In der Debatte über die Gesundheitsreform haben die Oppositionsparteien im Bundestag kein gutes Haar an den Sparplänen gelassen. Ministerin Warken verteidigte sich: Alle würden ihren Beitrag leisten.

Die erneuerte Hoffnung auf ein Friedensabkommen zwischen den USA und Iran treibt die Aktienmärkte zum Wochenschluss an - aber einige Experten bleiben skeptisch. Anleger blicken mit Spannung auf den SpaceX-Börsengang.

Das Rahmenabkommen zwischen Iran und USA ist nach Angaben aus Teheran "überwiegend finalisiert". Iranische Einsatzkräfte haben offenbar einen Öltanker in der Straße von Hormus gestoppt.

Auf einer der meistbefahrenen Autobahnen des Ruhrgebiets wird von heute an nach Weltkriegsbomben gesucht. Dafür wird die A40 bei Mülheim am Abend komplett gesperrt - für zehn Tage. Autofahrer werden Geduld brauchen.

Große Trauer in Thailand: Prinzessin Bajrakitiyabha, genannt "Bha", ist im Alter von 47 Jahren gestorben. Wie der Palast mitteilte, verschied sie am Donnerstagabend - nach mehreren Jahren im Koma.

Innenminister Dobrindt will Asylbewerber, für die ein anderes EU-Land zuständig ist, anders unterbringen - in "Sekundärmigrationszentren". Aber bislang wollen nur drei Bundesländer mitmachen. Von Claudia Kornmeier.

Großbritannien hat mit Dan Jarvis einen neuen Verteidigungsminister. Sein Vorgänger war mit harscher Kritik an Premier Starmer zurückgetreten. Der Regierungschef gerät immer stärker unter Druck.

Der Reichtum eines einzelnen Menschen könnte mit dem SpaceX-Börsengang bislang neue Dimensionen erreichen. Geht sein Plan auf, hat Elon Musk mehr als eine Billion Dollar - auf dem Papier. Von Ingo Nathusius.

Der Börsengang von SpaceX elektrisiert Anleger weltweit. Doch bei einer Bewertung von 1,8 Billionen Dollar muss Elon Musk mehrere Wetten gewinnen, damit die Rechnung aufgeht. Experten warnen vor zu viel Euphorie. Von Angela Göpfert.

Der Bundestag befasst sich heute mit dem Gesetzentwurf zur Gesundheitsreform. Mit einem milliardenschweren Sparpaket soll die gesetzliche Krankenversicherung stabilisiert werden. Gelingt das ohne Abstriche bei der Versorgung? Von Elisa Rebellato.

Die Migrationsrouten nach Griechenland haben sich verlagert. Die meisten Geflüchteten kommen nicht mehr auf den ägäischen Inseln an, sondern versuchen die gefährliche Überfahrt von Libyen direkt Richtung Kreta. Von Moritz Pompl.

Der BND sollte angesichts der Weltlage schnell schlagkräftiger werden. Doch die Bundesregierung hat das dafür notwendige neue Gesetz noch nicht vorgelegt. Nach Recherchen von NDR und WDR bremst Innenminister Dobrindt offenbar das Vorhaben.

Jahrelang hat die EU um neue Asylregeln gerungen - heute sind sie in Kraft getreten. Neue Zahlen zeigen, dass die irreguläre Migration schon in den vergangenen Monaten deutlich zurückgegangen ist. Von K. Schmid.

In der Demokratischen Republik Kongo steigt die Zahl der bestätigten Ebola-Fälle weiter an. Das Virus breitet sich auf neue Gesundheitszonen aus. Fehlende Impf- und Behandlungsmöglichkeiten sowie die unsichere Lage erschweren den Kampf.

Für die Abgeordneten des Bundestags zeichnet sich eine Nullrunde ab. Die Erhöhung ihrer Bezüge soll nach dem Willen der Koalition ausgesetzt werden. Zustimmung kommt aus der Opposition, die von einem "richtigen Zeichen" spricht.

Im Libanon sind Staatsmedien zufolge mehrere Menschen bei israelischen Angriffen getötet und weitere verletzt worden. Die Ölpreise sind nach der Absage der von den USA geplanten Angriffe auf den Iran deutlich gefallen.

Massive Angriffe auf Iran - so hatte es US-Präsident Trump für diese Nacht angekündigt. Nur wenig später kam die Kehrtwende: Die Angriffe seien abgesagt, da es Bewegung in den Friedensgesprächen gebe. Aus Iran kamen andere Töne.

Mit dem Sondervermögen soll die Infrastruktur saniert und ausgebaut werden. Die Regierungschefs der Ost-Länder kritisieren jedoch einen intransparenten Umgang mit den Mitteln. Aus Brandenburg kommen besonders klare Worte. Von Andre Kartschall.

Die erste Debatte im Bundestag über das Gebäudemodernisierungsgesetz war kontrovers. Ministerin Reiche sprach von "Freiheit beim Heizen", die AfD vom "Heizungshammer durch die Hintertür" - und die SPD gibt sich selbstkritisch. Von F. Aischmann.

Nach dem Aus des französisch-deutschen Kampfflugzeug-Projekts FCAS will ein Zusammenschluss deutscher Unternehmen ein neues Luftkampf-System für Europa entwickeln. Daran beteiligt ist auch die Rüstungssparte von Airbus.

Die EZB erhöht aus Sorge vor steigender Inflation erstmals seit fast drei Jahren den Leitzins, die Lage im Nahen Osten bleibt angespannt. Der DAX schließt nach einigem Auf und Ab praktisch unverändert.

Privatpersonen haben in der EU ein Recht auf ein Basis-Konto. Das gilt auch dann noch, wenn jemand auf einer Sanktionsliste der USA steht, wie nun der Europäische Gerichtshof geurteilt hat. Von Max Brauer.

Im Kampf gegen die Energiekrise hatte die Bundesregierung vor drei Monaten einen Teil ihrer Ölreserven freigegeben. Nach Informationen des ARD-Hauptstadtstudios ist diese Menge so gut wie weg. Von Jannik Pentz.

