Astronomers have seen the most energetic cosmic explosions yet, a new class of eruptions termed "extreme nuclear transients" (ENTs). These rare events occur when stars at least three times more massive than our Sun are shredded by supermassive black holes. While such cataclysmic events have been known for years, recent flares detected in galactic centres revealed a brightness nearly ten times greater than typical tidal disruption events. The discovery offers new insight into black hole behaviour and energy release in the universe's most extreme environments.Extreme Flares Detected by Gaia and ZTF Reveal Most Energetic Black Hole Events YetAs per a June 4 Science Advances report, lead researcher Jason Hinkle of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy noticed two mysterious flares from galactic cores in 2016 and 2018, recorded by the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft. The scientists recognised them as ENTs because a third one, observed in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility, has similar characteristics. These outbursts gave out more energy than supernovae did, and they lasted much longer than short bursts typically seen during tidal disruption events.Tidal disruption events such as Gaia18cdj are associated with flares that are explosive and long-duration. These explosions are greater than 100 times as intense as supernovas and have been occurring for millions to billions of years. They make ENTs an uncommon, energetic, and long-lived event that cosmic explorers might use.The ENTs' brightness lets astronomers focus on distant galactic centres, as well as the feeding habits of black holes in the universe's early days. "These flares are shining a light on the growth of supermassive black holes in the universe," mentioned co-author Benjamin Shappee, a Hubble fellow at IfA. Their visibility on large scales provides a statistical tool for cosmological studies in the future.Such findings are expanding what astrophysicists know about ENTs-but researchers stress that they're not done wrapping their heads around these mysterious objects just yet. The results might also advance new models of how black holes and stars work together and how energy moves across galaxies. Given upcoming missions with better instruments, the discovery of more ENTs will help astronomers learn even more about these violent events in the cosmos. For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube. Gadgets 360 Staff The resident bot. If you email me, a human will respond. More

AlienScreenRant, Ridley Scott explained how he’s done with the franchise, and reveals his true feelings about the franchise, beyond the films that he directed.Suggested ReadingBlasphemous 2 Developer Interview Share SubtitlesOffEnglishview videoSuggested ReadingBlasphemous 2 Developer Interview Share SubtitlesOffEnglishScott laid the groundwork for what the Alien franchise became. The first film establishes its setting, the Nostromo spaceship, as a claustrophobic labyrinth that induces more terror than the Xenomorph hunting and killing its crew members, and the moment a tiny alien bursts through the chest of Kane (John Hurt) is burned into the memory of anyone who saw it. While Scott returned to direct the 2012 prequel film Prometheus and 2017's Alien Covenant, he knows his time with the Alien franchise is likely done. “Where it’s going now, I think I’ve done enough, and I just hope it goes further.”His time with the franchise may be done, but he’s still probably the most trusted authority on what does and doesn’t work in Alien films. To him, the series “deadened after 4,” referring to 1997's Alien: Resurrection film. Part of the reason he thought there was nowhere else the franchise could go after the Jean-Pierre Jeunet-directed film is because he just didn’t think the movies after his and James Cameron’s films were that good.“I think mine was pretty damn good, and I think Jim’s was good, and I have to say the rest were not very good. And I thought, ‘Fuck, that’s the end of a franchise which should be as important as bloody Star Trek or Star Wars,’ which I think is phenomenal.” He did have very nice things to say about Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth TV series coming to FX starting August 12. As an executive producer on the show, Scott told The Hollywood Reporter that he appreciated how Hawley definitely respected the original Alien.” As he made clear, there’s much of the Alien franchise Scott doesn’t like, so him praising the upcoming series bodes well for the saga’s upcoming earthbound chapter.

