Other water sources are possible, they say, but not necessary to explain Earth's current state. "This is just one possible explanation for our planet's evolution, but one that would establish an important link between Earth's formation history and the most common exoplanets that have been discovered orbiting distant stars, which are called Super-Earths and sub-Neptunes," Shahar concluded.

A report released on Wednesday found that wind and solar energy made up a record high 12% of global electricity generation in 2022. Meanwhile EU countries are lagging behind with wind power expansion. From a report: All renewable energy sources, including nuclear power, made up 39% of global electricity last year according to the report by independent energy think tank Ember. The authors predict a phasedown of gas power along with a reduction of coal-fired power, forecasting that fossil fuel generation will decline by 0.3% this year. Electricity is as clean as ever, with the share of solar power rising by 24% and wind by 17% from 2021. Solar and wind energy now makes up over 10% of electricity in more than 60 countries. Ember's annual global electricity review takes data from 78 countries which account for 93% of global electricity demand. The European Union gets 22% of its electricity from wind and solar power. However, EU countries seem to lag behind global wind energy expansion, logging 9% growth from wind power -- below the global average. "The EU started the race to renewables early but, as the world accelerates, it cannot afford complacency," said Sarah Brown, Ember's Europe program lead. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February last year caused concern among EU member states about declining fossil fuel imports. The European Commission put forward a plan to increase renewable energy to 45%, an increase of 5% compared to the previous year.

Apple said it will invest up to an additional $200 million in its Restore Fund, which was created in 2021 to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Reuters reports: The additional investment is expected to help the fund start new projects and carry forward its previously stated goal to remove about 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, the company said. Apple is making efforts to become carbon neutral through its entire supply chain and the life cycle of every product by 2030.

The fund, launched with Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) and nonprofit Conservation International, has invested in forest properties in Brazil and Paraguay in the last two years. The expanded fund will be managed by Climate Asset Management, a joint venture of HSBC Asset Management and Pollination, Apple added.

If reactors are retired, polluting energy sources that fill the gap could cause more than 5,000 premature deaths, researchers estimate. The findings appear in the journal Nature Energy. MIT News reports: They lay out a scenario in which every nuclear power plant in the country has shut down, and consider how other sources such as coal, natural gas, and renewable energy would fill the resulting energy needs throughout an entire year. Their analysis reveals that indeed, air pollution would increase, as coal, gas, and oil sources ramp up to compensate for nuclear power's absence. This in itself may not be surprising, but the team has put numbers to the prediction, estimating that the increase in air pollution would have serious health effects, resulting in an additional 5,200 pollution-related deaths over a single year.

If, however, more renewable energy sources become available to supply the energy grid, as they are expected to by the year 2030, air pollution would be curtailed, though not entirely. The team found that even under this heartier renewable scenario, there is still a slight increase in air pollution in some parts of the country, resulting in a total of 260 pollution-related deaths over one year. When they looked at the populations directly affected by the increased pollution, they found that Black or African American communities -- a disproportionate number of whom live near fossil-fuel plants -- experienced the greatest exposure. "They also calculated that more people are also likely to die prematurely due to climate impacts from the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, as the grid compensates for nuclear power's absence," adds the report. "The climate-related effects from this additional influx of carbon dioxide could lead to 160,000 additional deaths over the next century."

Lead author Lyssa Freese, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), said: "We need to be thoughtful about how we're retiring nuclear power plants if we are trying to think about them as part of an energy system. Shutting down something that doesn't have direct emissions itself can still lead to increases in emissions, because the grid system will respond."

After unusually low amounts of rain and snow this winter, the continent faces a severe water shortage. From a report: What happens during the next few months will really matter. Abundant rainfall could ease the situation and stave off the worst-case scenario. But Europe needs a lot. "We're talking about a sea, a sea's worth of water," says Hannah Cloke at the University of Reading in the UK. In terms of volume, hundreds of millions of cubic liters of rain would have to fall across the continent to fill the deficit, she estimates. It would have to amount to higher-than-average rainfall for France and certain other places, including parts of the UK. The chances of that are, unfortunately, not high.

The UK's weather agency, the Met Office, estimates there's a 10 percent chance of a wetter-than-average March, April, and May. Conversely, there's a 30 percent chance that this period will be drier than average -- and that is 1.5 times the normal chance at this time of year. The Met Office stresses that this is a "broad outlook," and there might still be patches of very wet weather even if it remains dry overall. Any rain that does fall also has to fall in the right way and in the right places. "There's always this chance that if we do get it all in two days, we see some very serious floods," says Cloke. "What we want is to see sustained, reasonably gentle rain over the next few months." Another important factor is how hot it gets this summer, says Cammalleri. Heat waves push up water consumption and increase evaporation rates. He indicates that European forecasts do not suggest that temperatures will be quite as blisteringly hot as last year -- though there is some uncertainty there too.