Die Verhandlungen mit Iran stocken, die USA erhöhen den Druck: Präsident Trump hat für den Abend schwere Angriffe angekündigt. Zudem drohte er mit einer militärischen Übernahme der für Irans Ölindustrie wichtigen Insel Charg.

Je ernster die politische Lage, desto unverdrossener gibt sich der Kanzler in seiner Regierungserklärung. Aber letztlich wirkt es wie eine Überlebensstrategie, gerade auch mitten in schwierigen Reformdebatten. Von Corinna Emundts.

"Troubles" - im Englischen steht das für den jahrzehntelangen Bürgerkrieg in Nordirland. Viele in Belfast fühlen sich gerade daran erinnert. Die zweite Nacht in Folge gab es Randale - angestachelt von Rechtsextremen. Von F. Hoppen.

Auf Gran Canaria trifft Papst Leo XIV. in einem Hafen mit Migranten zusammen. Er fordert, Europa dürfe nicht hinnehmen, dass das Mittelmeer und der Atlantik zu "Friedhöfen ohne Grabsteine" würden.

Mexiko feiert heute die Eröffnung der Fußball-WM. Der Gastgeber will sich als modernes, weltoffenes und vor allem sicheres Land präsentieren. Doch die Euphorie wird von Protesten, Gewalt und sozialen Konflikten getrübt. Von J. Barke und A. Demmer.

Noch ein Dämpfer für Premier Starmer: Im Streit um den Militärhaushalt hat der britische Verteidigungsminister Healey seinen Rücktritt angekündigt. Weitere schlechte Nachrichten für Starmer könnten bald folgen.

TikTok, Instagram und Co sind bei Kindern und Jugendlichen beliebt, sie bergen aber auch Gefahren. Um Kinder besser zu schützen hat der Deutsche Ethikrat eine Empfehlung ausgegeben. Von Alicia Heid.

Vor dem US-Kongress hat Microsoft-Mitgründer Gates angegeben, der Sexualstraftäter Epstein habe ihn wegen seiner Affären erpresst. Kriminelles Verhalten habe er aber sonst nie beobachtet. Der Kontakt sei ein Fehler gewesen.

Weltweit ist die Zahl der Flüchtlinge leicht zurückgegangen - zum ersten Mal seit einem Jahrzehnt. Laut den UN kehrten so viele Vertriebene in ihre Heimat zurück wie lange nicht. Aber oft unfreiwillig. Von Kathrin Hondl.

Mode an der Börse ist wieder in Mode. Die britische Frasers Group will den Modehersteller Hugo Boss aus Metzingen übernehmen. Analysten bezeichnen das Angebot als nicht besonders attraktiv. Die Aktie steigt.

Der Ölpreisschock infolge des Iran-Kriegs treibt die Verbraucherpreise nach oben. Nun hat die Europäische Zentralbank reagiert und erstmals seit September 2023 die Leitzinsen im Euroraum angehoben - auf nun 2,25 Prozent.

Der Prozess gegen Israels Premierminister läuft seit fast sechs Jahren, ein Ende ist nicht in Sicht. Kritiker meinen, Netanjahu sabotiere das Justizsystem. Ist ein juristischer Deal wahrscheinlich? Von Julio Segador.

Die Justizministerkonferenz diskutiert über eine längere Verjährungsfrist bei Vergewaltigung. Für Claudia Wuttke kämen Änderungen zu spät. Sie kämpft schon lange für eine Gesetzesänderung. Von Janine Mertens.

Bundesregierung, Arbeitgeberverbände und Gewerkschaften haben gesprochen - und ziehen ein überwiegend positives Fazit. Betont wird vor allem die gute Atmosphäre. Nur an konkreten Ergebnissen fehlt es. Von Jim-Bob Nickschas.

Fußball schauen im Garten bis spät in die Nacht? Und danach ab in den Autokorso? Was ist während der WM erlaubt - und was sollte man lieber bleiben lassen? Von M. Nordhardt und F. Bräutigam.

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Hallo! Am Freitag bringt uns ein wellendes atlantisches Frontensystem einen bedeckten Himmel und länger anhaltende, aber nur mäßig ergiebige Regenfälle (5-10 mm). Die Temperaturen steigen bis maximal 17 Grad und die Luft enthält mit Taupunkten von 13 bis 14 Grad auch deutlich mehr Wasserdampf als am Vortag. Der Südwestwind ist in Böen frisch. Windig ist es am Samstag und am Sonntag. Der West- bis Nordwestwind ist tagsüber im Mittel mäßig und in Böen wiederholt stark. Dabei ist es wechselnd bewölkt mit Zwischenaufheiterungen. Vielleicht regnet es hier und da mal leicht, aber nennenswerte Mengen von mehr als 0,5 mm werden nicht erwartet. Am Samstag maximal 23 Grad und am Sonntag dann nur noch 19 Grad. Die Luft wird immer trockener und die Taupunkte sinken auf 5 Grad. Am Montag und Dienstag ist es dann wechselnd bewölkt mit zeitweiligem Sonnenschein und es bleibt trocken. Maximal wird es 21 bzw. 23-25 Grad warm. Der Nordwestwind lässt nach. Und das wird dann wohl ab Mitte nächster Woche in eine knackige Hitzewelle übergehen. Am Mittwoch 29 Grad und ab Donnerstag dann Höchsttemperaturen über 30 Grad und das wahrscheinlich dann mehrere Tage anhaltend. Ganz extrem ist dabei das AIFS-Wettermodell mit Höchsttemperaturen nahe 35 Grad durchgehend vom 19. bis zum 25. Juni. Es sieht ein bisschen danach aus, dass AIFS noch nicht so ganz ausgereift ist und bei solchen Wetterlagen ein zu starkes Plateau zeigt, also für zu lange Zeit ein durchgehend maximales Temperaturniveau. Bei den anderen Wettermodellen (wie auch beim KI-Konkurrenten AIGFS) haben wir mehr so ein Auf und Ab zwischen 29 und 35 Grad, was auch mehr der Erfahrung entspricht. Außerdem zeigen alle Wettermodelle eine ziemliche schwüle mit einer Neigung zu Gewittern, was in der Regel schon durch die abschirmende Wirkung von Restbewölkung zu Tagen mit weniger hohen Temperaturen führt. Die nächtlichen Tiefsttemperaturen liegen zunächst bei rund 10 und in der Hitzewelle dann bei 15 bis 20 Grad. Wetterochs Bitte unterstützen Sie die Wetterochs-Wettermail durch eine Spende!

