GoKawiil
Tech News
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's long-running entry on the metaphysics of holes, first published in 1996, has received a substantive revision dated May 12, 2025. The entry examines whether holes qualify as real entities or are merely linguistic fictions, drawing on evidence from ordinary language, causal reasoning, and cognitive science studies on how infants and adults perceive and track holes.
Graham Farmelo's book 'Hawking: His Life and Work' (John Murray, 2026) chronicles the physicist's scientific achievements alongside his personal struggles, including his motor neuron disease diagnosis, two marriages ending, and his relationships with students and colleagues. The review, written by a physicist who was a close friend of Hawking's from 1996 while working together at the University of Cambridge, praises the book's research and readability.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified a widespread class of compact, reddish objects dating to the universe's first billion years, dubbed 'little red dots.' Researchers say these objects have puzzled the field since their discovery, and new analysis is now offering possible explanations for what they are.
A new Nature study led by Max Planck Institute astrophysicist Sunmyon Chon simulated conditions in the early universe and found that rapidly forming black holes can generate light signatures matching the mysterious 'little red dots' seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. The team argues these objects quickly develop dense, thick gas disks that produce a strong hydrogen-alpha glow resembling what's observed in these ancient regions of space.
Astronomers analyzing James Webb Space Telescope data have identified an unusual celestial object that some researchers believe could be a so-called 'black hole star,' a rare hybrid where a black hole is enshrouded in thick gas that mimics stellar light. The classification remains tentative, with further observation needed to confirm whether the object fits this proposed new category.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope had largely concluded that mysterious compact objects called 'little red dots' were supermassive black holes obscured by dust. But two newly analyzed dots studied by teams led by de Graaff and Naidu show a distinctive Balmer break—a spectral signature usually associated with hot stellar surfaces—that standard black hole models don't produce, complicating the picture.
Researchers built a high-resolution dark-matter N-body simulation, seeded with Planck cosmological parameters, tracking halo mergers from redshift 35 to 7.5 using ROCKSTAR and CONSISTENT-TREES tools. They layered a semi-analytic galaxy-formation model onto this framework to simulate gas cooling, star formation, supernova feedback and radiation, showing that overmassive black holes and compact 'little red dot' galaxies emerge naturally from these early-universe conditions without requiring exotic physics.
IMAX's signature camera noise stems from its 15/70 film format, which uses a 65mm negative running horizontally across 15 sprocket holes per frame instead of the standard five, producing images roughly three times larger than conventional film. At 24 frames per second, this means 360 sprocket holes—about 5.6 feet of film—pass through the camera every second, requiring a powerful motor and mechanical components that create audible rattling during shooting.
An essay compares the universe to a massive, minified software file with no comments or source history, arguing that physicists effectively act as reverse engineers probing a running system they cannot inspect directly. It traces how Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein each uncovered hidden unifying rules beneath seemingly separate phenomena, and notes that quantum mechanics then complicated the picture by making particles behave differently depending on how they are observed.
Researchers led by Foschi and colleagues, publishing in Nature, developed an artificial-intelligence algorithm called kine that reconstructs continuous, movie-like views of relativistic plasma jets from black holes using sparse observational data. These jets, which blast material at over 98% of the speed of light, have historically been studied only through isolated snapshots, making it hard to trace their evolution over time.
VESA patterns refer to the standardized spacing, in millimeters, between the threaded mounting holes on the back of a TV, given as horizontal by vertical measurements. This spacing is unrelated to screen size or resolution, so buyers should check their exact TV model rather than assume a pattern based on display dimensions. Most wall mounts support several VESA patterns, so a bracket doesn't need to match one exact size as long as the TV's pattern is on its supported list.