Kimi Antonelli ended Ferrari’s run at the top in Monaco as he set the fastest lap of the session for Mercedes.

After 50 years of searching, astronomers say they have finally found evidence of a long-sought "wind" blowing from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. "Unless a black hole exists in a perfect vacuum, it must blow a wind somehow. And there is no perfect vacuum in the universe," team co-leader and Northwestern University researcher Mark Gorski said in a statement. "With new observations, this is the first time we've had a clean enough view to see the wind's imprint. We looked at the data and said, 'There it is. There is the thing that everybody's been looking for for 50 years.'" Space.com reports: Scientists have been aware for some time that feeding black holes launch powerful outflows of material around them, including jets and winds. Winds are caused when matter falling to the black hole is accelerated to near light-speed, generating pressure that pushes infalling material away. That has been seen with ravenously feeding black holes before, but not the barely feeding Sgr A*. Its sparse consumption of material and the fact it is obscured by the plane of the Milky Way from our vantage point have made tracing this wind difficult.

Gorski's Northwestern colleague and team co-leader Lena Murchikova pointed out that the scientists were the first to detect molecular gas very close to Sgr A* feeding the supermassive black hole. That makes Sgr A* reassuringly like other supermassive black holes. "The wind is not powerful, and its direction probably wanders with time. It shows that our black hole is not unique, and our place in the universe is not unique," Murchikova added. "To observe our own black hole, we have to look through the plane of our galaxy. That means we have to peer through gas, dust and ionized structures, and you can't really see through all of that easily."

While the team's results confirm that Sgr A* is extremely quiet compared to the supermassive black holes that sit in bright, turbulent regions of other galaxies called active galactic nuclei (AGN), this black hole wind is no slouch. In fact, the scientists think that it has been raging for around 20,000 years. "The majority of other galaxies spend most of their lives in a state where they are not particularly active," Murchikova said. "But we can only see them when they are in a fireworks stage. It is very attractive to study black holes when they are in the fireworks stage, but that's not actually their dominant state. "Sgr A* finally gives us a window into the life of a black hole in this quiet state."
The team's research was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Een groep actievoerders van Extinction Rebellion hebben zaterdagmiddag meerdere ingangen van de Rotterdamse Cruise Terminal, waar het cruiseschip Mein Schiff 3 ligt, geblokkeerd. Tientallen cruisepassagiers konden hierdoor tijdelijk niet naar binnen. Er zijn vier actievoerders aangehouden.

Een groep actievoerders van Extinction Rebellion blokkeerden zaterdagmiddag meerdere ingangen van de Rotterdamse Cruise Terminal geblokkeerd, waar het cruiseschip Mein Schiff 3 ligt. Tientallen cruisepassagiers konden hierdoor tijdelijk niet naar binnen.

Een groep bewoners van het Rotterdamse Sportdorp hebben zaterdag hun wijk symbolisch uitgeroepen tot een monument. Met een kleinschalige actie aan de Atletiekstraat en de onthulling van een monumentenplaquette vroegen zij aandacht voor het behoud van hun buurt, waar mogelijk woningen gesloopt worden voor herontwikkeling.

De Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA) heeft volgens verschillende onderzoekers tussen de 40 en de 70 procent van de economische activiteiten op het eiland in handen. Washington noemt GAESA daarom „het hart van Cuba’s kleptocratische communistische systeem”.

BREUKELEN (ANP) - Theatermaakster en politica Agaath Witteman is vrijdag op 84-jarige leeftijd overleden. Ze stierf na een kort ziekbed, in het bijzijn van haar familie. Theaterproducent Matthijs Bongertman heeft dat zaterdag namens de familie aan het ANP bevestigd na berichtgeving door de Volkskrant.

Witteman was in 1984 een van de oprichters van vrouwentheatergroep Persona. Toneelstukken van de groep vertelden verhalen vanuit een vrouwelijk perspectief. In 1988 werd Witteman in Arnhem de artistiek leider van het net opgerichte Theater van het Oosten, waar zij vier jaar later na interne conflicten vertrok. Daarna werkte zij als freelancer onder meer bij Toneelgroep De Appel in Den Haag, het Noord Nederlands Toneel en theatergroep Het Toneel Speelt. Ook richtte zij een klein productiehuis op, Studio Antigone.

