In spite of their dark reputations, two black holes may have set off a cosmic light show. Subtle gravitational rumbles from a collision of two black holes may have been accompanied by a flare of light about a month later, physicists report June 25 in Physical Review Letters. It’s a surprising conclusion given black holes’ […] More
In some parts of the US, police kill black people at a rate six times higher than they kill white people. The differences are most stark in the northern Midwest, especially Chicago, and in north-eastern states like New York. Protest movements like Black Lives Matter have highlighted the disproportionate killing of black people by US […] More
The Black Lives Matter movement is primarily about social justice, but it will tackle environmental injustices too, says Graham Lawton Humans | Comment 24 June 2020 I WANTED to join the recent Black Lives Matter protests in London, but I also didn’t want to be in close proximity to thousands of other people for hours […] More
New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss Humans 24 June 2020 Read Breath: The new science of a lost art sees journalist James Nestor describe the experiments conducted on him at Stanford University, California, to discover the impact of bad breathing. What he found […] More
Neutrinos spit out by the main processes that power the sun are finally accounted for, physicists report. Two sets of nuclear fusion reactions predominate in the sun’s core and both produce the lightweight subatomic particles in abundance. Scientists had previously detected neutrinos from the most prevalent process. Now, for the first time, neutrinos from the […] More
Ripples in spacetime have revealed a distant collision between a black hole and a mystery object, which appears too massive to be a neutron star but not massive enough to be a black hole. At first glance, the event — detected by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors on August 14, 2019 — looked […] More
“IN SCIENCE, I am surrounded by a lot of privileged white people,” says Aya Osman, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Born in Saudi Arabia, she moved from the UK to the US two years ago for her postdoctoral degree. On her first day of orientation, she says, she was one of […] More
Jets of high-energy plasma shooting away from supermassive black holes resemble bell-bottom pants — starting out narrow but ending with a flare. The shape can help astrophysicists tease out how such jets are launched and reveal details of their black holes, researchers report in the July Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “From studying […] More