Ben Nadel demonstrates how to use the "name:" attribute in Docker Compose to collocate all docker assets under the same project umbrella....

Yoko Ono’s painting invites us to step on it, challenging both galleries and audiences. Why is touch transgressive? - by Aeon Video Watch on Aeon

Terrorists and tech bros alike view accelerationism as a revolutionary weapon. Nick Land glimpsed something much darker - by Vincent Lê Read on Aeon

When it comes to the Universe, there’s one class of object that achieves more extreme conditions than any other: black holes. While other objects may be dense — the centers of an iron-rich planet, a white dwarf star, a uranium nucleus, or a neutron star — only a black hole packs so much mass into such a small volume that it actually creates an event horizon. An event horizon represents a boundary between our observable Universe, where we reside, and a black hole’s interior, where all infalling quanta inevitable head towards a central singularity. Once you cross over that horizon, from the outside to the inside, you can never escape no matter what you are, no matter how hard you fire a rocket or how fast you go: even if you travel at the speed of light. But the black holes that we routinely observe actually emit many things that we can see directly: light of all different wavelengths, particles, spectacular jets, and event gravitational waves. If once something falls in, it can’t get out, how do we see all of these things? That’s what Patreon supporter Dominic Turpin wants to know, writing in to ask: “There is something about Black holes that I have never understood. [They’re] so powerful that nothing crossing over the even horizon can escape, [but] they produce jets and winds, where we just found winds from Sagittarius A*. How can both things be true?” It’s a confusing and counterintuitive puzzle, but it turns out that both things actually are true at once. Nothing can get out once it falls in, and we see all sorts of signals escaping from them. Here’s how to make sense of it. The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, emits X-rays due to various physical processes. The flares we see in the X-ray indicate that matter flows unevenly and non-continuously into the black hole, leading to the flares we observe over time. In X-rays, no event horizon is visible at these resolutions; the “light” is purely disk-like. Credit: NASA/CXC/Amherst College/D.Haggard et al. Rather than start with a black hole and talk about the astrophysical conditions that occur around it, something that most of us aren’t particularly familiar with, I want to start with something that we’re a little more experienced with: a kitchen. Imagine that you have a large amount of water: a giant pot, cauldron, or jug full of it, for example. Imagine, also, that you have a drain: a place that can easily accept all of that water, no matter how much of it you have. Even if the drain opening itself is small in terms of its physical size, as long as there’s enough room on the inside — room so that there’s a place for that water to “go,” so to speak — then every last drop of that water can fit through the drain, no matter how big your cauldron is or how small the drain opening is. What you can’t do, however, is force all that water into the drain at the same instant. The smaller the drain opening is, and the more water that you have to put into it, the longer it’s going to take for the drain to accept all of that water. If you don’t want to make a mess, you’ll go slowly, and you’ll pour the water into the drain gradually and smoothly. If you don’t care about making a mess, you might dump the water in all at once, where much of it will splash about and collect around the drain, and only much later will it all make its way onto the other side of the drain. When water in a sink encounters a drain, the water doesn’t immediately all go into the drain unless the flow is slow, doesn’t overflow the drain, and remains confined to a narrow area that goes directly into the drain. For all other cases, the water will have to flow near and/or around the drain before entering it, and has a more difficult time doing so the smaller the drain is. Credit: Dean Hochman/flickr If you try and force the water into the drain, at high pressure, for instance, you’ll make the messiest situation of all: the water will splash back at you, and might even wind up splashing up to great heights and large distances. If you have a large amount of suction coming from the other side of the drain, trying to draw the water in, you might be able to increase the rate-of-flow that the drain can accept, but you’ll also increase the speed that any splashed-back water travels at. And the smaller the opening is to your drain, especially relative to the volume of water you’re trying to force into it, the larger the mess you’ll make. In total: the more water you pour in, at higher speeds and/or greater pressures, into a smaller drain opening, the more the water will splash, and the greater a mess it will make over a larger distance outside of the drain itself. Anyone who’s ever turned a faucet on full blast, even directly over the sink drain, has had this experience: creating a wet mess, and often resulting in not just drops but large globs of water winding up much farther away from the drain than even the initial faucet was from it. When a disturbance is created in a pond, such as by dropping a stone into an otherwise still body of water, it will generate ripples that propagate circularly outward. If water falls into an already-existing body of water, even if there’s an open drain at the bottom, that water can get kicked up and splashed out entirely, as though it were ejected from the environment around the drain, rather that getting sucked into the drain. Credit: Sergiu Bacioiu/flickr On the other hand, if you only pour the water into the drain slowly and smoothly, you won’t make a mess at all. If you had a drain opening that was enormous compared to the amount of water it was accepting, it wouldn’t make a mess at all. And if you used a device like a funnel, you might not spill a drop, so long as the spout of the funnel was smaller than the drain’s diameter. There are plenty of ways to pour your water into a drain without making a mess: you just have to be thoughtful in your choices of how to do it, and careful in the execution of how you’re doing it. The reason why is straightforward: unless you pour the water in slowly enough so that the various drops, streams, or “glugs” of water only go directly into the drain itself, there’s going to be a pile-up of “splashable material” (i.e., the water itself) around the drain. That material can interact with itself, with the environment around the drain, and with the sink or tub that surrounds the drain. Under the right conditions, some of that material can even be ejected at high speeds, even though if it were to actually go into the drain, it would never come back out. Instead of water flowing into a drain, a black hole can have material flowing into its event horizon: the region of space around it that serves as a boundary between what can escape and what can’t escape. From outside the event horizon, infalling material often can pile-up on top of itself, and not all (or even most) of that piled-up material will eventually wind up being devoured by the event horizon itself. Credit: Big Think / NASA It’s true that we’re not talking about drains here; we’re talking about black holes. And most of what falls into a black hole isn’t water-like at all, although, being made of normal matter, it can often behave as a fluid or a gas: where the particles within it “flow” in some sense. But what drains and black holes have in common is this: they have an “opening size” inherent to them (a surface area), and material can only flow into them through that finite area. While black holes can be large — supermassive ones can even be larger than Neptune’s orbit around the Sun — the material that typically impacts them is normally strewn across a far greater volume of space. In other words, the drain opening, or the surface area of the black hole, is very, very small compared to the volume of matter that falls into it. Even if it’s material from, say, a single star that falls in, it’s very unlikely that you’ll have a direct hit: something where the star’s velocity points exactly towards the center of the black hole as it comes in. Most things in the Universe, and in a galaxy or galaxy cluster, have what we know as orbital angular momentum, and so it will instead be the black hole’s tidal forces that gradually or suddenly tear that object apart. When that happens, it winds up occupying a much, much larger volume of space than not only the original star (or stellar remnant) itself, but even larger than the black hole’s event horizon size. This illustration of a tidal disruption event shows the fate of a massive, large astronomical body that has the misfortune of coming too close to a black hole. It will get stretched and compressed in one dimension, shredding it, accelerating its matter, and alternately devouring and ejecting the debris that arises from it. Black holes with accretion disks are often highly asymmetrical in their properties, but far more luminous than inactive black holes that lack them. