Dick Advocaat en Cor Pot gaan niet als bondscoach van Curaçao naar het WK voetbal. Fred Rutten neemt de taken van Advocaat over bij het eindtoernooi in Noord en Midden-Amerika.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Bij de bordesscène van het pas beëdigde kabinet-Jetten waren maandagochtend protestgeluiden te horen van klimaatactivisten van Extinction Rebellion. Zij voerden actie bij het hek van Huis ten Bosch in Den Haag omdat zij teleurgesteld zijn in de klimaatambities van het nieuwe kabinet. Terwijl de staatssecretarissen en ministers poseerden voor de foto, waren daardoor onder andere fluitjes en alarmgeluiden te horen.

"Wij vragen aandacht voor de richting die deze coalitie opgaat, en dat is de verkeerde", lichtte een woordvoerder van de protestbeweging toe.

Het kabinet-Jetten is vandaag geïnstalleerd. Wat is jouw advies voor de nieuwe ministers en staatssecretarissen? Laat het weten aan de opinieredactie van NRC.

The AI Disruption We've Been Waiting for Has Arrived [ungated; cf.] - "We're entering a new renaissance of software development. We should all be excited, despite the uncertainties that lie ahead." (previously, viz. usw.)

The tech industry is a global culture — an identity based on craft and skill. Software development has been a solid middle-class job for a long time. But that may be slipping away. What might the future look like if 100 million, or a billion, people can make any software they desire? Could this be a moment of unparalleled growth and opportunity as people gain access to tech industry power for themselves? According to the market, the answer is no. Recently, software stocks — Monday.com, Salesforce, Adobe and many others — plummeted all at once; the Nasdaq 100 lost half a trillion dollars in two days. Legal software company stocks slumped recently because Anthropic released tools to automate some legal work. Financial services firms and real estate services — the market keeps devaluing them because traders expect there to be less need for humans at desks in an A.I.-automated future. Why will anyone need all that legacy software when A.I. can code anything up for you in two shakes of a robotic lamb's tail? Personally this all feels premature, but markets aren't subtle thinkers. And I get it. When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting. I was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made me a professional software cost estimator. When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.

from [mefi's own] Paul Ford: "how I feel about writing for a general audience in the age of social media." also btw...

• @___frye: "i don't think the general public understands what it means that the cost of building any software product is now $200/mo."
• @CaptKevin0x: "A full-time cardiologist built an AI care platform in 7 days—coding between shifts and on flights—and won 3rd place out of 13,000 apps. The 'I don't know how to code' excuse is officially dead. In the AI era, execution and ideas are literally the only things that matter now."
• @bcherny: "Coding is now 'solved' for most use cases."
• Chris Lattner: "I've spent a large part of my career working on compilers and programming languages, so when Anthropic announced the Claude C Compiler (CCC), I paid close attention. My basic take is simple: this is real progress, a milestone for the industry. We're not in the end of times, but this also isn't just hype, so take a deep breath, everyone. AI building a C compiler is not truly revolutionary, but it does reveal how far AI coding has progressed and where it may be heading next."
• AI has moved beyond writing small snippets of code and is beginning to participate in engineering large systems.
• AI is crossing from local code generation into global engineering participation: CCC maintains architecture across subsystems, not just functions.
• CCC has an "LLVM-like" design (as expected): training on decades of compiler engineering produces compiler architectures shaped by that history.
• Our legal apparatus frequently lags behind technology progress, and AI is pushing legal boundaries. Is proprietary software cooked?
• Good software depends on judgment, communication, and clear abstraction. AI has amplified this.
• AI coding is automation of implementation, so design and stewardship become more important.
• Manual rewrites and translation work are becoming AI-native tasks, automating a large category of engineering effort.
• AI, used right, should produce better software, provided humans actually spend more energy on architecture, design, and innovation.
• Architecture documentation has become infrastructure as AI systems amplify well-structured knowledge while punishing undocumented systems.
• The Real Reason Anthropic built a Compiler - "This is going to be a weird video because I'm going to say something positive about Anthropic. And then I'm also gonna call Anthropic one of the most deceitful companies I have ever seen."
• Pentagon-Anthropic battle pushes other AI labs into major dilemma - "The Pentagon is threatening to sever its contract with Anthropic and declare the company a 'supply chain risk' because it's unwilling to lift certain restrictions on its model, Claude. The company is particularly concerned about Claude being used for mass domestic surveillance or to develop fully autonomous weapons."
• OpenAI debated calling police about suspected Canadian shooter's chats - "An 18-year-old who allegedly killed eight people in a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada, reportedly used OpenAI's ChatGPT in ways that alarmed the company's staff."
• OpenAI is Suddenly in Trouble - "OpenAI is the company that led the generative AI revolution. But that was 2022, today in 2026 things look very different. From growing competition to top talent leaving to losing 10s of billions of dollars with no way to profitability."
• OpenAI executive who opposed 'adult mode' fired for sexual discrimination - "OpenAI has cut ties with one of its top safety executives, on the grounds of sexual discrimination, after she voiced opposition to the controversial rollout of AI erotica in its ChatGPT product."
• AI insiders are sounding the alarm - "Anthropic published a report showing that, while low risk, AI can be used in heinous crimes, including the creation of chemical weapons. This so-called 'sabotage report' looked at the risks of AI without human intervention, purely on its own. At the same time, OpenAI dismantled its mission alignment team, which was created to ensure AGI (artificial general intelligence) benefits all of humanity, Platformer author Casey Newton reported Wednesday."
• @TheStalwart: "They believe they're shepherding an extremely destabilizing, yet inevitable technology.
• @arindube: "You market your product as something that will turn human civilization upside down and destroy livelihoods, and somehow everyone is not super excited about it."

