Abstractions blog

A supernova-like explosion dubbed the Camel appears to be the result of a newborn black hole eating a star from the inside out.

A new thought experiment indicates that quantum mechanics doesn’t work without strange numbers that turn negative when squared.

An overlooked but powerful driver of cloud formation could accelerate the loss of polar sea ice.

One black hole is nice, but astrophysicists can do a lot more science with 50 of them.

A new study shows that extreme black holes could break the famous “no-hair” theorem, and in a way that we could detect.

A group of MIT undergraduates is searching for tetrahedra that tile space, the latest effort in a millennia-long inquiry. They’ve already made a new discovery.

Unusual proteins that can quickly fold into different shapes provide cells with a novel regulatory mechanism.

Small black holes were nowhere to be found, leading astronomers to wonder if they didn’t exist at all. Now a series of findings, including a “unicorn” black hole, has raised hopes of solving the decade-long mystery.

Since they can’t prod actual universes as they inflate and bump into each other in the hypothetical multiverse, physicists are studying digital and physical analogs of the process.