Astronomers have spotted something strange and spectacular: a mysterious object that keeps emitting pulses every 44 minutes.In a press release from Australia's Curtin University, which was part of the international team that detected the object just 15,000 light-years away in our Milky Way galaxy, astronomers explained that the find was all the more stunning because the signal is coming in the form of both X-rays and radio waves.The object, which was named ASKAP J1832-0911 after Australia's ASKAP radio telescope that was used to detect it, was discovered emitting two-minute-long pulses that would pause and then repeat 44 minutes later. As the Curtin press release explains, the researchers lucked out when they realized that NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory was observing the same part of the sky and detected the same repeating signal in X-ray form.This dual-natured pulse belongs to a newly-discovered class of space phenomena known as "long-period radio transients," or LPTs for short.Discovered in 2022 by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research — which also sponsored this latest study — these mystery pulses have unknown origins and occur in fixed intervals of minutes or hours. They're considered by astronomers to be remarkably slow as compared to the signals emitted by pulsars, those rapidly-rotating stars that send out similar bursts every few milliseconds when their poles point in Earth's direction.In the years since they were first discovered, astronomers around the world have only detected some 10 other LPTs — but before now, none have been run through X-ray telescopes as well.According to Ziteng "Andy" Wang, an ICRAR-affiliated Curtin astronomer and the lead author a paper about the finding that was just published in the journal Nature, discovering the dual nature of LPTs in such a coincidental manner "felt like finding a needle in a haystack.""The ASKAP radio telescope has a wide field view of the night sky, while Chandra observes only a fraction of it," Wang explained in the Curtin press release. "So, it was fortunate that Chandra observed the same area of the night sky at the same time."Because LPTs are such a new phenomenon to astronomers, they can't say for sure what causes them.When the first of them were discovered, astronomers posited that they could be coming from magnetars, a type of neutron star with extremely strong magnetic fields that also emit radio pulses at faster intervals, leading to the ICRAR team positing that they may have an "ultra-long-period magnetar" on their hands.While the magnetar theory appears to have been scrapped, the astronomers behind this update in LPT knowledge are hopeful that it will help them figure out what these strange, slow pulses are about."This object is unlike anything we have seen before," said Wang.Share This Article

Best of the rest Research roundup: 7 stories we almost missed Also: drumming chimpanzees, picking styles of two jazz greats, and an ancient underground city's soundscape Jennifer Ouellette – May 31, 2025 5:37 pm | 4 Time lapse photos show a new ping-pong-playing robot performing a top spin. Credit: David Nguyen, Kendrick Cancio and Sangbae Kim Time lapse photos show a new ping-pong-playing robot performing a top spin. Credit: David Nguyen, Kendrick Cancio and Sangbae Kim Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. May's list includes a nifty experiment to make a predicted effect of special relativity visible; a ping-pong playing robot that can return hits with 88 percent accuracy; and the discovery of the rare genetic mutation that makes orange cats orange, among other highlights. Special relativity made visible Credit: TU Wien Perhaps the most well-known feature of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity is time dilation and length contraction. In 1959, two physicists predicted another feature of relativistic motion: an object moving near the speed of light should also appear to be rotated. It's not been possible to demonstrate this experimentally, however—until now. Physicists at the Vienna University of Technology figured out how to reproduce this rotational effect in the lab using laser pulses and precision cameras, according to a paper published in the journal Communications Physics. They found their inspiration in art, specifically an earlier collaboration with an artist named Enar de Dios Rodriguez, who collaborated with VUT and the University of Vienna on a project involving ultra-fast photography and slow light. For this latest research, they used objects shaped like a cube and a sphere and moved them around the lab while zapping them with ultrashort laser pulses, recording the flashes with a high-speed camera. Getting the timing just right effectively yields similar results to a light speed of 2 m/s. After photographing the objects many times using this method, the team then combined the still images into a single image. The results: the cube looked twisted and the sphere's North Pole was in a different location—a demonstration of the rotational effect predicted back in 1959. DOI: Communications Physics, 2025. 10.1038/s42005-025-02003-6  (About DOIs). Drumming chimpanzees A chimpanzee feeling the rhythm. Credit: Current Biology/Eleuteri et al., 2025. Chimpanzees are known to "drum" on the roots of trees as a means of communication, often combining that action with what are known as "pant-hoot" vocalizations (see above video). Scientists have found that the chimps' drumming exhibits key elements of musical rhythm much like humans, according to  a paper published in the journal Current Biology—specifically non-random timing and isochrony. And chimps from different geographical regions have different drumming rhythms. Back in 2022, the same team observed that individual chimps had unique styles of "buttress drumming," which served as a kind of communication, letting others in the same group know their identity, location, and activity. This time around they wanted to know if this was also true of chimps living in different groups and whether their drumming was rhythmic in nature. So they collected video footage of the drumming behavior among 11 chimpanzee communities across six populations in East Africa (Uganda) and West Africa (Ivory Coast), amounting to 371 drumming bouts. Their analysis of the drum patterns confirmed their hypothesis. The western chimps drummed in regularly spaced hits, used faster tempos, and started drumming earlier during their pant-hoot vocalizations. Eastern chimps would alternate between shorter and longer spaced hits. Since this kind of rhythmic percussion is one of the earliest evolved forms of human musical expression and is ubiquitous across cultures, findings such as this could shed light on how our love of rhythm evolved. DOI: Current Biology, 2025. 