"I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it's hard to distinguish the two." --Ted Chiang[1]

• Billionaires' low taxes are becoming a problem for the economy - "Billionaires have ways to lower their tax bills that aren't available to most Americans. A common strategy is to avoid salaries, which are heavily taxed... Billionaires prefer to be paid in shares, which are subject to capital-gains taxes when sold. But they don't need to sell to fund their lifestyles. Billionaires use borrowed money for living expenses, pledging their shares or other assets as collateral. The interest on the debt is much lower than a capital-gains tax bill would be, and their stock portfolios can continue accumulating paper gains."
• @JustinWolfers: "On Gen Z's (understandable!) anxiety: AI is likely to boost productivity, so we can create more with less. That likely creates a bigger pie. But a bigger pie won't pay the bills unless we figure out how to ensure that everyone gets a reasonable slice."
• @brian-goldstone.bsky.social‬: "Reading this story—about how the Pentagon has been given so much extra money it's struggling to spend it all—while thinking about the formerly homeless tenants I've spoken with in recent weeks whose housing vouchers are being discontinued for 'lack of funds.'"
• @grahamformaine: "Susan Collins's husband's lobbying firm received over $50 million in federal contracts, with tens of millions of dollars from agencies Susan Collins oversees. It's got to be one of the great coincidences of American history."
• @karenguzzo.bsky.social‬: "Thanks to the OBBB, Amazon's tax bill for 2025 is $1.2 billion, down from $9 billion the year before despite a 45% jump in profits."
• @TheMaineWonk: "Tax breaks for the wealthy cost more than any individual government spending program. It's an oligarchy."
• @TheMaineWonk: It's worse than you imagine. 935 billionaires & families make up 17% of all campaign contributions. Top 10% make up 80% (!!!) of all campaign contributions. Working class Americans & their policy prescriptions are getting left behind in favor of the oligarch donor class."
• @ianbremmer: "are us elections free and fair? or bought and paid for?"
• @lastpositivist.bsky.social‬: "Individually one cannot, but it is striking (in a way that really advocates the old Marxist in me) that socially we can only really see a technology that saves a bunch of labour without generating replacement level jobs as a disaster. This is because we are *so* sure the profit will be privatised."
• @tszzl: "it's a bad situation to be in where you have to rely on the goodness or righteousness of any one person or organization do something important correctly-but therein lies the seeds of the 'enemy'. you crave the guarantees of algorithm and machine to overcome the weaknesses of men."