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser However, because it’s still made up of normal matter — particles that can be built out of the building blocks from the Standard Model — these particles can interact with one another on their way towards the black hole, which acts as a cosmic drain. Just as in the case of the drain with the water, this leads to a pile-up of material around the black hole. Typically, because of two reasons: that material has a net amount of angular momentum to it, and that it’s likely to be distributed, in three-dimensions, with one axis of the distribution being the shortest/smaller, that material winds up contracting down into a rotating, two-dimensional structure around the black hole: a disk. That’s what the term accretion disk is all about: a common term whenever discussions of black holes are had. The material gets largely (but not exclusively) confined to a disk because normal matter doesn’t just bounce off of each other perfectly when it collides with other particles of normal matter; rather it “sticks together” in what we call an inelastic collision. And when matter collides inelastically, it doesn’t just stick together, but by the conservation of energy, it also heats up. (Techincally, there are also “accretion flows” that can be either in-or-out of the disk, but the disk itself typically dominates.) An illustration of an active black hole, one that accretes matter and accelerates a portion of it outward in two perpendicular jets. The normal matter undergoing an acceleration like this describes how quasars and active galaxies work extremely well. Flows of matter inside the accretion disk can lead to flares in a black hole’s emissions. All known, well-measured black holes have enormous rotation rates, and the laws of physics, particularly the conservation of angular momentum, all but ensure that this is mandatory. Credit: University of Warwick/Mark A. Garlick Now, we’re getting somewhere. Even though a lot of this matter will inevitably fall into the drain that it’s circling, in the very process of “circling the drain” it collides and heats up, causing it to get even closer to the drain itself. And when that happens, because more gravitational potential energy is getting converted into kinetic energy, it now orbits the black hole at an even faster speed. Because of the properties of the event horizon, that matter begins moving close to the speed of light as it approaches the event horizon itself, and gets very, very hot indeed. The temperature equivalent of the material in accretion disks routinely exceeds a million degrees (at this point, it doesn’t really matter which units you use: Fahrenheit, Celsius, or Kelvin), and can even crest 10 million degrees. That’s overkill, because above a few thousand or tens-of-thousands of degrees, all of the atoms you can make become fully ionized: into a sea of free atomic nuclei and a sea of free electrons. As the lightest charged constituents of matter, the electrons wind up moving the fastest, and when you have charged particles moving through space, they inevitably generate magnetic fields. This illustration shows a model of what powers a microquasar: a downscaled version of a supermassive black hole within an active galaxy. The central black hole gains an accretion disk, which in turn generates its own powerful magnetic field. When an additional source of matter (at left) comes into play, the interaction between that new matter and the existing accretion disk can lead to flares, winds, and the emission of large numbers of charged particles and copious radiation, among other signals. Credit: E. M. de Gouveia Dal Pino and A. Lazarian, Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2005 Magnetic fields, then, are incredibly important because one of the things that happens, in physics, is that if you pass a charged particle through a magnetic field, that magnetic field then accelerates the charged particle by changing its direction. In an accretion disk, with the magnetic field it generates, that accelerates particles in one of two directions: perpendicular to the disk, either “up” and out of the plane of the disk, or “down” and out of the plane of the disk. The disk itself is hot and emits radiation, but it’s the particles that get launched perpendicular to the disk, close to the speed of light, that escape. This is the source of the majority of signals we see coming from black holes: jets, X-rays, flares, matter-and-antimatter particles, and even neutrinos. The matter that circles the drain: makes an accretion disk, which heats up and becomes ionized, where charged particles move very quickly around the black hole, creating magnetic fields, which deflect particles up-and-down, out of the plane of the disk, and those launched particles then create jets, flares, electromagnetic radiation, neutrinos, and even exotic particles like antimatter. (Where the antimatter, mostly in the form of positrons, then later annihilates, downstream, with electrons, creating gamma-rays.) This picture was spectacularly confirmed with the discovery of “Fermi bubbles” of gamma rays around the Milky Way’s galactic center, caused by these accelerated particles when the Milky Way’s central black hole was active. In the main image, our galaxy’s antimatter jets are illustrated, blowing ‘Fermi bubbles’ in the halo of gas surrounding our galaxy. In the small, inset image, actual Fermi data shows the gamma-ray emissions resulting from this process. These “bubbles” arise from the energy produced by electron-positron annihilation: an example of matter and antimatter interacting and being converted into pure energy via E = mc². We are certain that no antimatter signature in our galaxy arises from either antimatter stars or large clumps of antimatter. Credit: David A. Aguilar (main); NASA/GSFC/Fermi (inset) This also helps us debunk another big myth about black holes: that they somehow “suck” everything into them. Black holes don’t “suck” anymore than other massive objects in the Universe do: neutron stars, white dwarfs, stars, etc. They simply gravitate, and the objects that orbit them orbit just as they would any theoretical mass at a given orbital radius. If normal matter didn’t “clump” and “stick” and “collide inelastically,” then it wouldn’t heat up, wouldn’t ionize, wouldn’t create magnetic fields, and wouldn’t get accelerated to produce these jets. It’s why only normal matter (and not dark matter) can create these signals! The key that we have to recognize is that the signals that we see are not coming from within the black hole’s event horizon at all! Even though matter is being absorbed by the black hole, and the black hole is growing in mass over time, the matter that falls into the black hole is not what’s creating the jets, the radiation, the neutrinos, the cosmic rays, etc., that the black hole emits. It’s only the material that’s outside the black hole’s event horizon that creates it: the material that doesn’t fall in, but that spends time in the environment near the event horizon, and then gets accelerated and ejected so that it doesn’t cross the event horizon and fall in at all. Messier 87, best known as the supermassive galaxy whose black hole was first imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope, has its relativistic jets and the shockwaves created by their material imaged in the infrared by Spitzer, amidst the mass of shining stars (in blue). Messier 87 is the most massive (and second-brightest) galaxy within the entire Virgo cluster of galaxies, and it is the central black hole that generates these relativistic jets. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/IPAC You might then ask, as a follow up, “okay, if all of this is true, then when something does get tidally torn apart, and forms an accretion disk around a black hole, how much of that mass gets eaten versus how much of that mass gets ejected due to the process we just described?” The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is that most of that infalling mass gets ejected, and only a small fraction of it crosses over the event horizon to the interior of the black hole. Although estimates vary, it’s typically 90-99% of the mass that encounters a black hole that inevitably escapes from it, and just 1-10% of the total mass that winds up getting swallowed: very different from the picture most people have in their minds! This is why, when I explain it to children, I tell them that black holes eat like Cookie Monsters do. (Cookie monsters are more fun than drains. At least, they were to me when I was a kid.) Because even though they work to devour as much as they can, most of the material winds up getting strewn about and ejected instead, rather than winding up inside the black hole’s interior. It’s because the matter gets near, but remains outside, of the black hole’s event horizon that the emitted signals you see — jets, radiation, flares, particles, and more — can come into existence! Send in your Ask Ethan questions to startswithabang at gmail dot com! This article Ask Ethan: How are black holes active if nothing escapes from them? is featured on Big Think.