Tussen 2003 en 2007 zat Witteman voor de PvdA in de Eerste Kamer. Zij sprak in de senaat onder meer over wetgeving op het gebied van het cultureel erfgoed en was woordvoerster mediabeleid. Ook was zij voorzitter van de vaste senaatscommissie voor Cultuur. Witteman was tevens bijzonder hoogleraar kunst en cultuur aan de universiteit in Nijmegen en bestuurslid van Theater De Engelenbak in Amsterdam.

• Live qualifying updates from 3pm UK time

• Russell refuses to feel pressure amid title battle

• You can email Philip | Sign up for The Recap

Is there a better name for a nationality than Monegasque? Will the highlight of my weekend be typing “Monegasque” and “idiosyncrasies” correctly at the first time of trying?

Leclerc is talking to Martin Brundle and his earliest memory of watching the F1. He reckons it was Michael Schumacher in 2001, “and the red car won”. The German, of course, was in the Ferrari.

Continue reading...

Italian will start his first grand slam final as the underdog but he has shown he knows how to beat No 2 seed on clay

At almost the exact time Flavio Cobolli and Matteo Arnaldi had been scheduled to take to Court Philippe-Chatrier on Friday and contest the match of their lives, they could instead be located in the bowels of the stadium, their faces a picture of total misery inside the main interview room at Roland Garros.

If not for the seriousness of the situation, with Arnaldi forced to withdraw from his first grand slam semi-final due to a virus that had overwhelmed his body overnight, it would have been a comical sight. Somebody behind the scenes was not exactly of sound mind when they decided it was a good idea for Cobolli to sit next to an individual with a viral illness two days before his grand slam final.

Continue reading...

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that balanced it out, performed evasive maneuvers, decorated a love shack, and bred inside bones.

First, scientists discover a new “triple symmetry” on Earth that nobody can explain. Then: female dolphins keep tabs on coercive males, bowerbirds turn urban trash into urbane treasure, and the housing opportunities provided by dead dinos.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files. 

Triple symmetry all across the sky

Zhang, Jianhao et al. “Earth’s east–west albedo symmetry.” Nature.

Scientists have discovered an unexplained “triple symmetry” in Earth’s albedo, meaning its ability to reflect sunlight. The finding deepens the mystery of Earth’s oddly-balanced brightness contrasts, which has been well documented in the near-perfectly matched albedos of the northern and southern hemispheres, despite the very different geographies of these two halves of the planet.

Researchers led by Jianhao Zhang of the University of Colorado Boulder now report the existence of “a unique and persistent east-west (E-W) albedo symmetry: the 27° E meridian divides the planet into an Eastern Hemisphere and a Western Hemisphere that reflect nearly identical amounts of sunlight,” according to the team’s study. 

The hemispheres bisected by the 27° E meridian line have nearly-identical amounts of ice-free ocean, cloud cover, as well as planetary albedo, distinguishing this phenomenon as a “triple symmetry” that is distinct from the equatorially divided north-south symmetry, which only has matching albedos.

Zhang and his colleagues discovered the triple symmetry by examining 25 years of data (2001–2025) captured by NASA's Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) program. The satellite-mounted instruments measure the amount of solar energy Earth reflects back into space. 

The east-west symmetry persisted over this dataset, with its greatest variations linked to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). For this reason, the team emphasized that the symmetry is essential to accurate projections on a rapidly warming world. Currently, “all models fail to capture…the triple-symmetry feature,” a problem that may be ”contributing to the persistent uncertainty in climate projections,” according to the study.

As for what causes this symmetry, nobody knows. It could be just a strange coincidence, or even weirder, an unknown process of planetary equilibrium. As we reported last year, the north-south albedo symmetry may be fading as both hemispheres get darker, with more pronounced effects in the North, so scientists are leaning toward the weird coincidence hypothesis. 

“We cannot yet rule out the possibility that these hemispheric symmetries are simply coincidental features of the present climate state,” the team said in the study. “The importance of the E–W symmetry discovery, however, is beyond the identification of another ‘sweet spot’ of the Earth system.”

“It offers a powerful…constraint on state-of-the-art [Earth system models] and, more broadly, on our fundamental understanding of the Earth climate system,” the researchers concluded. 

