OK, I plead ignorance on this one. How unusual would it be to have this partner black hole orbiting (it appears to be, anyway) perpendicular to the galactic plane? I was under the impression that most matter orbiting a supermassive black hole is pretty much in the same plane. But I could be, unsurprisingly, very wrong. Anytime science looks simple and easily understood, that’s a really good sign that I’ve missed something.
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it sounds like it’s still in the maybe category. their model appears to fit the data, but there might still be other possible explanations.
“It doesn’t fit anything that we know about these systems. We’re seeing evidence of objects going in and through the disk, at different angles, which challenges the traditional picture of a simple gaseous disk around black holes.
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Maybe the little black hole came from somewhere else and got too close to the large one?
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from the video “fully privatized funding”
ah yes, that kind of “privatized”
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Hair is usually a warm tone. Mine came back a cool tone instead.
From this (top) to this (bottom)…random internet images:
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If this was a Warner Brothers cartoon that coyote in the foreground would have crossed the runway just in time to find himself hanging for dear life onto the nose of the hypersonic test vehicle just before they sent the thing screaming in to the stratosphere.
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I was bald before chemo and radiation. It didn’t come back at all. 
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Just as well, or guys like me would hog all the chemo drugs (see Ozempic).
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So, how does a cell operate a stopwatch? It’s not like it can ask Siri to set a timer—it’s largely stuck working with nucleic acids and proteins.
It turns out that, like many things related to cell division, the answer comes down to a protein named p53. It’s a protein that’s key to many pathways that detect damage to cells and stop them from dividing if there are problems. (You may recall it from our recent coverage of the development of elephant stem cells.)
No matter how complicated and borderline mystical you think science is, the truth is, it’s much, much worse.
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The first thing I thought of is that some of us can still see the flickering even with the newer fluorescent bulbs:
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Granted, those hints are still below the necessary threshold to claim discovery and hence fall under the rubric of “huge, if true.” We’ll have to wait for more data from DESI’s continuing measurements to see if they hold up.
Yeah, yeah, further study needed. Still intriguing. Not least of all, in considering what we up-jumped apes have been able to suss out about the universe in a really brief period of time.
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Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from life?
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Of course, what we’ve been able to figure out is only what Those Who Watch want us to know about the universe…
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Pathogenic bacteria make us sick by secreting toxins. While the release of smaller toxin molecules is well understood, methods of releasing larger toxin molecules have mostly eluded us until now. Researcher Stefan Raunser, director of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology, and his team finally found out how the insect pathogen Yersinia entomophaga (which attacks beetles) releases its large-molecule toxin.
They found that designated “soldier cells” sacrifice themselves and explode to deploy the poison inside their victim. “YenTc appears to be the first example of an anti-eukaryotic toxin using this newly established type of secretion system,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Nature.
That’s really fascinating. This mechanism reminds me a bit of slime molds where some of the independent, single celled amoeboids will form a self-sacrificing stalk to lift the reproductive cells up for scattering ( Altruism, cheating, and anticheater adaptations in cellular slime molds - PubMed (nih.gov) ). Weird how evolution comes up with solutions that look like altruism, sacrificing oneself to further the survival of the species. Nothing about science is obvious or simple, no matter how much some might want it to be.
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Awww, was hoping there would be people who can see more than 60fps…
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