Could depression, dementia, and poor oral health all have one uniting link? The gut microbiome contains 200 more genes than human cells, and research shows its strong impact on mental illness, brain health, and chronic inflammation. Professor of epidemiology at King’s College London Tim Spector breaks down the science of how gut microbes produce the chemicals that shape your mood, your immune system, and your cognitive health, and why the standard Western diet has been systematically destroying them for 50 years. This video The hidden link: Depression, processed food, and your gut microbiome is featured on Big Think.

Every few months, I round up useless or unused objects in my house, walk to the alley, and plop them into the dumpster without a second thought. I am no collector or hoarder. I only really value a few physical possessions: my three guitars, my books and magazines, and a small collection of posters and art (my favorite being a painting of a stork whose eyes stare right through you, made by my late grandpa). That last category is something I could use much more of: beautiful things to look at. One piece that’ll soon hang on the wall of my office comes from my colleague, Ben Gibson, a design director at Big Think. He recently created a poster called “A Visual History of the Universe,” made with help from Dr. Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and author of the Big Think column Starts With A Bang. It’s a poster that strikes a rare balance between being aesthetically stunning while also teaching you something useful — in this case, scientists’ best explanation for how everything around you came to be. Ideas worth displaying. Reserve yours here. Ben’s been striking that balance since he was a kid. “I had always loved looking at things like maps, charts, and cutaway illustrations, and spent a lot of hours (too many!) trying to draw them myself,” he said. In 2010, he cofounded the infographics poster company Pop Chart with Patrick Mulligan after the two met while working at Penguin Books. “Patrick also loved this stuff, and we started finding ways to incorporate these things into the books we were working on at Penguin — but we realized we needed a bigger canvas.” The first poster the two produced was a chart of rapper names, diagrammed according to semantics. They’ve since sold hundreds of thousands of infographic posters and other products, becoming a design shop for advertising, events, publishing, and custom merchandise, with clients like HBO, Nike, Wieden + Kennedy, The New York Times, and the MoMA Design Store. Pop Chart’s posters cover everything from literature’s most famous opening lines (as analyzed through the Reed-Kellogg system) to a visual breakdown of the Beatles’ discography by instruments featured on each song to a taxonomical diagram of every species of bird in North America — a bestseller that Ben said took about four months of “pretty painstaking research, illustration, and design to complete.” Credit: Pop Chart The New York Times has dubbed Pop Chart “the poster mavens.” Fast Company described their posters as “catnip for uber-geeks.” Popular Science called them the “master of the infographic poster.” Now, Big Think is calling them a partner. On Pop Chart, we recently launched Big Think’s first-ever store, where you can find our “A Visual History of the Universe” poster, along with Big Think T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, notebooks, and much more. We’ll be designing and releasing many more posters over the coming months. It’s a natural partnership: Like Big Think, Pop Chart is always “uncovering deeper, surprising, and fascinating layers” about the world, Ben said. Big Think does that with articles and videos. Pop Chart turns those ideas into something worth hanging on your wall. Got an idea for a poster? Reach out to us anytime, and we might just make it. This article A visual history of the universe that fits on your wall is featured on Big Think.