10.1016/j.cub.2025.04.019  (About DOIs). Distinctive styles of two jazz greats Jazz lovers likely need no introduction to Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery, 20th century guitarists who influenced generations of jazz musicians with their innovative techniques. Montgomery, for instance, didn't use a pick, preferring to pluck the strings with his thumb—a method he developed because he practiced at night after working all day as a machinist and didn't want to wake his children or neighbors. Pass developed his own range of picking techniques, including fingerpicking, hybrid picking, and "flat picking." Chirag Gokani and Preston Wilson, both with Applied Research Laboratories and the University of Texas, Austin, greatly admired both Pass and Montgomery and decided to explore the underlying the acoustics of their distinctive playing, modeling the interactions of the thumb, fingers, and pick with a guitar string. They described their research during a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in New Orleans, LA. Among their findings: Montgomery achieved his warm tone by playing closer to the bridge and mostly plucking at the string. Pass's rich tone arose from a combination of using a pick and playing closer to the guitar neck. There were also differences in how much a thumb, finger, and pick slip off the string:  use of the thumb (Montgomery) produced more of a "pluck" compared to the pick (Pass), which produced more of a "strike." Gokani and Wilson think their model could be used to synthesize digital guitars with a more realistic sound, as well as helping guitarists better emulate Pass and Montgomery. Sounds of an ancient underground city Credit: Sezin Nas Turkey is home to the underground city Derinkuyu, originally carved out inside soft volcanic rock around the 8th century BCE. It was later expanded to include four main ventilation channels (and some 50,000 smaller shafts) serving seven levels, which could be closed off from the inside with a large rolling stone. The city could hold up to 20,000 people and it  was connected to another underground city, Kaymakli, via tunnels. Derinkuyu helped protect Arab Muslims during the Arab-Byzantine wars, served as a refuge from the Ottomans in the 14th century, and as a haven for Armenians escaping persecution in the early 20th century, among other functions. The tunnels were rediscovered in the 1960s and about half of the city has been open to visitors since 2016. The site is naturally of great archaeological interest, but there has been little to no research on the acoustics of the site, particularly the ventilation channels—one of Derinkuyu's most unique features, according to Sezin Nas, an architectural acoustician at Istanbul Galata University in Turkey.  She gave a talk at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in New Orleans, LA, about her work on the site's acoustic environment. Nas analyzed a church, a living area, and a kitchen, measuring sound sources and reverberation patterns, among other factors, to create a 3D virtual soundscape. The hope is that a better understanding of this aspect of Derinkuyu could improve the design of future underground urban spaces—as well as one day using her virtual soundscape to enable visitors to experience the sounds of the city themselves. MIT's latest ping-pong robot Robots playing ping-pong have been a thing since the 1980s, of particular interest to scientists because it requires the robot to combine the slow, precise ability to grasp and pick up objects with dynamic, adaptable locomotion. Such robots need high-speed machine vision, fast motors and actuators, precise control, and the ability to make accurate predictions in real time, not to mention being able to develop a game strategy. More recent designs use AI techniques to allow the robots to "learn" from prior data to improve their performance. MIT researchers have built their own version of a ping-pong playing robot, incorporating a lightweight design and the ability to precisely return shots. They built on prior work developing the Humanoid, a small bipedal two-armed robot—specifically, modifying the Humanoid's arm by adding an extra degree of freedom to the wrist so the robot could control a ping-pong paddle. They tested their robot by mounting it on a ping-pong table and lobbing 150 balls at it from the other side of the table, capturing the action with high-speed cameras. The new bot can execute three different swing types (loop, drive, and chip) and during the trial runs it returned the ball with impressive accuracy across all three types: 88.4 percent, 89.2 percent, and 87.5 percent, respectively. Subsequent tweaks to theirrystem brought the robot's strike speed up to 19 meters per second (about 42 MPH), close to the 12 to 25 meters per second of advanced human players. The addition of control algorithms gave the robot the ability to aim. The robot still has limited mobility and reach because it has to be fixed to the ping-pong table but the MIT researchers plan to rig it to a gantry or wheeled platform in the future to address that shortcoming. Why orange cats are orange Credit: Astropulse/CC BY-SA 3.0 Cat lovers know orange cats are special for more than their unique coloring, but that's the quality that has intrigued scientists for almost a century. Sure, lots of animals have orange, ginger, or yellow hues, like tigers, orangutans, and golden retrievers. But in domestic cats that color is specifically linked to sex. Almost all orange cats are male. Scientists have now identified the genetic mutation responsible and it appears to be unique to cats, according to a paper published in the journal Current Biology. Prior work had narrowed down the region on the X chromosome most likely