Using the MIRI instrument onboard the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of scientists made the first-ever detection of a mid-IR flare from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive blackhole at the heart of the Milky Way. In simultaneous radio observations, the team found a radio counterpart of the flare lagging behind in time. The paper is published on the arXiv preprint server.

Scientists have been actively observing Sagittarius A* (Sgr A)—a supermassive black hole roughly 4 million times the mass of the sun— since the early 1990s. Sgr A regularly exhibits flares that can be observed in multiple wavelengths, allowing scientists to see different views of the same flare and better understand how it emits light and how the emission is generated...

Our body isn’t just human—it’s home to trillions of microorganisms found in or on us. In fact, there are more microbes in our gut than there are stars in the Milky Way. These microbes are essential for human health, but scientists are still figuring out exactly what they do and how they help.

In a new study, published in Nature Microbiology, my colleagues and I explored how certain gut bacteria—a group known as Enterobacteriaceae—can protect us from harmful ones. These bacteria include species such as Escherichia coli (E coli). This is normally harmless in small amounts but can cause infections and other health problems if it grows too much.

We found that our gut environment—shaped by things like diet—plays a big role in keeping potentially harmful bacteria in check.

By conducting tests under an experimental scenario, a team of medical researchers and AI specialists at NYU Langone Health has demonstrated how easy it is to taint the data pool used to train LLMs.

For their study published in the journal Nature Medicine, the group generated thousands of articles containing misinformation and inserted them into an AI training dataset and conducted general LLM queries to see how often the misinformation appeared.

Prior research and anecdotal evidence have shown that the answers given by LLMs such as ChatGPT are not always correct and, in fact, are sometimes wildly off-base...

A whitish, gray patch that sometimes appears in the night sky alongside the northern lights has been explained for the first time by researchers at the University of Calgary.

The article, which was published on Dec. 30 in the journal Nature Communications, explores a “structured continuum emission” that’s associated with aurora borealis.

“You’d see this dynamic green aurora, you’d see some of the red aurora in the background and, all of a sudden, you’d see this structured—almost like a patch—gray-toned or white toned-emission connected to the aurora,” says Dr. Emma Spanswick, Ph.D...