fidzu : nerd

"A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules," reports Live Science. "It's not only exceeding the 'speed limit' of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions - two features that are not predicted to coexist..." "How is this rule-breaking behavior even possible? In a paper published Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of researchers observed ID830 in multiple wavelengths to find an answer...." As they attract gas and dust, this material accumulates in a swirling accretion disk. Gravity pulls the material from the disk into the black hole, but the infalling material generates radiation pressure that pushes outward and prevents more stuff from falling in. As a result, black holes are muzzled by a self-regulating process called the Eddington limit... Its X-ray brightness suggests that ID830 is accreting mass at about 13 times the Eddington limit, due to a sudden burst of inflowing gas that may have occurred as ID830 shredded and engulfed a celestial body that wandered too close. "For a supermassive black hole (SMBH) as massive as ID830, this would require not a normal (main-sequence) star, but a more massive giant star or a huge gas cloud," study co-author Sakiko Obuchi, an observational astronomer at Waseda University in Tokyo, told Live Science via email. Such super-Eddington phases may be incredibly brief, as "this transitional phase is expected to last for roughly 300 years," Obuchi added. ID830 also simultaneously displays radio and X-ray emissions. These two features are not expected to coexist, especially because super-Eddington accretion is thought to suppress such emissions. "This unexpected combination hints at physical mechanisms not yet fully captured by current models of extreme accretion and jet launching," the researchers said in a statement. So while ID830 is launching massive radio jets, its X-ray emissions appear to originate from a structure called a corona, produced as intense magnetic fields from the accretion disk create a thin but turbulent billion-degree cloud of turbocharged particles. These particles orbit the black hole at nearly the speed of light, in what NASA calls "one of the most extreme physical environments in the universe." Altogether, ID830's rule-breaking behaviors suggest that it is in a rare transitional phase of excessive consumption - and excretion. This incredible feeding burst has energized both its jets and its corona, making ID830 shine brightly across multiple wavelengths as it spews out excess radiation. Additionally, based on UV-brightness analysis, quasars like ID830 may be unexpectedly common, the researchers said. Models predict that only around 10% of quasars have spectacular radio jets, but these energetic objects could be significantly more abundant in the early universe than previously suggested. Most importantly, ID830 also shows how SMBHs can regulate galaxy growth in the early universe. As a black hole gobbles matter at the super-Eddington limit, the energy from its resultant emissions can heat and disperse matter throughout the interstellar medium - the gas between stars - to suppress star formation. As a result, ancient SMBHs like ID830 may have grown massive at the expense of their host galaxies.

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23 Feb 2026 8:34am GMT

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23 Feb 2026 8:22am GMT

Ardour 9.1 addresses critical issues from version 9.0, restores correct bottom pane behavior in the Editor, and adds MIDI note chasing and duplication.

23 Feb 2026 8:11am GMT

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23 Feb 2026 7:33am GMT

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23 Feb 2026 7:01am GMT

When one company asked job applicants to submit a video where they answer a question, most of the 300 responses were "eerily similar," reports the Washington Post (with a company executive saying it was "abundantly clear" they'd used AI.) Job seekers are turning to AI to help them land jobs more quickly in a tough labor market.... Employers say that's having an unintended consequence: Many applications are looking and sounding the same... It's easy to spot when candidates over-rely on AI, some employers said. Oftentimes, executive summaries will look eerily similar to each other, odd phrases that people wouldn't normally use in conversation creep into descriptions, fancy vocabulary appears, and someone with entry-level experience uses language that indicates they are much more senior, they added. It's worse when they use auto-apply AI tools, which will find jobs, fill out applications and submit résumés on the candidate's behalf, some employers said. Those tend to misinterpret some of the application questions and fill in the wrong information in inappropriate spots. If these applications were evaluated alone, employers say they'd have a harder time identifying AI usage. But when hundreds of applications all have the same issue, they said, AI's role in it becomes obvious. The article acknowledges that some employers could be using AI tools to screen resumes too. One job-seeker in Texas even says he'll stop submitting an AI-written résumé when the recruiter stops using AI to evaluate them. "You're saying, 'You shouldn't be doing this' when I know a good chunk of them do this!" Obligatory XKCD.

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23 Feb 2026 5:35am GMT

This week Raspberry Pi saw its stock price surge more than 60% above its early-February low (before giving up some gains at the end of the week). Reuters notes the rise started when CEO Eben Upton bought 13,224 pounds worth of shares - but there could be another reason. "The rally in the roughly $800 million company has materialised alongside social-media buzz that demand for its single-board computers could pick up as people buy them to run AI agents such as OpenClaw." The Register explains: The catalyst appears to have been the sudden realization by one X user, "aleabitoreddit," that the agentic AI hand grenade known as OpenClaw could drive demand for Raspberry Pis the way it had for Apple Mac Minis. The viral AI personal assistant, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, has dominated the feeds of AI boosters over the past few weeks for its ability to perform everyday tasks like sending emails, managing calendars, booking appointments, and complaining about their meatbag masters on the purportedly all-agent forum known as MoltBook... In case it needs to be said, no one should be running this thing on their personal devices lest the agent accidentally leak your most personal and sensitive secrets to the web... In this context, a cheap low-power device like a Raspberry Pi makes a certain kind of sense as a safer, saner way to poke the robo-lobster... The Register argues Raspberry Pis aren't as cheap as they used to be "thanks in part to the global memory crunch. Today, a top-specced Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of memory will set you back more than $200, up from $120 a year ago." "You know what's cheaper, easier, and more secure than letting OpenClaw loose on your local area network? A virtual private cloud..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Feb 2026 2:34am GMT

Catch up on the latest Linux news: Sparky 8.2, KDE Plasma 6.6, COSMIC 1.0.7, Fish Shell 4.5, PipeWire 1.6, Bottles 62, open-source community launches MinIO fork, and more.

22 Feb 2026 9:39pm GMT

DietPi 10.1 adds NanoPi Zero2 support, introduces WhoDB, unlocks RISC-V Navidrome builds, and delivers multiple enhancements and bug fixes.

22 Feb 2026 5:27pm GMT

Is the global atmospheric commons destined to be an industrial waste dumping ground?

22 Feb 2026 11:20am GMT

"Accessing and remediating any of these issues can only be performed in the VAB."

21 Feb 2026 11:54pm GMT

Like rocks, egg shells can trap isotopes, allowing us to use them to date samples.

21 Feb 2026 1:00pm GMT