Astronomers have detected one of the most powerful ultrafast outflows ever seen from a distant supermassive black hole. Using XMM-Newton and NuSTAR, a team studied a hyper-luminous quasar at cosmic noon and found two distinct wind components blasting away from the black hole, details of which are outlined in a paper submitted to the arXiv preprint server on June 3. The study has been submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and is currently under minor revision.

Killer winds
Black holes consuming large amounts of material tend to lash out, driving powerful winds of gas outward from the vicinity of the accretion disk...

Physical pain is essential for survival, as it allows animals to detect when they are injured or unwell, seek shelter and address their ailments. Yet when it becomes chronic, pain can also become highly distressing and debilitating.

While there are now several therapeutic strategies for managing chronic pain, an emerging one that has been found to be particularly promising is vagus nerve stimulation (VNS). VNS entails the delivery of mild electrical pulses to the nerve that connects the brain to organs throughout the body.

Past studies suggest that VNS-based therapy can reduce the pain associated with various medical conditions, including chronic headaches, fibromyalgia and joint inflammation. The neural processes by which it can ease pain, however, are still poorly understood.

The human brain is the ultimate supercomputer. It uses a highly branched and interconnected network of neurons and synapses to achieve massive computational power with extreme efficiency. In the age of AI, the brain, a paradigm of efficient neuromorphic computing, is providing inspiration for scientists.

Ionic computing—which uses ions to compute instead of the electrons in typical devices—could provide a path forward for neuromorphic technology that rivals the brain’s efficiency. But the field is only a few years old, and many challenges remain before it moves beyond proof of principle and toward real-world deployment.

To bring neuromorphic ...

If we’re to reach another star, chemical propulsion will not get us there in any reasonable time frame. We’re going to need a different propulsion technology, and one of the most promising seems to be a solar sail. These giant reflective surfaces form the basis of many interstellar mission concepts. Combined with giant lasers pushing them, they can be accelerated to speeds unreachable by any other current technologies.

However, according to a new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server by Chao Shen and Jiaze Li of the Harbin Institute of Technology, once those missions start reaching a significant percentage of the speed of light, they’re going to run into a drag force from the light itself.

The paper ...