to contain the relevant mutation. The scientists knew that females usually have just one copy of the mutation and in that case have tortoiseshell (partially orange) coloring, although in rare cases, a female cat will be orange if both X chromosomes have the mutation. Over the last five to ten years, there has been an explosion in genome resources (including complete sequenced genomes) for cats which greatly aided the team's research, along with taking additional DNA samples from cats at spay and neuter clinics. From an initial pool of 51 candidate variants, the scientists narrowed it down to three genes, only one of which was likely to play any role in gene regulation: Arhgap36. It wasn't known to play any role in pigment cells in humans, mice, or non-orange cats. But orange cats are special; their mutation (sex-linked orange) turns on Arhgap36 expression in pigment cells (and only pigment cells), thereby interfering with the molecular pathway that controls coat color in other orange-shaded mammals. The scientists suggest that this is an example of how genes can acquire new functions, thereby enabling species to better adapt and evolve. DOI: Current Biology, 2025. 10.1016/j.cub.2025.03.075  (About DOIs). Not a Roman "massacre" after all Credit: Martin Smith In 1936, archaeologists excavating the Iron Age hill fort Maiden Castle in the UK unearthed dozens of human skeletons, all showing signs of lethal injuries to the head and upper body—likely inflicted with weaponry. At the time, this was interpreted as evidence of a pitched battle between the Britons of the local Durotriges tribe and invading Romans. The Romans slaughtered the native inhabitants, thereby bringing a sudden violent end to the Iron Age. At least that's the popular narrative that has prevailed ever since in countless popular articles, books, and documentaries. But a paper published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology calls that narrative into question. Archaeologists at Bournemouth University have re-analyzed those burials, incorporating radiocarbon dating into their efforts. They concluded that those individuals didn't die in a single brutal battle. Rather, it was Britons killing other Britons over multiple generations between the first century BCE and the first century CE—most likely in periodic localized outbursts of violence in the lead-up to the Roman conquest of Britain. It's possible there are still many human remains waiting to be discovered at the site, which could shed further light on what happened at Maiden Castle. DOI: Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 2025. 10.1111/ojoa.12324  (About DOIs). Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 4 Comments

A swirling sea of pink, where fluffy tufts float majestically upward, while elsewhere violet plumes rain down from above. This is the Sun as seen in groundbreaking new images — and they're unlike anything you've ever laid eyes on.As detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, scientists have leveraged new coronal adaptive optics tech to bypass the blurriness caused by the turbulence of the Earth's atmosphere, a time-old obstacle that's frustrated astronomers' attempts to see features on our home star at a resolution better than 620 miles. Now, they've gotten it down to just under 40 miles — a light year sized leap.The result is some of the clearest images to date of the fine structures that make up the Sun's formidable corona, the outermost layer of its atmosphere known for its unbelievable temperatures and violent, unpredictable outbursts.The authors are optimistic that their blur-bypassing techniques will be a game-changer."These are by far the most detailed observations of this kind, showing features not previously observed, and it's not quite clear what they are," coauthor Vasyl Yurchyshyn, a research professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology's Center for Terrestrial Research (CSTR), said in a statement about the work."It is super exciting to build an instrument that shows us the Sun like never before," echoed lead author Dirk Schmidt, an adaptive optics scientist at the US National Solar Observatory.Stretching for millions of miles into space, the corona is the staging ground for the Sun's violent outbursts, which range from solar storms, to solar flares, to coronal mass ejections. One reason scientists are interested in these phenomena is because they continue to batter our own planet's atmosphere, playing a significant role in the Earth's climate and wreaking havoc on our electronics. Then, at a reach totally beyond our very limited human purview, is the corona's mighty solar wind, which sweeps across the entire solar system, shielding it from cosmic rays.But astronomers are still trying to understand how these solar phenomena occur. One abiding mystery is why the corona can reach temperatures in the millions of degrees Fahrenheit, when the Sun's surface it sits thousands of miles above is no more than a relatively cool 10,000 degrees. The conundrum even has a name: the coronal heating problem.The level of detailed captured in the latest images, taken with an adaptive optics system installed on the Goode Solar Telescope at the CSTR, could be transformative in probing these mysteries.One type of feature the unprecedented resolution revealed were solar prominences, which are large, flashy structures that protrude from the sun's surface, found in twisty shapes like arches or loops. A spectacular video shows a solar prominence swirling like a tortured water spout as it's whipped around by the sun's magnetic field.Most awe-inspiring of all are the examples of what's known as coronal rain. Appearing like waterfalls suspended in midair, the phenomenon is caused as plasma cools and condenses into huge globs before crashing down to the sun's surface. These were imaged at a scale smaller than 100 kilometers, or about 62 miles. In solar terms, that's pinpoint accuracy."With coronal adaptive optics now in operation, this marks the beginning of a new era in solar physics, promising many more discoveries in the years and decades to come," said coauthor  Philip R. Goode at the CSTR in a statement.More on our solar system: Scientists Detect Mysterious Object in Deep Solar SystemShare This Article