What We're Reading

The GRAVITY instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope has discovered new details about the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole — chiefly, hot clumps of gas that orbit the black hole at 30 percent the speed of light.

The 4-1 ruling paves the way for the $1.43 billion project after protests halted construction in 2014. The TMT would be the largest telescope in the Northern Hemisphere and could be completed by 2029.

In plumbing the massive new database by Retraction Watch, Science has found that the number of retractions has continued to grow, but the rise seems to reflect not so much an epidemic of fraud as a community trying to police itself.

In this podcast posted October 26, 2018, host Michelle Thaller talks with Chiara Mingarelli of the Center for Computational Astrophysics, who describes the use of gravitational waves to study ancient supermassive black holes and the dawn of our universe.

Extrasolar planetary systems made up of terrestrial-type planets in compact, tightly-spaced orbits are most likely to form around lower-metallicity stars, a new study concludes.

The ratchet is a microscopic heat engine that converts thermal fluctuations into work. Conceived by Richard Feynman to show that the second law of thermodynamics cannot be violated, it works only when connected to two heat sources at different temperatures.

Scientists should acknowledge that emotions and values play a legitimate role in shaping public perceptions of risk.

To better find disease-causing genes, researchers from the Flatiron Institute and Princeton University have developed diseaseQUEST, an integrative approach that combines data from human genome-wide disease studies with in silico network models of tissue- and cell-type-specific function in model organisms.

Scientists worry about how new tools that are enabling them to home in on the genetic basis of hot-button traits like intelligence will be misconstrued to fit racist ideologies.

In this heartfelt essay, an MIT graduate student writes of obsessively laboring to understand the intricacies of frog embryos and how his "monomania" affected his personal life. His adviser had a saying: “You have to believe that Sisyphus was happy.”