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In this week's science news, we discover a bevy of new black holes, that blue whales are still singing, our lesser known dream cycles, and the complex path along which human's evolved.
(Image credit: NASA/ESA and Eco2drew via Getty Images)
Black holes have dominated our coverage this week, with the discovery of a record-breaking space-time rupture believed to be the earliest ever found.
The black hole and its galaxy, together dubbed CAPERS-LRD-z9, existed just 500 million years after the Big Bang, and adds to growing evidence that black holes began shaping our universe much earlier than astrophysicists once thought.
Black holes' ever earlier beginnings could help to explain how some swell to mind-boggling sizes. Take the one at the heart of the "Cosmic Horseshoe" galaxy system: This week, scientists said they'd found a black hole there that is 36 billion times the mass of the sun. This makes it one of the largest cosmic monsters in the universe.
Training our black hole spotting skills could enable us to detect one close enough to visit, albeit in a paperclip-sized craft propelled by Earthbound lasers, according to one astrophysicist's proposal. Visiting a black hole could provide insights into the structure of space-time. But taking a one-way trip to a black hole isn't the only way to learn about them: radiation from newly-hypothesized evaporating black hole 'morsels' could also reveal clues to the nature of these cosmic behemoths.
Recent reports of blue whales falling silent off California may have been more than a little exaggerated. The media coverage, which began in July with a report by National Geographic, cites a February study that began in 2015 during the peak of a devastating, ecosystem-disrupting marine heatwave known as "the blob."
But after we looked at the study and contacted its authors, we found that the iconic whales had soon found their voices after the heatwave had dissipated. The long-term impacts of climate change on blue whale populations and their singing are still hard to untangle, but relatively recent estimates still suggest that their numbers are growing. A sigh — or a song — of relief is in order.
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A new gene-editing technique could promise a cure for diabetes without the need for immune supressing drugs.
(Image credit: quantic69 via Getty Images)
A man with type 1 diabetes became the first person to produce his own insulin without using immune suppressing drugs. The breakthrough came thanks to a genetically engineered cell transplant.
The approach is still in its earliest days — the man didn't produce enough insulin to cure his diabetes — but it is nonetheless an exciting potential breakthrough in treatment of the disease.
Scientists once thought there was a clear evolutionary line between our ancestors and us. But emerging evidence suggests our evolutionary history is more like a braided stream than a branching tree.
(Image credit: Sam Falconer)
We all know the famous March of Progress image: Starting with a quadrupedal ape-like ancestor, humans evolved in a series of steps until we arrived at the upright, two-legged body we have today.
The MIRI Deep Imaging Survey (MIDIS), the James Webb Space Telescope's take on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, reveals 2,500 more distant structures.
(Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Östlin, P. G. Perez-Gonzalez, J. Melinder, the JADES Collaboration, the MIDIS collaboration, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb))
The James Webb telescope has reexamined Hubble's famed Ultra Deep Field image to discover 2,500 more objects.
And many of them are beautiful new galaxies that are even older and more distant than the ones in the original image, dating back to less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
Ben Turner is a U.K. based writer and editor at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.
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