An outburst from V404 Cygni. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Black holes are famous for their muscle: an intense gravitational pull known to gobble up entire stars and launch streams of matter into space at almost the speed of light. It turns out the reality may not live up to the hype. In a paper published today in the journal Science, University of Florida scientists have discovered these tears in the fabric of the universe have significantly weaker magnetic fields than previously thought.j

A 40-mile-wide black hole 8,000 light years from Earth named V404 Cygni yielded the first precise measurements of the magnetic field that surrounds the deepest wells of gravity in the universe...

Research suggests social memory formation is regulated by an oxytocin-sensitive brain circuit in a seahorse-shaped area of the brain. Photo: iStock/Bim

Study in mice reveals an oxytocin-fueled brain circuit that regulates social recognition. The results shed light on brain’s ability to sort out confusion by reconciling conflicting social stimuli. How do we recognize others? How do we know friend from foe, threat from reward? How does the brain compute the multitude of cues telling us that Susan is not Erica even though they look alike? The complexity of social interactions – human as well as mammalian – has mystified brain researchers for decades.

Now a new study conducted in mice by regenerative neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Massachusetts G...

Illustration of the molecular structure of the graphene nanoribbons prepared by UCLA chemistry professor Yves Rubin and colleagues. Credit: Courtesy of Yves Rubin

Tiny structures could be next-generation solution for smaller electronic devices. As electronic devices have become smaller and smaller, creating tiny silicon components that fit inside them has become more challenging and more expensive. Now, UCLA chemists have developed a new method to produce nanoribbons of graphene, next-generation structures that many scientists believe will one day power electronic devices.

The nanoribbons are extremely narrow strips of graphene, the width of just a few carbon atoms...

This simulation shows the turbulent gas when a supernova collides with a nearby star-forming halo. Credit: Ken Chen, East Asian Core Observatories Association

New research bridges scaling gap between astrophysics and cosmology. An international team ran multi-scale, multi-physics 2D and 3D simulations to illustrate how heavy metals expelled from exploding supernovae held the first stars in the universe regulate subsequent star formation and influence the appearance of galaxies in the process. In their respective efforts to understand the universe and all it comprises, there is a telling gap between what cosmologists and astrophysicists study and how they study it: scale...