Observed

Humpback Whale Sex Observed for the First Time Ever, between Two MalesPhotographers captured a healthy male humpback penetrating a weaker individual in the first record of humpback whale sexBy Melissa HobsonA male humpback whale dubbed Whale B was seen copulating with another male, Whale A, in the first-ever documented case of humpback whale mating. Credit: Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi RomanoEach year humpback whales travel thousands of miles from their polar feeding grounds to the tropical waters where they mate, give…

Gone are the days when we associated sharks with Steven Spielberg’s terrifying Jaws. Now, we celebrate all new marine life, including the species that has so often been misunderstood.And in marine life news, a special announcement has been made about the first-ever sighting of a live newborn great white.Great whites, the largest predatory sharks in the world with the most fatal attacks on humans, are tough to imagine as newborn babies. That is partially because it seems no one has seen one in the wild until now, the…

A dramedy that chronicles a tour of the Holocaust? Wait a minute, does that ring a bell? Nitesh Tiwari's Bawaal with its disastrous use of Auschwitz as a metaphor for relationship issues immediately comes to mind. None of that embarrassment occurs in A Real Pain, the new film by actor-director Jesse Eisenberg, which marked its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this year. For all its playfulness and humour, A Real Pain strikes an intimate balance between the horrifying history of the Holocaust and the…

Researchers, using the James Webb Space Telescope, have discovered the oldest known black hole, challenging existing theories about black hole formation. This discovery, considered a significant advancement in astronomy, could lead to the identification of even older black holes and deepen understanding of their origins. Credit: SciTechDaily.comAstronomers have discovered the universe’s oldest black hole with the JWST, challenging current theories of black hole growth and potentially impacting the development of its host…

In a magnificent first, we finally have direct observational evidence of the stellar process that produces neutron stars and black holes.From a supernova that exploded in a nearby galaxy, astronomers observed the emergence of something with the hallmarks of such compact objects. It's not clear which kind, neutron star or black hole, but the finding finally confirms that the core collapse of massive stars produces the densest objects in the Universe, in a spectacular explosion of stellar material.Stellar-mass black holes…

Musician turned film-maker Amanda Kramer gave us a retro campy reverie of queer longing in her previous feature Please Baby Please which, though interesting, was oddly unsatisfying and insubstantial. This works much better: a genuinely strange and unsettling creation whose meaning and form can’t quite be pinned down.It appears to be an imaginary standalone primetime US TV special which went out in some alternative dream-universe between 1975 and 1985; it is centred on one particular star, a brassy, heart-on-sleeve…

The schematic diagram for extracting contextuality from three-party nonlocality. Credit: Image by Zheng-Hao Liu, et al.A team of scientists studied the single-system version of multipartite Bell nonlocality, and observed the highest degree of quantum contextuality in a single system. Their work was published in Physical Review Letters. They were led by Prof. Chuanfeng Li and Prof. Jinshi Xu from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), collaborating with Prof.…

A group of researchers discovered the most distant active black hole we’ve ever observed, at least so far. The discovery was made using the James Webb Space Telescope. Astronomers say they made the discovery in the galaxy CEERS 1019, which is believed to have existed over 570 million years after the big bang, according to a report from NASA. The black hole found in this galaxy is also intriguing because it is much smaller than astronomers expected it to be, especially for the time that it existed. Evidence of…

(A) Location map of the Central Volcanic Zone (CVZ) of the Andes, including the Northern, Southern, and Austral Volcanic Zones (NVZ, SVZ, and AVZ, respectively), showing the Lastarria volcano as a red triangle. (B) General view of the northern side of Lastarria volcano, including the four fumarolic fields (F1–F4). (C) Drone photographs of the fumarolic field 1 (F1), showing the location of the 2019 sulfur flows (samples F1A and F2; coordinate 25.1552°S,…

With the help of citizen scientists, astronomers discovered what may be the last three planets that the Kepler Space Telescope saw before it was retired. This illustration depicts NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, which retired in October 2018, and three planets discovered in its final days of data. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech (K. Walbolt)In its final days of operation in 2018, <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>NASA</div><div…