Astronomers to Peer Into a Black Hole for 1st Time with Event Horizon Telescope

Ever since first mentioned by Jon Michell in a letter to the Royal Society in 1783, black holes have captured the imagination of scientists, writers, filmmakers and other artists. Perhaps part of the allure is that these enigmatic objects have never actually been "seen." But this could now be about to change as an international team of astronomers is connecting a number of telescopes on Earth in the hope of making the first ever image of a black hole.Black holes are regions of space inside which the pull of gravity is so strong that nothing – not even light – can escape. Their existence was predicted mathematically by Karl Schwarzchild in 1915, as a solution to equations posed in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Astronomers have had circumstantial evidence for many decades that supermassive black holes – a million to a billion times more massive than our sun – lie at the hearts of massive galaxies. That's because they can see the gravitational pull they have on stars orbiting around the galactic centre. When overfed with material from the surrounding galactic environment, they also eject detectable plumes or jets of plasma to speeds close to that of light. Last year, the LIGO experiment provided even more proof by famously detecting ripples in space-time caused by two medium-mass black holes that merged millions of years ago.

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Two-Thirds of Cancer Mutations Are Random and Unavoidable, Scientists Claim
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Almost two-thirds of cancer mutations are caused by random DNA-copying errors during cell division and are impossible for us to avoid, regardless of lifestyle and the genes we inherit from our parents, according to new research.

The findings – which estimate that 66 percent of cancer mutations are effectively bad luck that we can't do anything about – support the conclusions of a controversial paper released in 2015 by the same researchers, which came under fire for appearing to suggest that there was nothing we could do to prevent various cancers.

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Best evidence yet that hypnotised people aren’t faking it
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You are feeling sleepy…or are you? In a hypnotism performance, ordinary people seem to somehow become puppets, made to talk in silly accents, or act like a baby or in other embarrassing ways. But have they really lost command of their bodies, or are they just pretending?

Now we have some of the best evidence yet that people who are hypnotised really feel like they are acting involuntarily. When estimating split-second timings, hypnotised people behaved as though their actions were outside their control, in ways that would have been difficult to fake.

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Scientists turn mammalian cells into complex biocomputers
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Computer hardware is getting a softer side. A research team has come up with a way of genetically engineering the DNA of mammalian cells to carry out complex computations, in effect turning the cells into biocomputers. The group hasn’t put those modified cells to work in useful ways yet, but down the road researchers hope the new programming techniques will help improve everything from cancer therapy to on-demand tissues that can replace worn-out body parts.

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This Object Has Been Sprayed With the World's Blackest Material, and It's Freaking Us Out
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Well, we've finally cracked it. Scientists have finally figured out how to paint a portal to another dimension, as prophesied by Loony Tunes' the Roadrunner. Who wants to try driving a (very small) truck right through that gaping void circle?

In all seriousness, what you're looking at isn't actually a portal to another dimension - but it's not Photoshop, either. That really is a physical object that's been sprayed with Vantablack - the blackest material known to science.

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How Much Energy Would You Need to Power an Actual Time Machine?
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There are two hypotheses for time travel that are most popular: wormhole tunneling and cosmic strings. A wormhole is a hypothetical, bi-directional tunnel connecting two space-time locations.

Physicist Michio Kaku doesn't entirely rule this possibility out, but he cautions that powering a time machine to travel in this way is beyond human capabilities right now, and would demand either negative energy or the energy of a star.

Physicist Brian Greene, a string theory expert, doubts that this kind of approach could ever work.

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Relativity Just Passed a Major Test Involving the Most Accurate Clocks Ever
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Science loves nothing better than to find new ways to kick well-tested theories even harder and see if they can't be made to bleed a little.

Take time dilation for instance - the idea that time depends on your relative speed and gravity's pull. While it's been tested using highly accurate caesium atomic clocks, physicists have now put it to the test using even more accurate strontium atomic clocks, and they've found that Einstein still stands victorious.

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Automated telescope to help identify fast radio bursts
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A new Dutch telescope is set to help solve a nagging astrophysical mystery, by automatically scanning the southern skies alongside a giant array of radio dishes. MeerLICHT, a 65-centimeter optical telescope, is expected to help identify the sources of fast radio bursts (FRBs)—extremely brief, energetic flashes of radio waves from remote galaxies. In early April, after finishing tests at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, the telescope will be put in crates and shipped via cargo plane to the South African Astronomical Observatory near Sutherland. “We expect to be fully operational in July or August,” says MeerLICHT Project Manager Steven Bloemen.