Pre-Industrial Economic Growth - "In a world in which there cannot be enough for all, at the foundation politics and governance can be little more than an élite elbowing competitors out of the way, and running a force-and-fraud exploitation game on the rest of humanity."[2]

This élite of thugs-with-spears (and later thugs-with-gunpowder-weapons), along with their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists—they could have enough. And with their enough they could build and enjoy their high culture. But those who controlled the commons, and had enough so that they could have the leisure to write the literatures that have come down to us—those were hard men, who reaped where they did not sow, and gathered where they did not scatter. They made typical human life fairly dystopian back in the long Agrarian age, even after taking account of the general poverty. But why was technological progress slow back then? A good deal of the answer is that they simply were not enough people and not enough sufficiently educated people to have the energy and time to think about solving the problems of advancing technology. Two heads are not twice as good as one, quite. But two heads are considerably better than one. And heads that are not exhausted by the combination of hard work and a scant diet have more energy to think, plan, experiment, and evaluate. Plus we humans are much smarter when we think together. Thinking together requires that we be able to communicate not just within our own little band or village, but communicate across space and across time. To the extent that humanity is more numerous, richer, better educated, and better able to communicate across space and time, we can become a truly remarkably intelligent anthology intelligence. In the years since 1875, that ability to transform ourselves into such an anthology intelligence has allowed us to power technological progress forward at 2% per year on average, even though the low-hanging technological fruit has long been harvested, and even though a great deal of the technological fruit we are now harvesting is a very, very high indeed. But there is more than a lack of numbers, lack of education, lack of energy and leisure, and lack of the means of communication and memory behind the slow rate of technological progress back before modern economic growth. In a society where the typical activity of those who deploy resources is to use them to grab enough for themselves from everybody else, the ideas that will be promoted will not be ideas that are true, but rather ideas that are useful for that grabbing process. The consequences of general poverty for inequality, and the consequences of inequality for ideas and for the direction of societal effort are major drags on even the possibility of technological development.

Bubbles, Productive & Unproductive; Builders; & Bots: Why the AI Boom Isn't One Story, But Rather the Vector Driving the AI Economy Is at Least 12-Dimensional - "The AI surge looks to me half like a familiar 'productive bubble' and half like something much more complicated and new and strange. The productive bubble terrain of grifters, wasteful overbuilding, socially valuable but privately unprofitable infrastructure construction, coordination cycles, a few rock‑solid business models, and financial-crisis risk is at least somewhat familiar."

But then we also have:

• Platform near‑monopolists investing defensively at staggering scale;
• Millenarian enthusiasts with their religious-cult agendas;
• Natural‑language interfaces promise massive user surplus while commoditizing producers, as modes of human interaction with the infosphere are transformed utterly;
• These transformations do not just produce new technologies of nature-manipulation and human coöperation, they also rewire the brain and restructure human thought in unpredictable ways;
• Newer and stronger forms of attention extraction looming as the default monetization path.
• The downstream consequences of what will be a revolution in the modes of human collective cognition
• most durable value likely sits in small, task‑specific models tied to trusted data, and in moats built on workflow, reliability, and proprietary information. Even if many investors lose money, the infrastructure and capabilities will persist.

As an optimist, I see the likely equilibrium is user surplus rising fast—cheap, ubiquitous natural‑language access to data—while margins migrate to trusted data, integration, and uptime rather than model scarcity. I see policy choices around competition, energy, and data governance determining whether we get a broad productivity growth acceleration, or another round of attention enclosure. But the future is one I cannot see.

