What We're Reading

In a series of six papers published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers with the Event Horizon Telescope — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes — unveiled the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

Under the right pressure and temperature, potassium can adopt a so-called chain-melt phase. It might exist in the Earth's mantle.

The brain-tingling feeling was a hard-to-describe psychological oddity triggered by melodious whispers and soothing sounds. Until, suddenly, it was a YouTube phenomenon.

A review of 2013 data from the Mars Express orbiter has verified the methane spike on Mars first detected by the Curiosity rover. But whether the methane was produced by a life form is unknown.

Upgrades complete, the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors are set to resume their hunt for gravitational waves on April 1. This third observing run could detect as many as 40 black hole collisions.

A media and computer science professor argues that software cannot always catch recycled text; in fact, writers will sometimes game the system to get a good originality score at the expense of clarity.

Most advanced-stage cancers mutate, resisting drugs meant to kill them. Now physicians are harnessing the principles of evolution to thwart that lethal adaptation.

A machine inspired by biology, self-coordinates movement based on statistical principles.

The CERN discovery of so-called CP violation in particles called D mesons, which contain charm quarks, provides a fresh way to probe why matter exists.

Frilly surfaces that help slugs move may motivate future energy-efficient, soft-body robots, according to work by Shankar Venkataramani of the University of Arizona and a 2018 Simons Fellow in mathematics.