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Astronomers at MIT, NASA, and elsewhere have a new way to measure how fast a black hole spins, by using the wobbly aftermath from its stellar feasting.

The method takes advantage of a black hole tidal disruption event—a blazingly bright moment when a black hole exerts tides on a passing star and rips it to shreds. As the star is disrupted by the black hole’s immense tidal forces, half of the star is blown away, while the other half is flung around the black hole, generating an intensely hot accretion disk of rotating stellar material.

The MIT-led team has shown that the wobble of the newly created accretion disk is key to working ...

Gut bacteria and a diet rich in the amino acid tryptophan can play a protective role against pathogenic E. coli, which can cause severe stomach upset, cramps, fever, intestinal bleeding and renal failure, according to a study published March 13 in Nature.

The research reveals how dietary tryptophan—an amino acid found mostly in animal products, nuts, seeds, whole grains and legumes—can be broken down by gut bacteria into small molecules called metabolites...

eVTOL battery analysis reveals unique operating demands. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are taking cleaner transportation to the skies by creating and evaluating new batteries for airborne electric vehicles that take off and land vertically.

These aircraft, commonly called eVTOLs, range from delivery drones to urban air taxis. They are designed to rise into the air like a helicopter and fly using wing-borne lift like an airplane...

A UCL-led research team has used artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to infer the influence and properties of dark energy more precisely from a map of dark and visible matter in the universe covering the last 7 billion years.

The study, submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and available on the arXiv preprint server, was carried out by the Dark Energy Survey collaboration. The researchers doubled the precision at which key characteristics of the universe, including the overall density of dark energy, could be inferred from the map.

This increased precision allows researchers to rule out models of the universe that might previously have been conceivable.

Dark energy is the mysterious force that is accelerating the universe’s expansion and is th...