The Positive Possibilities of Gen AI - "First, look at those of our institutions that do harness us cooperatively. The institutions of scientific discovery are powerful mechanisms to give people incentives to turn their individual productivity to tasks that make us all smarter. The institutions of the market economy are powerful mechanisms to give people incentives to turn their individual productivity to tasks that make us all richer—as long, at least, as we are producing rival, excludable commodities under competitive conditions."[3]

But, second, we have no similarly well-crafted institutions or arrangements in communication and in information evaluation that work nearly as well. Thus third, building such is, I think, the challenge that must be addressed if we are to fully realize the potential of machine learning technologies... collective intelligence is our most-powerful tool.[4] [...] But, sixth, this works only if our communications and action systems harness us so that we pull together. And that problem is highly multidimensional. We need to think hard about just how multidimensional.[5] Seventh, I think that the most important dimension is our need for systems to direct our attention—about to be the only thing truly scarce—usefully.[6,7] Eighth, I think the second most important dimension is that we need processes to mentor the young—as the ways they used to rub up against people who have the useful tacit knowledge continue their decline. This will be essential in ensuring that the next generation of workers is able to fill our shoes. But education and training for tacit as well as formal knowledge is really hard in anything other than an apprenticeship setting, and the jobs that apprentices would have filled will soon be, many of them, the province of the 'bots.

meanwhile, although bit shifting may be limitless, moving atoms remains hard(er)...

• The Chinese Factory That Opened in the US and Clobbered Its Rivals - "President Trump has pressured trading partners for investment in U.S. manufacturing plants. What if local industries can't compete?"[8,9,10]
• @ianbrooke: "To put a point on this, industrial success is measured in tonnage, watts, seconds, meters and microns. That is base reality, everything else is an abstraction."
• @kyleichan: "BYD and Tesla both make EVs in China. Yet BYD has significantly lower costs. Two major factors: 1) Vertical integration is very high for BYD. 2) Doing R&D in China is far cheaper. State subsidies are a small part. It's more a structural advantage."
• @pitdesi: "BYD's vertical integration is insane, much moreso than Tesla's. They make their own batteries, chips, motors, and even mine their own lithium. A couple of years ago they felt there weren't enough transport options for their cars, so they built their own fleet of car carrier ships, and- per this video, the cars drive off of the ships autonomously. They now operate the largest car carriers in the world. Each carries up to 9,200 cars and is powered by LNG. The fleet can export ~1M cars/year and cuts per-vehicle shipping costs 30-40%. Wild!"
• Battery storage prices drop to record low, report finds - "Battery storage prices dropped more than a quarter last year to a record low, a boon for grids straining under rising electricity demand, a new BloombergNEF report found."[11,12,13]
• Why Hokkaido is the New Taiwan - "Today, Japan holds a 50%+ global share in semiconductor materials. For specific high-end segments like EUV photoresists, that share is near 100%. You cannot print a chip at TSMC without Shin-Etsu Chemical. You cannot coat a wafer without Tokyo Electron. You cannot cut a silicon ingot without Disco Corporation."[14,15,16,17]
• @Gaurab: "Nittobo is a Japanese glass fiber company with 2,745 employees. Nvidia, Apple, Google, Amazon, AMD, Microsoft, and Qualcomm have all sent executives to Japan to personally lobby for supply. T-glass forms the structural core of every AI chip substrate. Nittobo controls 90% of it. It sells for $80 to $100 per kilogram. Standard glass fiber is $3 to $5. The thermal expansion has to match silicon almost exactly or the substrate warps and the chip fails. Nvidia locked up supply through long-term binding contracts. New capacity won't arrive until 2027. The CEO told Nikkei he won't expand at the pace of the AI market. He doesn't need to."
• @ramez: "While Trump dithered on Tomahawks, Ukraine designed their own cheaper, longer range, more powerful cruise missile, and they and European allies started manufacturing it in volume."[18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]

Can we escape AI slavery? Only the Left can tame big tech - "This is light years beyond mere surveillance capitalism, an earlier system where machines spied on you so that advertisers could target their marketing material."