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (or UAPs, formerly known as UFOs) are back in the news, with the U.S. Defense Department’s recent publication of (mostly old) case files, and the release of Steven Spielberg’s new film Disclosure Day on June 12. It’s unlikely that either will move us any closer to unraveling the mystery of UAPs. What might help, though, is a method for determining which of the thousands of sightings reported every year are truly worth investigating. Toward that end, we have proposed a rating scale meant to help citizens and scientists alike assess the reliability of UAP reports based on the type and quality of evidence. This won’t solve most cases (more than half of the sightings reviewed by the U.S. government’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) lack sufficient data for rigorous analysis). But it might help us reduce the number of “false alarms.”  We start from the premise that most UAP reports stem from misunderstandings — people seeing unfamiliar objects in the sky that, if investigated fully, would have an ordinary explanation. These objects range from balloons and drones (which together accounted for 91% of sightings between 1996 and 2024 that could be resolved by the AARO) to meteors, flocking birds, and even rare atmospheric phenomena such as “sprites” and “elves.”  It isn’t that people who mistakenly report ordinary objects as UAPs are dumb or dishonest. Most of the time, they’ve just seen something strange (to them) and want to know what it is. If you’ve never seen a bright fireball in the night sky or a train of Starlink satellites, it might well look like something from a sci-fi movie. Nor do we outright dismiss the idea that UAPs could be aliens. It’s entirely possible that other spacefaring civilizations exist in our galaxy, and even though the distances between stars are great, what would a 10,000-year journey matter to beings that live (perhaps in a dormant state) 100 times that long? The possibility that even one reported UAP could be evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life accounts for the ongoing public interest in the subject and makes it worth serious scientific and governmental investigation.  A proposed reliability scale for UAP reports How, then, does our rating scale rank reported sightings? We categorize them according to the quality of their evidence, considering such factors as the number of observers, whether there is supporting evidence (such as photos and video), and whether witnesses (or a third party) have made some kind of effort to find an ordinary explanation for what they saw or experienced.  10 — Long-duration sighting by multiple individuals/groups at different locations or recorded evidence from multiple sensors; physical evidence; reviewed by experts, and so far unexplained 9 — Long-duration sighting by multiple individuals/groups at different locations or recorded evidence from multiple sensors; physical evidence 8 — Long-duration sighting by multiple individuals/groups at different locations or recorded evidence from multiple sensors; reviewed by experts, and so far unexplained   7 — Long-duration sighting by multiple individuals/groups at different locations or recorded evidence from multiple sensors; plausibly explained, but the explanation is disputed 6 — Long-duration sighting by multiple individuals/groups at different locations or recorded evidence from multiple sensors 5 — Long-duration sighting by one person or group, with recorded evidence  4 — Long-duration sighting (more than ~10 seconds) by one person or group, no recorded evidence 3 — Short-duration sighting by one person or group, with recorded evidence 2 — Short-duration sighting by one person or group, researched but no recorded evidence 1 — Short-duration sighting (under ~10 seconds) by one person or group, not researched 0 — Sighting explained beyond a reasonable doubt as a known phenomenon or object That last step — attempting to find an ordinary explanation, which is required to rise from Category 1 in our scale to Category 2 and above — may be the most important in reducing the number of false alarms. Some UAP reporting organizations, such as the National UFO Reporting Center and Enigma Labs, offer likely explanations for some cases submitted online. Future systems using artificial intelligence will undoubtedly be able to explain even more. But even today, you might find your own explanation for a mysterious light in the sky with a bit of online research. A “Before You Report” checklist Toward that end, we urge UAP witnesses to take the time to do a simple self-guided check before reporting a sighting. Below is a list of possible UAP explanations along with sources you can check for each. Airplanes: FlightRadar24 or ADS-B Exchange Weather balloons: SondeHub Tracker Rocket launches or re-entries: U.S. Launch Range Locations or Vapor Tracers Meteors: American Meteor Society Satellites: N2YO.com Real Time Satellite Tracking or Starlink Satellite Map Military aircraft: This map of U.S. military bases to see where tests and overflights may have taken place. Many bases post notices of these events, and can answer queries through their public information offices. Unusual cloud formations: Cloud Appreciation Society Stars or planets: Stellarium Star Map Birds: BirdCast bird migration forecasts in real-time Drones: Interactive Map of UAV Drones over the USA (a very limited list of the estimated 8,500 public and private drones flying in U.S. airspace on any given day) For a sighting to be classified higher on our scale (Category 8 and above) requires a thorough, in-depth investigation by expert outside reviewers. This is particularly true for information collected by advanced sensors, whose specific capabilities (and possibilities for error) are often known only to a relatively small group of specialists. We suggest that this type of review be conducted by neutral parties (not associated with the UAP witness), consistent with the tradition of scientific peer review, and that it include people with professional backgrounds in science, engineering, psychology, and other relevant fields. These expert reviews could be done by the AARO or by a standing committee in a respected body such as the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics or the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Although it was not tasked to examine evidence for particular UAP claims, the 2023 NASA Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study could be a model for such an effort. Whoever the expert reviewers are, we should keep in mind that UAP sightings, by their very nature, pose a problem for scientific study, as they cannot be reproduced in a lab setting. Physical evidence is helpful, but also rare. Credibility in many cases hinges on the reliability of witness testimony, and positive proof will be difficult to come by even under the best circumstances.  Fortunately, there are a number of individuals and groups, including Metabunk, Skeptoid, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the Society for UAP Studies, making good-faith efforts to evaluate UAP evidence scientifically, with a critical eye. We are fully aware that even in cases where a plausible explanation is offered, arguments may continue. As a result, many cases are likely to rise no higher than Category VII, including some that have become famous in the UAP literature. In some cases, there’s likely never to be a final, authoritative verdict. To illustrate how our suggested rating scale might be applied, we rated two well-known UAP cases in a recent paper: the Council Bluffs case (Iowa, 1977) and the Nimitz “Tic Tac” encounters from 2004. We encourage everyone to keep an open mind about UAP and remember that even the most experienced observer can misinterpret what they’ve witnessed (veteran astronaut Scott Kelly’s remarks to the 2023 NASA study panel are instructive here). We hope that our rating scheme — or something like it — could help shed light on a mystery that continues to captivate the public. This article A new scale for spotting UFO reports worth investigating is featured on Big Think.

