James Webb Space Telescope posted a photo:

If it’s invisible, how do you map it and why does it *matter*?

Using Webb data, researchers mapped locations of dark matter (shown in blue) across a field of nearly 800,000 galaxies. This area of the sky is about 2.5 times larger than the full Moon, located in the constellation Sextans.

We can’t see dark matter. It doesn’t emit, reflect, absorb, or block light. How can we tell it's there? The answer is gravity. Dark matter, like everything with mass, has gravity, and we can see the effect it has on space, and light traveling through space. If we observe how and where light is being warped by gravity, we can make a map of the matter warping it, even if that matter is invisible to us.

The Webb data show how dark matter overlaps and intertwines with regular matter; it’s the invisible scaffolding of the universe. When we see a big cluster of thousands of galaxies, there is an equally massive amount of dark matter in the same place.

So why does dark matter matter? Dark matter has actually shaped the universe. As the early universe evolved, scientists think dark matter started clumping together first, eventually pulling regular matter together, prompting galaxy and star formation to begin earlier than they might have otherwise. All this created the conditions for planets to eventually form. It was in the first generation of stars that the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were made, and through star death that those elements were dispersed. Dark matter provided more time for complex planets to form and gave us the elements for life to appear on Earth.

Scientists will use the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope for wider field mapping of dark matter, and a next generation telescope concept like the Habitable Worlds Observatory will help with more detailed views.

Credit: NASA/STScI/J. DePasquale/A. Pagan

Read more: www.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasa-reveals-new-details-about...

Image description: Image of nearly 800,000 galaxies appearing as points of white in varying sizes overlaid with a map of dark matter, shown in varying opacities of light blue.

DUBAI (ANP) - Tallon Griekspoor staat in de halve finale van het toernooi van Dubai. De beste Nederlandse tennisser boekte een knappe zege op Jakub Mensik: 6-3 3-6 6-2.

Griekspoor stuit in de halve finale op de Rus Andrej Roeblev. Mensik steekt dit jaar in uitstekende vorm. De Tsjech boekte al dertien overwinningen en schakelde vorige week Jannik Sinner uit in Doha.

De 29-jarige Griekspoor nam een voorsprong van 4-2 in de eerste set en won vervolgens twee servicebeurten op rij. De in Haarlem geboren tennisser kwam in de tweede set met 1-4 achter en slaagde er niet meer in die achterstand te repareren. Griekspoor domineerde de derde set en liep uit naar een fraaie zege.

UTRECHT (ANP) - In de binnenstad van Utrecht heeft zich aan het begin van de avond een groep van 150 tot 200 mensen verzameld die tegen het extreemrechtse Defend Netherlands demonstreren. De groep roept leuzen als "nooit meer fascisme". De politie is in de buurt aanwezig.

De groep is naar het politiek-culturele centrum ACU gelopen. Daar wil Defend Netherlands in de avond een herdenking houden voor de Franse uiterst-rechtse activist Quentin Deranque, die vorige week in Lyon werd doodgeslagen tijdens een gevecht met vermeende radicaal-linkse activisten. Onduidelijk is of en hoeveel mensen er komen.

Het ACU besloot uit voorzorg de deuren donderdag dicht te houden. Antifascistische demonstranten zeggen het ACU te willen beschermen.

We asked F1 TV analyst and IndyCar race winner James Hinchcliffe what exactly makes that relationship work, and the key traits a driver looks for in their ideal race engineer.

Scientists say DNA evidence indicates male Neanderthals and human females interbred more often than opposite

Tens of thousands of years ago, as modern humans migrated into northerly territories inhabited by our ancient cousins, the Neanderthals, the two species met – and sometimes mated.

Now, genetic evidence has revealed a striking imbalance in these prehistoric trysts, suggesting that interbreeding was mostly between male Neanderthals and female humans.

Continue reading...

Zo’n 50.000 jaar geleden was er geregeld seksueel contact tussen neanderthalers en Homo sapiens. Nu blijkt dat het vooral ging om neandermannen en sapiensvrouwen. Hoe dat contact verliep, is pure speculatie.

De website zorgde op zich voor het juiste vakantiegevoel: Traum-Fehrienwohnungen. Maar meer dan een droom werd het niet. Ter plaatse bleek het vakantiehuisje niet te bestaan. Vooral Duitse toeristen zijn de dupe.

Meet Bogdan Peschir, the crypto trader who allegedly traded virtual "fire phoenixes" to try and swing the Romanian presidential election. [Archive] Using nearly $1 million in TikTok gifts to recruit an army of influencers, the user known as "Bogpr" helped catapult a fringe, far-right candidate from 1% in the polls to a shocking first-place victory in the first round runoff. Romanian intelligence suggests this was a masterclass in Russian hybrid warfare, complete with 25,000 "live" bots and SVR hacking units working to subvert democracy in a country where nearly half the population are TikTok users.

Romania eventually threw out this first round of voting and disqualified Georgescu with the far more centrist candidate Nicușor Dan defeating Georgescu's similarly extremist replacement.

A fictional memo set in June 2028, published by short seller Citrini Research, wiped roughly $10 billion off Indian IT stocks in a single trading session on February 24 and sent the Nifty IT index down as much as 5.3% -- its worst single-day fall since August 2023 -- on the argument that AI coding agents have collapsed the cost advantage of Indian developers to the price of electricity. The index has shed more than $68 billion in market value in February alone, its worst month since 2003.

But the core claim that India's entire $205 billion software export industry rests on cheap labor is roughly 15 years out of date, an analysis argues, custom application maintenance alone accounts for about 35% of a typical Indian IT firm's revenue, per HSBC, and enterprise platforms require deterministic outputs that probabilistic AI systems cannot wholesale replace. HSBC estimates gross AI-led revenue deflation for the sector at 14-16%, a measured headwind rather than an extinction event. The story adds: 24 years of software export data that has never posted a decline, $200 billion in annual revenue, partnerships with the very AI labs whose products are supposed to be the instrument of the sector's destruction, possibly a new $1.5 trillion market category emerging at the intersection of services and software, and the largest U.S. corporates in the middle of mapping their entire workforces into process architectures that require technology partners to modernise. I think India's IT is going to be fine.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.