Massive economies of scale are synonymous with natural monopoly — it's one of the few useful things we teach economics students at university. That's the reason why we cannot have several water companies competing in the same city, laying down different water pipes that run through our streets and walls. For similar reasons, a handful of Big Tech hyper-scalers own and control the means of production of AI. For any company or startup wanting to build a serious AI capability, accessing these hyperscalers' infrastructure is not just convenient, but a fundamental necessity. This gives them immense influence over the pace, cost, and direction of AI's second face... AI's second face, the technofeudal one, is prevailing and will continue to do so after any bust of the AI bubble. It could not be otherwise. Given a choice between the precarious profits that any start-up, like DeepSeek, can dissolve overnight and the cloud rents that AI-enabled machines can lock in for the long run, Big Tech opted for the latter. Any company that, today, continues to try to profit by supplying AI-based commodities will either have to switch to extracting cloud rents in the technofeudal sector or perish. What does this mean for us, for humanity's future? The tech-optimists are convinced that AI will usher us into new vistas of pleasure, productivity and wealth. But I cannot share their cheerfulness... there is only one route from the Daedalian prison to the Promethean ideal: radical democratic politics. "Which means what?", they ask. It means starting with small regulatory steps, like legislating interoperability or rescinding legislation that heightens Big Tech's exorbitant power, before moving on to the grander tasks of building a digital monetary commons and re-thinking property rights over data and cloud capital. Only then will we have a shot at turning AI into humanity's benign enabler.

Capitalism has already ended and we don't even know it, Yanis Varoufakis warns - "To rebalance economic power, Varoufakis called for democratising central banks... While the technology exists to do this, the political resistance is high because such reforms would reduce the influence of both financial institutions and major tech companies, the Greek economist concluded."[26]

Scarecrow of the sky in full flight to protect Australian fruit and almond crops A new peregrine falcon drone wards off peckish birds that have been destroying valuable fruit crops.

Canadian-made drones masquerading as peregrine falcons are being used to watch over Australian fruit and almond orchards. The drones come in fixed-wing and flapping wing models that rely on bio-mimicry technology to keep smaller birds away from the fruit and nut trees. That means they look and behave as a predator would, to scare off species such as corellas or cockatoos. With most of Victoria recording minimal rainfall over the past year, birds have been looking to agricultural crops for food. (Context here is that while it is illegal for fruit growers/almond growers to shoot corellas or cockatoos, it happens all too often, so anything that results in native birds being scared away from orchards rather than killed is good.)

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

The London stock market has dipped slightly in early trading.

The FTSE 100 index is down 19 points, or 0.18%, at 10,668 points.

Continue reading...

The latest in our series of writers on their most important comfort films is a celebration of Nicolas Cage’s finest action moment

It’s easy to poke fun at Nicolas Cage. Between the meltdown memes, dodgy hairdos and his more taxman-friendly choices of roles, he has frequently made himself a target for ridicule among the masses.

Fresh off an Oscar win for Leaving Las Vegas, the actor’s decision to follow up with three action films must have seemed baffling at the time. The gambit paid off, though. Consisting of The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off, this unofficial “trilogy” of blockbusters would showcase the fundamental unknowability of Nicolas Cage.

Continue reading...

A huge vaccination drive has been launched after the country’s first outbreak in years of the paralysing disease. But the battle to wipe out the virus is struggling elsewhere, so how can it be eradicated?

As a seven-year-old boy is treated for polio at a hospital in Malawi, the country has launched a major vaccination campaign to stem an outbreak of the disease.

The effort in Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries and badly hit by the aid cuts, has seen an astonishing 1.3 million children already vaccinated against the disease in just four days after emergency supplies were airlifted in by the World Health Organization (WHO) just over a week ago.

Continue reading...

New Art UK chair Ben Terrett appointed as charity marks 10 years of building online database

From a bronze Rodin sculpture of the naked Eve outside a Nando’s in Harlow to more than 6,000 artworks by JMW Turner, to a crumpled-up piece of A4 paper owned by Manchester Art Gallery, the UK’s public art collection is a wonderful and varied thing.

It is huge, as demonstrated by the charity Art UK, which has announced it has reached a million artworks on its database and appointed a new chair who said: “We’ve only scratched the surface.”

Continue reading...

Arousal may be spontaneous, or arise in response to sensory stimulation, memory, fantasy or emotional connection. Here’s how to understand the differences

What turns you on? Depending on the person, the answer to that question will vary wildly. But what is really going on under the, ahem, hood when we start to get in the mood?