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In 4 billion years our galaxy the Milky Way will collide with Andromeda; NASA created this animation of what the collision and eventual merger will look like.

Gene editing of human embryos yields early results
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Scientists have long sought a strategy for curing genetic diseases, but — with just a few notable exceptions — have succeeded only in their dreams. Now, though, researchers in China and Texas have taken a step toward making the fantasies a reality for all inherited diseases.

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Lost in Space: How Mars' Atmosphere Evaporated Away
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Mars may have once possessed an atmosphere about as thick as Earth's, but then lost most of it to space due to solar wind and ultraviolet rays, a new study found.

The new finding could shed light on the habitability of not just early Mars, but also distant worlds, researchers said.

Mars is currently a frigid desert world with extremely thin air. The atmospheric pressure on the Martian surface is on average only about one-hundredth to one-thousandth that on Earth at sea level. (In comparison, the atmospheric pressure at the highest point on Earth's surface, the top of Mount Everest, is about one-third that on Earth at sea level.)

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Scientists Have Detected an Unexplained Explosion Coming From a Galaxy 10.7 Billion Light-Years Away
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Scientists have taken the deepest X-ray image of our Universe to date - and within it, they've found evidence of a huge, unexplained explosion coming from a galaxy around 10.7 billion light-years away.

The galaxy itself appears to be fairly faint and unremarkable, but in October 2014, it suddenly became at least 1,000 times brighter over a few hours, before fading into oblivion again. No astronomical phenomenon that scientists currently know of can explain the behaviour.

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New Simulations Suggest Dark Energy Might Not Exist
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Ever since the late 1990s, physicists have been fairly certain that the Universe isn't only getting bigger, it also appears to be expanding at an ever increasing rate.

A mysterious force called dark energy is currently thought to be responsible for this accelerating growth, but a new study raises the possibility that what seems to be a type of energy could be an illusion caused by the changing structure of the Universe.

Physicists from Loránd University in Hungary and the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii are now questioning if approximations in Einstein's equations introduced "serious side effects" that gave the illusion of a vast, unknown force pushing space apart.

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Falcon 9 launch of SES-10; the first re-flight of an orbital class rocket.
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It's a long ways down. This is a view from the vantage point of astronaut Shane Kimbrough during his spacewalk Friday outside the International Space Station.

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Tadpoles learn to see with new eyes transplanted on their tails
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Blind tadpoles have learned to see again, using eyes implanted on their tails. With help from a migraine drug, these eyes were able to grow new connections to the tadpole’s nervous system. The same approach may work in humans, allowing the body to integrate bioengineered organs, say the team behind the work.

“If a human had an eye implanted on their back connected to their spinal cord, would the human be able to see out of that eye? My guess is probably yes,” says Michael Levin, at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

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A Japanese Man Just Got Another Person's Stem Cells Transplanted in His Eye
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In what's reported to be a world-first, last Tuesday, a Japanese man received a pioneering retinal cell transplant grown from donor stem cells instead of his own.
Doctors took skin cells from a donor bank and reprogrammed them into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which can be coaxed to grow into most cell types in the body.

For this procedure, the physicians grew the iPS cells into a type of retinal cell, and then injected them into the retina of the patient's right eye.
The test subject was a man in his 60s who has been living with age-related macular degeneration - a currently incurable eye disease that slowly leads to loss of vision.

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Scientists are turning spinach leaves into heart tissue.

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Confirmed: Those Mysterious Radio Bursts Really Are Coming From Outer Space
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For almost a decade now, scientists have been trying to decode the origin of some of the most mysterious and explosive signals in the Universe - fast radio bursts (FRBs).

Lasting only milliseconds, these bursts of energy are about a billion times more luminous than anything we've ever seen in our own galaxy, and seem to be travelling across vast distances. But despite having detected more than 20 of them, scientists still aren't sure where they're coming from, or what causes them. Now researchers are one step closer by ruling out any source on Earth.

There are still several hypotheses out there that need to be ruled out before we can say for sure where FRBs do come from - perhaps the most bizarre one put forward by Harvard scientists last month is that the FRBs could actually be alien signals.

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