In the modern world, the sheer scale of human organizations has become overwhelming. The average Fortune 1000 company employs more than 30,000 people, with functional teams often numbering in the hundreds. Government and defense organizations are even larger. Yet, despite the common refrain that an organization’s most valuable asset is the intelligence and creativity of its people, we currently lack the ability to enable teams of even a dozen people to hold thoughtful, productive conversations. Instead, we rely on message-passing within rigid hierarchies, with insight and reasoning lost at each layer. We can also use polls and surveys to capture input at scale, but this strips away the nuance of human wisdom and eliminates the key element of group conversation: interactive deliberation. The value of a real-time discussion is that individuals can build on others’ ideas by debating options, offering new evidence, and converging on solutions that would not have emerged from any one person alone.  Even worse than polls or message-passing, a new trend is to use AI to capture input from individuals through automated surveys and interviews, and then distill it into conclusions. This replaces human deliberation with AI processing. I find this profoundly foolish. The human brain is not a source of data points for aggregation; it is a sophisticated data processor optimized for thoughtful deliberation with others. We should not be using AI to reduce groupwise human interactions. Instead, we should use AI to enable human teams to discuss, debate, and deliberate at scales we never thought possible. I am talking about inventing new forms of hyper-communication in which dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people can engage in productive conversations that efficiently converge on meaningful solutions.   This has been my focus as a computer scientist for over a decade, and I’m confident it will enable large human teams to amplify their collective intelligence, creativity, and productivity to unprecedented levels. In fact, I believe hyper-communication is a pathway to creating a “collective superintelligence” that performs at super-human levels while keeping humans in the loop — integrating not just our combined knowledge and expertise, but our values, morals, sensibilities, and interests. The biological blueprint: Nature’s “brain of brains”  The concept of amplifying intelligence through scalable group deliberation is not a human creation, but a natural survival strategy that has evolved in many social species, including schooling fish, flocking birds, and swarming bees. These organisms do not aggregate data through polls or surveys. They form real-time dynamic systems that “push and pull” on the decision space and converge on solutions that exceed the mental capacity of any individual member. Biologists refer to this as swarm intelligence.  Honeybees provide a classic example of swarm intelligence. When a bee colony must choose a new nesting site, they engage in a “waggle dance,” a collective deliberation in which hundreds of individuals vibrate their bodies to argue in favor of various options until the group reaches a threshold of support and converges on a solution. Research has shown that a “hive mind” of deliberating bees almost always selects the best solution across many competing constraints.  This process is strikingly similar to how the brain functions. In these colonies and human brains, large numbers of individual units (bees and neurons, respectively) work in parallel to weigh competing signals until a decision emerges. Because of these similarities, I often describe swarm intelligence as a “brain of brains” that can function together as a super-intelligent system. It’s not just bees that can form swarm intelligence. Many social species have evolved similar mechanisms, enabling them to solve problems that no individual member could on its own. Schools of fish are another powerful example. Each individual fish has a limited view of its surroundings depending on where it is in the school. Yet if multiple predators approach from different directions, the school can almost instantly find an optimal direction to escape toward. No individual could have seen the solution, but schooling fish form a brain of brains that can. How do fish do this? They have a special organ called a lateral line that detects pressure and vibration changes in the water around them, enabling each individual to monitor its neighbors’ intentions. In this way, every fish holds a “deliberation” with a small subset of nearby fish. The magic of a school is that each small group overlaps other small groups, enabling information to propagate across the full population. This allows thousands of members to engage in a multi-directional tug-of-war that quickly converges on solutions that maximize collective intent.  Why can’t humans deliberate at scale? If bees and fish can form a collective superintelligence through large-scale deliberation, why can’t humans do this? Ironically, the barrier is rooted in our collaborative superpower: language. Unlike other social species, which interact through physical signals, humans use sophisticated conversations that enable groups to discuss and debate, build on ideas, suggest alternatives, and identify risks — all while making arguments and counterarguments that can sway perspectives. The problem is that real-time interactive conversation is not naturally scalable.      Research suggests that the ideal size for a thoughtful discussion is only 4 to 7 people. At this scale, each person has enough “airtime” to express their views and low “wait-time” to respond to others. As groups grow larger, this dynamic collapses. By the time a group reaches 10 to 12 people, it becomes a series of monologues and soon, a one-to-many presentation. So how can we enable teams of 30, 300, or even 3,000 people to hold productive discussions? If we take our inspiration from Mother Nature, our approach might be to divide the full population into small deliberative subgroups, each sized for thoughtful conversation. Then, like a school of fish, we could place overlapping members within each conversational subgroup, enabling information to propagate across the entire population. Unfortunately, this fails in humans.  The reason is that we cannot be in two real-time conversations at once. Cognitive scientists call this “the cocktail party problem” because people often divide themselves into small subgroups at parties. The problem is simple: If you hear something interesting in a neighboring subgroup and shift your attention, you immediately lose track of the conversation you’re in. This seemed an insurmountable barrier until 2023, when I, along with my colleagues from Unanimous AI and Carnegie Mellon University, presented a study at IJCACI 2023 suggesting, for the first time, that networked human groups could hold thoughtful, real-time conversations at potentially unlimited scale. This solution was achieved by combining the biological principles of swarm intelligence with the power and flexibility of conversational AI agents. The key ingredient is a novel agent, a “conversational surrogate,” whose job is to do the one thing human brains can’t do: participate in multiple conversations at once. To be clear, the surrogate agent does not introduce new information into the deliberation; instead, it passes human insights among subgroups, thereby creating a unified, large-scale conversation. And because each subgroup is small — 1 to 7 people, plus an AI agent — all members have ample opportunity to express their thoughts or debate with others. My colleagues and I call this concept “conversational swarm intelligence” (or hyperchat for short). It refers to a network of AI agents that structure large human groups into a “conversational swarm.” The result is a scalable communication architecture that allows human groups of any size (even thousands of members) to discuss and debate issues in real time and quickly converge on solutions that leverage the combined knowledge, wisdom, insight, and creativity of the population. In fact, the hyperchat concept does not merely match the efficiency of biological swarms. It takes it to a new level.  