The first scientists to really take the physiology of sex seriously – or at least break the taboos around talking about it – were William Masters and Virginia Johnson, sexologists who began their studies in the 1950s (and got married in 1971). “They came up with what’s known as the four-stage model, which was that the body gets aroused, you hit a plateau, you have an orgasm, you go back down to baseline,” says Dr Angela Wright, a GP and clinical sexologist based in Yorkshire.

Continue reading...

Als een bezoeker een zwangerschapstest in diens online winkelmandje doet, dan sturen de webshops van Nederlandse drogisten die informatie door naar tech-bedrijven als Google, Meta en Tiktok. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van Investico, in samenwerking met De Groene Amsterdammer en tv-programma Radar.

Alle twintig onderzochte drogisten, waaronder Kruidvat, Etos en Trekpleister deonlinedrogist.nl sturen informatie over de gebruiker en diens klikgedrag naar Google. De helft van de drogisten doet dit ook naar Meta, het moederbedrijf van Facebook. Drogist DA, flitsbezorger Flink en online drogist plein.nl sturen zelfs informatie naar het Chinese Tiktok.

De drogisten overtreden daarmee de regels. ‘Een webshop moet een gebruiker heel expliciet vertellen wat er met de informatie over bijvoorbeeld een zwangerschapstest gebeurt, omdat het hier over je gezondheid of seksleven gaat.’ zegt Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, professor ICT en Recht aan de Radboud Universiteit.

Meer bij Investico

Zelensky told the BBC that the war was the Russian leader’s attempt to impose a “different way of life” on the world.

peaceful-jp-scenery has added a photo to the pool:

Meiji Jingu
明治神宮

Feeling like a school trip, I went to Meiji Shrine. Even though it's in the Tokyo, the grounds are filled with greenery, which is quite impressive.

修学旅行気分、続いては明治神宮です。都会とはいえ、緑がいっぱいの境内はさすがの感じでした。

Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, Japan

peaceful-jp-scenery posted a photo:

Meiji Jingu
明治神宮

Feeling like a school trip, I went to Meiji Shrine. Even though it's in the Tokyo, the grounds are filled with greenery, which is quite impressive.

修学旅行気分、続いては明治神宮です。都会とはいえ、緑がいっぱいの境内はさすがの感じでした。

Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, Japan

peaceful-jp-scenery posted a photo:

Hill of Clementine
みかんの丘

The winter cherry blossoms and Kawazu cherry blossoms in my hometown, Shimizu Ward, are in full bloom, making it feel like spring.

地元、清水区の寒桜と河津桜はぱーっと咲いて、まるで春のよう。暖かくなってきました。

Shimizu-ku, Shizuoka city, Japan

​De koning vergeet niet. Dat laat hij vandaag duidelijk merken bij de beëdiging van het Kabinet Jetten I. Zodra Willem-Alexander een momentje alleen heeft met de nieuwe premier, ziet hij zijn kans schoon om Jetten te confronteren met uitspraken die hij had gedaan over Amalia. De koning grijpt de premier bij de strot: “Wat zei je over mijn dochter?” zegt hij terwijl hij Jetten lachend aankijkt.

De kersverse premier begint te stotteren. Zijn gedachten gaan terug naar het verkiezingsdebat waarin hij claimde dat ‘veel kerels in de zaal wel zin hebben om een militaire training met Amalia te doen.’ Hij was ervan overtuigd dat alles vergeven en vergeten was. Tot nu. “S-s-sorry Majesteit”, is het enige wat Jetten uit kan brengen.

Willem-Alexander ontspant zijn hand een beetje. Jetten kan eindelijk naar adem happen. De koning strijkt over zijn hart en besluit: “Het is oké. Maar dit flik je me niet nog een keer vriend.”

&''

"A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules," reports Live Science. "It's not only exceeding the 'speed limit' of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions — two features that are not predicted to coexist..."

"How is this rule-breaking behavior even possible? In a paper published Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of researchers observed ID830 in multiple wavelengths to find an answer...."