A filmmaker walks us through the reasons behind the 'dark cinematography' that's causing so many complaints. From a report: Take, for instance, Wes Craven's 1996 horror classic Scream -- a film often remarked on for just how lit everything in it is at all times. An early scene depicts protagonist Sidney Prescott embracing her boyfriend Billy Loomis in the wake of a terrifying home invasion and her near-death at the hands of a masked killer. After Sidney throws her arms around Billy, Craven cuts to a tight close-up on Billy's face, which is illuminated by a harsh, ominous, icy-cool light that telegraphs his sinister intentions. But where is that light coming from? The bedroom they're in has no lamps switched on. Could it be the moon? Hard to justify, as the only windows in the space are behind Billy, and the light we're staring at is so much brighter and closer than the moon could ever be. So what on Earth is that light?

The answer is, simply enough, nothing. Craven often didn't feel any real need to rationalize why a bright light would suddenly appear one second before disappearing again in the following shot. It's a purely stylistic choice, employed for that one moment to cast doubt on Billy's trustworthiness in the audience's mind. Itâ(TM)s an extremely stagey choice that fits neatly within the larger series' heightened, melodramatic style. Scream wouldn't really be Scream without it. The hyper-lit style was a staple of cinematography in American films during the '90s, and like all trends, it eventually fell out of fashion -- in this case, a few years after Scream hit theaters. The 2000s saw filmmakers embracing more directional, shadowy lighting styles, evoking a grittier, more "grounded" aesthetic while retaining a sense of classic Hollywood polish. The 2010s featured another huge shift in style, this time toward hyper-naturalism. Even broad, big-budget blockbusters like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- Part 1 embraced a look torn straight from indie cinema. Not only are the lights in that film always motivated, they're realistic. Where earlier films might have used the presence of the moon or a table lamp to justify much brighter lighting, movies like Deathly Hallows, Interstellar, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes let the light of a lamp simply look like a lamp.

When Dr. Makenzie Lystrup was sworn in as the new director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center last week, she didn't take her oath of office on the Bible or the U.S. Constitution, but rather on a tome revered by space enthusiasts everywhere: Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. From a report: The book, published in 1994, is named after an iconic image of Earth, snapped by the Voyager I probe, that depicts the planet as a small speck smothered by the emptiness of space. That photo inspired astronomer Carl Sagan to write: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us." For many, the book serves as a reminder of humanity's place in the universe and the need to preserve our home planet, which makes it similar to holy scripture for a newly appointed NASA director. On Thursday, when Lystrup chose to place her left hand on a copy of Sagan's book while being sworn in by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a photographer captured the moment, and NASA Goddard's social media shared the image. The constitution does not require that government officials be sworn in using a particular text, just that they "shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution." Most U.S. politicians and officials end up using the Bible.

schwit1 shares a report from Inverse: On March 23, sky observers marveled at a gorgeous display of northern and southern lights. It was a reminder that when our Sun gets active, it can spark a phenomenon called "space weather." Aurorae are among the most benign effects of this phenomenon. At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms that can knock out satellites. The folks at Starlink found that out the hard way in February 2022. On January 29 that year, the Sun belched out a class M 1.1 flare and related coronal mass ejection. Material from the Sun traveled out on the solar wind and arrived at Earth a few days later. On February 3, Starlink launched a group of 49 satellites to an altitude only 130 miles above Earth's surface. They didn't last long, and now solar physicists know why.

A group of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America took a closer look at the specifics of that storm. Their analysis identified a mass of plasma that impacted our planet's magnetosphere. The actual event was a halo coronal mass ejection from an active region in the northeast quadrant of the Sun. The material traveled out at around 690 kilometers per second as a shock-driving magnetic cloud. Think of it as a long ropy mass of material writhing its way through space. As it traveled, it expanded and at solar-facing satellites -- including STEREO-A, which took a direct hit from it -- made observations. Eventually, the cloud smacked into Earth's magnetosphere creating a geomagnetic storm.

The atmosphere thickened enough that it affected the newly launched Starlink stations. They started to experience atmospheric drag, which caused them to deorbit and burn up on the way down. It was an expensive lesson in space weather and provided people on Earth with a great view of what happens when satellites fall back to Earth. It was also that could have been avoided if they'd delayed their launch to account for the ongoing threat.

The Biden administration has proposed a new regulation to significantly reduce hazardous air pollutants from chemical plants, a move that environmental advocates predicted would significantly reduce the health risks to people living near industrial sites. From a report: The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule calls on chemical plants to monitor and reduce the amount of toxic pollutants released in the air, including the carcinogens ethylene oxide, an ingredient in antifreeze, and chloroprene, which is used to make the rubber in footwear. The proposed rule would affect the vast majority of chemical manufacturers, applying to more than 200 facilities spread across Texas and Louisiana; elsewhere along the Gulf Coast; the Ohio River Valley; and West Virginia. It would update several regulations governing emissions from chemical plants, some of which have not been tightened in nearly 20 years. The action is part of the Biden administration's effort to address the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards facing communities that surround chemical plants. Known as fenceline communities, they are generally low-income, minority neighborhoods with elevated rates of asthma, cancer and other health problems.