In other news…

Bottlenose bullies get bad reputations  

Bouchard, Alice et al. “Female dolphins use individual vocal labels to track coercive males.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Female dolphins avoid sexually coercive males by keeping track of their signature whistles, according to scientists who observed how wild female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins reacted to recorded playbacks of male vocalizations in the waters of Shark Bay, Australia. 

To secure mating opportunities, coercive males “will bite, hit, or charge the female, chase her…and produce threat vocalizations termed pops—all to intimidate the female and control her movements,” said researchers led by Alice Bouchard of the University of Bristol. “Indeed, pops are only produced by males” and act “as an agonistic ‘come-hither’ signal, inducing the female to stay close to the popping male.” 

Who could have guessed the term “popping male” could be so ominous? No wonder female dolphins keep them at fin’s length. Along those lines, the team found that females showed aversive responses to the recorded whistles of males known to have been coercive in the past.

Females appear to use “individual vocal labels to guide reproductive decision-making based on their experience of individual male behavior,” according to the study. Call it a whistle campaign.

Look at this stuff, isn’t it neat? This is how I reproductively compete

Evans, Caitlin F. and Kelley, Laura A. “Urbanization alters courtship signals in male great bowerbirds.” Royal Society Open Science.

For every popping dolphin in the seas, there is a lover bird in the trees. For the male great bowerbird (Chlamydera nuchalis), the key to attracting females isn’t biting or coercion, but the construction of elaborate shelters called bowers decorated with carefully selected trinkets for the enjoyment of potential mates. 

Scientists have now discovered that urban bowerbirds may have an edge in their game compared to their rural counterparts, thanks to the dazzling decor options that can be upcycled from their city environments. 

The team catalogued nearly 4,000 decorations collected by Australian bowerbirds at Dreghorn Cattle Station, the rural site, and their urban counterparts in, literally, Townsville (the children’s book writes itself). The results suggest that "urban males may represent an adaptive change to a more attractive display, and that rural males are restricted in their displays by the materials available in their environment.”

“The two most common decorations in rural areas were green glass and green leaves/seeds, and in urban areas the two most common decorations were green glass and red wire,” said authors Caitlin F. Evans and Laura A. Kelley of the University of Exeter, “Decorations on urban bowers were over 10 times more likely to be anthropogenic…than decorations on rural bowers.” 

While the city birds may have an easier time finding flashy ornaments, the use of plastics and other human-generated trash have posed dangers, such as entanglement or ingestion, for other species, though it has not been confirmed in bowerbirds. Glass shards and scarlet wires may make for beautiful displays, but never discount the risk of fatal attraction.  

I’m so hungry, I could eat a titanosaur

Belaústegui, Zain et al. “The fossil record of insect bone bioerosion: Insights from titanosaur remains at Lo Hueco (Late Cretaceous, Spain) and implications for continental ichnofacies.” Earth-Science Reviews.

We’ll end, as all things should, with a 30,000-pound feast. Titanosaurs, the largest family of animals ever to walk on land, were so enormous as adults that predators basically left them alone (though they made for easy pickings as youngsters). 

But once these dinosaurs shuffled off their metric-ton mortal coils, their corpses were devoured by scavengers—including small insects that bore into their bones, leaving permanent structures in their fossilized remains, known as “ichnofacies.” 

In a new study, paleontologists mapped out the pits, holes, burrows, and trails etched into Cretaceous titanosaur bones deposited in the exquisitely well-preserved Lo Hueco site in Cuenca, Spain. In particular, the results revealed idiosyncratic pupation chambers likely dug out by flesh-eating Cubiculum beetles to deposit larvae. The structures suggest that the dead dinos were exposed to open air for weeks on ancient floodplains as beetles were born and bred in their bones.

“Given the size of the titanosaurs…it is likely that at least part of their carcasses remained dry for long periods of time (several days and even months), and hence, to constitute a perfect scenario for insect colonization,” said researchers led by Zain Belaústegui of the University of Barcelona. “The large size of the carcasses involved (i.e., tons of decaying organic matter) may support specific and stable ecosystems during long periods of time.”

In other words, titanosaur skeletons served as luxury mansions long after their death, with beetle colonies etching in the equivalent of “we were here” notes that have lasted for 70 million years.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.