As they attract gas and dust, this material accumulates in a swirling accretion disk. Gravity pulls the material from the disk into the black hole, but the infalling material generates radiation pressure that pushes outward and prevents more stuff from falling in. As a result, black holes are muzzled by a self-regulating process called the Eddington limit... Its X-ray brightness suggests that ID830 is accreting mass at about 13 times the Eddington limit, due to a sudden burst of inflowing gas that may have occurred as ID830 shredded and engulfed a celestial body that wandered too close. "For a supermassive black hole (SMBH) as massive as ID830, this would require not a normal (main-sequence) star, but a more massive giant star or a huge gas cloud," study co-author Sakiko Obuchi, an observational astronomer at Waseda University in Tokyo, told Live Science via email. Such super-Eddington phases may be incredibly brief, as "this transitional phase is expected to last for roughly 300 years," Obuchi added.

ID830 also simultaneously displays radio and X-ray emissions. These two features are not expected to coexist, especially because super-Eddington accretion is thought to suppress such emissions. "This unexpected combination hints at physical mechanisms not yet fully captured by current models of extreme accretion and jet launching," the researchers said in a statement. So while ID830 is launching massive radio jets, its X-ray emissions appear to originate from a structure called a corona, produced as intense magnetic fields from the accretion disk create a thin but turbulent billion-degree cloud of turbocharged particles. These particles orbit the black hole at nearly the speed of light, in what NASA calls "one of the most extreme physical environments in the universe." Altogether, ID830's rule-breaking behaviors suggest that it is in a rare transitional phase of excessive consumption — and excretion. This incredible feeding burst has energized both its jets and its corona, making ID830 shine brightly across multiple wavelengths as it spews out excess radiation.

Additionally, based on UV-brightness analysis, quasars like ID830 may be unexpectedly common, the researchers said. Models predict that only around 10% of quasars have spectacular radio jets, but these energetic objects could be significantly more abundant in the early universe than previously suggested. Most importantly, ID830 also shows how SMBHs can regulate galaxy growth in the early universe. As a black hole gobbles matter at the super-Eddington limit, the energy from its resultant emissions can heat and disperse matter throughout the interstellar medium — the gas between stars — to suppress star formation. As a result, ancient SMBHs like ID830 may have grown massive at the expense of their host galaxies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

 If you’re familiar with Adobe InDesign and Master Pages, you may have wondered how to automatically display the current chapter title at the top of each page. Or maybe your document is using different sections, and you want the current section to automatically appear on each page. Here are some tips...

Create a Running Header

To insert dynamic chapter titles in InDesign Master Pages, you first create a paragraph style for your chapter names and name it something like 'Chapter Name'. Once the style is created you go to Type > Text Variables > Define... In the window that appears, select Running Header and click the 'Edit' button. Then in the Style dropdown menu select your 'Chapter Name' paragraph style. 

Dynamic Chapter Title

Next, go to your Master Page, and insert a text frame where you want the chapter title to appear. With the text cursor blinking in that text field go to Type > Text Variables > Insert Variable > Running Header. This will insert a text snippet <Running Header> (or the name you entered in the Name field). This will now automatically display your 'chapter name' (paragraph style) on each page where this Master Page is applied.

Section Marker

Maybe you're (also) working with different sections in your document and instead of showing the chapters, you just want to have the sections appear dynamically. Or maybe you want to show both the section and the chapter (more info on how to create sections in InDesign). When you create a section, you create a so called 'Section Marker'. Besides the page numbering options, you also have the option to give this 'Section Marker' a name. Here you enter the exact text of how you want this section to appear in your document. 

Automatic Sections

Once this is done for each section of your document that you want to show, go to the Master Pages that is applied to the pages of your document and have your text cursor in the text field where you want this section title to appear. If needed create a new text field. Now with the text cursor blinking in that text field go to Type > Insert Special Characters > Markers > Section Marker. The word 'Section' will appear in the text field. This will now show the text that you entered in the 'Section Marker' field in your document on the pages where this Master Page is applied to. As you might have noticed from that menu list, there is also Current Page Number, and Section Number. So the same method applies for adding those into your document.