The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much as 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032, The New York Times reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. From the report: That would represent a quantum leap for the United States -- where just 5.8 percent of vehicles sold last year were all-electric -- and would exceed President Biden's earlier ambitions to have all-electric cars account for half of those sold in the country by 2030. It would be the federal government's most aggressive climate regulation and would propel the United States to the front of the global effort to slash the greenhouse gases generated by cars, a major driver of climate change. The European Union has already enacted vehicle emissions standards that are expected to phase out the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. Canada and Britain have proposed standards similar to the European model.

At the same time, the proposed regulation would pose a significant challenge for automakers. Nearly every major car company has already invested heavily in electric vehicles, but few have committed to the levels envisioned by the Biden administration. And many have faced supply chain problems that have held up production. Even manufacturers who are enthusiastic about electric models are unsure whether consumers will buy enough of them to make up the majority of new car sales within a decade. The action from the E.P.A. is likely to hearten climate activists, who are angry over the Biden administration's recent decision to approve an enormous oil drilling project on federal land in Alaska. Some inside the administration argue that speeding up a transition to renewable energy, with most Americans driving electric vehicles, would lessen demand for oil drilled in Alaska or elsewhere.

After a nice spike during the first two years of the pandemic, global PC shipments continued to drop for a fourth consecutive quarter. Analyst firm IDC's latest figure has Q1 down 29% from the same time last year. Canalys paints an even more troubling picture for the industry, with a full 33% drop. From a report: A disappointing 2022 holiday set the stage for the beginning of the year, as vendor inventory has continued to pile up -- a trend that is expected to carry at least into Q3. The plunge has been so consistent that last quarter's figures dipped below those of Q1 2019, putting worldwide shipments below their pre-pandemic level.

[...] The culprits? For starters, a lot of people purchased news systems in 2020 and 2021 as their work settings adapted to a global pandemic. Laptops tend to have a life span of around three to five years. Desktops are even longer, at three to eight. People are likely to be content with their systems for a few years at least. As vendors go, both IDC and Canalys have Apple suffering the largest drop at 40.5 and 45.5%, respectively. That's a staggering figure, likely owing -- at least in part â" to the company coming back down to earth, as the M1 chip managed to buck larger category trends in 2021/2022. That chip marked Apple's biggest PC computing update since the company shifted to Intel decades prior. In spite of what ad copy might suggest, you don't get a generational shift every year.

"There's an invisible monster on the loose," NASA wrote on Thursday, "barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. " This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy... Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. "We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut...

The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to... Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole... Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole. Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy.

Duke University announces their engineers "have produced the world's first fully recyclable printed electronics that replace the use of chemicals with water in the fabrication process" — bypassing the need for hazardous chemicals.

Electrical/computer engineering professor Aaron Franklin led the study, according to Duke's announcement: In previous work, Franklin and his group demonstrated the first fully recyclable printed electronics. The devices used three carbon-based inks: semiconducting carbon nanotubes, conductive graphene and insulating nanocellulose. In trying to adapt the original process to only use water, the carbon nanotubes presented the largest challenge.... In the paper, Franklin and his group develop a cyclical process in which the device is rinsed with water, dried in relatively low heat and printed on again. When the amount of surfactant used in the ink is also tuned down, the researchers show that their inks and processes can create fully functional, fully recyclable, fully water-based transistors....

Franklin explains that, by demonstrating a transistor first, he hopes to signal to the rest of the field that there is a viable path toward making some electronics manufacturing processes much more environmentally friendly. Franklin has already proven that nearly 100% of the carbon nanotubes and graphene used in printing can be recovered and reused in the same process, losing very little of the substances or their performance viability. Because nanocellulose is made from wood, it can simply be recycled or biodegraded like paper. And while the process does use a lot of water, it's not nearly as much as what is required to deal with the toxic chemicals used in traditional fabrication methods.

According to a United Nations estimate, less than a quarter of the millions of pounds of electronics thrown away each year is recycled. And the problem is only going to get worse as the world eventually upgrades to 6G devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to expand. So any dent that could be made in this growing mountain of electronic trash is important to pursue. While more work needs to be done, Franklin says the approach could be used in the manufacturing of other electronic components like the screens and displays that are now ubiquitous to society. Every electronic display has a backplane of thin-film transistors similar to what is demonstrated in the paper. The current fabrication technology is high-energy and relies on hazardous chemicals as well as toxic gasses. The entire industry has been flagged for immediate attention by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

"The performance of our thin-film transistors doesn't match the best currently being manufactured, but they're competitive enough to show the research community that we should all be doing more work to make these processes more environmentally friendly," Franklin said.