Outperforming Mother Nature: From swarms to hyperswarms In biological swarms, information emerges in parallel but spreads throughout the system based on physical proximity (i.e., from individual to nearby individual, subgroup to neighboring subgroup). In fish, for example, when a threat is detected on one side of the school, that information must pass through all intervening subgroups to reach fish on the other side. This is not optimal. The hyperchat architecture uses the power and flexibility of AI agents to solve this problem by creating a conversational hyper-structure that efficiently shares conversational content among subgroups in the population.  As shown above, surrogate agents can pass information from one subgroup to any other subgroup. In addition, the hyperchat AI engine routes content intelligently by selecting insights to express in each local discussion that are most likely to challenge its members. This drives participants to reflect on their positions, either by adopting new insights or pushing back. In a research study presented at the 7th International Joint Conference on Advances in Computational Intelligence, my colleagues and I found that this greatly accelerates deliberation by enabling the full group to rapidly evaluate competing perspectives and converge on optimal solutions.  Does hyper-communication really work?  Our first academic study on hyperswarms was published in 2021 and used a simulation to assess whether large hyper-connected groups could overcome the single biggest problem of polls, surveys, and prediction markets — namely that the most popular perspective almost always wins, even if it’s not the “smartest.” The simulation predicted that hyper-structures, compared with traditional methods, should significantly increase the probability that smart ideas rise to the top based on merit rather than popularity.   Our first studies among real human groups were published in 2023 and 2025 by researchers at Unanimous AI and Carnegie Mellon University. The experiments used an online platform called Thinkscape and suggested that groups as large as 240 people could deliberate in real time using a hyperswarm structure mediated by surrogate AI agents. In these studies, large teams were able to productively discuss issues, brainstorm solutions, make decisions, forecast outcomes, and solve problems, consistently producing more efficient and accurate results than traditional methods. In one notable study we conducted, hyperconnected groups of 35 randomly selected people were given standard IQ test questions to deliberate as a conversational swarm. Remarkably, they performed, on average, at the 97th percentile (IQ = 128). This significantly outperformed the average individual (IQ=100) and traditional “wisdom of the crowd” methods (IQ=115). In fact, when connected by hyperchat AI technology, groups didn’t just beat the average member of their 35-person teams; they consistently outperformed every member of their teams. In our most recent preprint study from this year, groups of 25 random sports fans predicted 50 NBA basketball games against the Vegas spread. A typical individual achieves 50% accuracy in such predictions, while professional gamblers rarely exceed 55%. However, when deliberating in hyper-connected subgroups, these 25-person teams converged on predictions that achieved 62% accuracy against the spread. This outperformed the large-scale prediction market, Polymarket, which achieved 55% accuracy on the same set of games. Where is this technology headed? Based on my research so far, I believe that hyper-communication mediated by AI agents is the future of enterprise collaboration. It will enable large teams, whole divisions, or even entire companies to engage in thoughtful and productive conversations in which they efficiently share ideas, debate alternatives, brainstorm solutions, assess risks, forecast outcomes, and solve problems.  While these are significant benefits, my personal motivation for working on hyper-communication is that the alternative to scaling human collaboration is to replace it with AI. In fact, this is already happening in organizations that mistakenly believe processing data from humans is the same as enabling human groups to deliberate. It’s not the same. Processing data reduces people to statistics that loosely represent their thinking, while scaling deliberation enables teams to leverage their judgment and insight, harnessing not just human expertise, but human values, wisdom, and sensibilities. This is why I’ve been pursuing collective superintelligence — to keep humans in the loop. I believe that swarms of humans and AI agents will soon work together to solve problems that neither humans nor machines could solve on their own, with AI making the solutions smarter and humans making the solutions wiser. This is the motivation for collective superintelligence, to help keep the future human. This article Can 1,000 people have a meaningful conversation? AI may make it possible. is featured on Big Think.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman, PhD and physicist Sean Carroll, PhD challenge two assumptions we’re only beginning to question: that our reality is the reality, and that physics leaves no room for free will. Eagleman explains how genetics, brain wiring, and experience shape each person’s inner world. Carroll argues that even in a lawful universe, incomplete knowledge, counterfactual reasoning, and responsibility make our choices matter. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series. This video Your brain built a reality bubble. Literature, science, and philosophy can pop it. is featured on Big Think.

A new map of global mycorrhizal fungi details the massive scope of the vital systems The post Hidden Fungal Networks Could Stretch from the Earth to the Sun a Billion Times Over appeared first on Nautilus.

Extended DMT trips could help scientists probe a new theory of reality that puts consciousness first The post Turning the Psychedelic Experience into a Math Problem appeared first on Nautilus.

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From high-speed battering rams to gravity tractors, the technology exists to protect the planet. The question is whether humanity will act in time—and in concert. The post How to Stop a Killer Asteroid appeared first on Nautilus.

In the first episode of the new season of ‘The Joy of Why,’ Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna discusses how she discovered CRISPR’s genome-editing power, the breakthroughs and hurdles during its explosive growth, and what lies ahead for this groundbreaking technology. The post What’s the Future of Gene Editing? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

While we still can't explain how AI works, algorithms are rapidly learning what makes us tick. And the gap is widening. The post AI Is Advancing Faster Than Our Ability to Understand It, Researchers Warn appeared first on SingularityHub.