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“People often ask about this, and simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe,” said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who created the visualizations. “So I simulated two different scenarios, one where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out, and one where it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate.”

Researchers have discovered a kind of “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” embedded in the strings of “click” sounds the whales use to communicate and hunt.

Move over, graphene. There’s a new, improved two-dimensional material in the lab. Borophene, the atomically thin version of boron first synthesized in 2015, is more conductive, thinner, lighter, stronger and more flexible than graphene, the 2D version of carbon. Now, researchers at Penn State have made the material potentially more useful by imparting chirality — or handedness — on it, which could make for advanced sensors and implantable medical devices. The chirality, induced via a method never before used on borophene, enables the material to interact in unique ways with different biological units such as cells and protein precursors.

The team, led by Dipanjan Pan, Dorothy Foehr Huck & J. Lloyd Huck Chair Professor in Nanomedicine and professor of materials science and engineering and of nuclear engineering, published their work — the first of its kind, they said — in ACS Nano.

“Borophene is a very interesting material, as it resembles carbon very closely including its atomic weight and electron structure but with more remarkable properties. Researchers are only starting to explore its applications,” Pan said. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to understand the biological interactions of borophene and the first report of imparting chirality on borophene structures.”

The number of electric vehicles (EVs) exported from Germany rose sharply in 2023, meaning that EVs accounted for about one quarter of all car exports that year, the country’s statistical office Destatis has said.

The country exported about 786,000 fully electric cars for a total value of roughly €36 billion ($A61.8 billion) – an increase of 58 per cent compared to 2022.

The most important destinations for EVs produced in Germany were the Netherlands, the UK and Belgium, Destatis added. Imports of EVs to Germany climbed about 23 percent to 446,000 units, with more than a quarter coming from China.

Warren Buffett addressed Tesla’s Full Self-Driving over the weekend.

Neurons are important, but they are not everything. Indeed, it is “cartilage,” in the form of clusters of extracellular matrix molecules called chondroitin sulfates, located in the outside nerve cells, that plays a crucial role in the brain’s ability to acquire and store information.

Citri, A., Malenka, R. Synaptic Plasticity: Multiple Forms, Functions, and Mechanisms. Neuropsychopharmacol 33, 18–41 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.npp.

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Some problems of the very intuitive evolutionary emergentist paradigm trying to explain consciousness from neurons, thanks to Andrés Gómez Emilsson and Chris Percy at Qualia Research Institute:

The “Slicing Problem” is a thought experiment that raises questions for substrate-neutral computational theories of consciousness, particularly, in functionalist approaches.

The thought experiment uses water-based logic gates to construct a computer in a way that permits cleanly slicing each gate and connection in half, creating two identical computers each instantiating the same computation. The slicing can be reversed and repeated via an on/off switch, without changing the amount of matter in the system.