alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Astronomers have an answer for a long-running mystery in astrophysics: why is the growth of supermassive black holes so much lower today than in the past? A study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray telescopes found that supermassive black holes are unable to consume material as rapidly as they did in the distant past. The results appeared in the December 2025 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

[...] The team ran tests of the three main possible scenarios currently being considered for the slowdown of black hole growth. These options were: could the decline in black hole growth be caused by less efficient rates of consumption, or by smaller typical black hole masses, or by fewer actively growing black holes? Their analysis of the data, extending over billions of years of cosmic history, led them to the conclusion that black holes are indeed consuming material less rapidly the later they are found after the Big Bang. The researchers expect this trend of slower-growing black holes to continue into the future.

NASA is reportedly halting work on the lunar Gateway in favor of a more direct push to build a lunar base. The new plan would cost tens of billions over the next decade, though the change could face hurdles because Congress previously funded Gateway specifically. SpaceNews reports: "Starting today, we're building humanity's first deep space outpost," said Carlos Garcia-Galan, program executive for NASA's moon base effort. The lunar base will take place in three phases. Phase 1, running from 2026 to 2028, "is all about getting to the moon reliably," he said. That includes a significant increase in the cadence of lander missions through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services and other programs. It will also focus on developing enabling technologies and getting "ground truth" for potential base locations at the lunar south pole.

Phase 2, from 2029 through 2031, starts building the base, he said. That would include building out communications, navigation, power and other infrastructure, developing larges CLPS cargo landers and supporting two crewed missions a year. Phase 3, beginning 2032, will enable "long distance and long duration human exploration" on the moon, he said, with routine logistics missions to the moon and uncrewed cargo return missions from the moon. Garcia-Galan said NASA foresees spending $10 billion each on Phases 1 and 2. Phase 3, lasting to at least 2036, would cost an additional $10 billion or more.

The base would leverage existing programs, although with some changes. NASA is planning to revamp the Lunar Terrain Vehicle program after concluding the current approach would take too long to get a crew-capable rover to the moon. "We were projecting a delivery on the lunar surface by 2030," he said. The agency is instead issuing a draft request for proposals for simplified rovers that could be quicker and easier to develop but could be upgraded later. The base, though, would include some new capabilities and technologies. One example Garcia-Galan provided was MoonFall, a drone that would be able to hop from one location to another on the lunar surface. The drones will be "built on the legacy" of Ingenuity, the small Mars helicopter. "We're going to take everything that we learned from Ingenuity's systems, the avionics, all of that, to build this."

Computershack shares a report from NBC News: Leonid Radvinsky, the owner of adult-content platform OnlyFans, has died of cancer at the age of 43, the company said in a statement on Monday. "We are deeply saddened to announce the death of Leo Radvinsky. Leo passed away peacefully after a long battle with cancer," an OnlyFans spokesperson said. "His family have requested privacy at this difficult time."


Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American entrepreneur, acquired Fenix International Limited, the parent company of OnlyFans, in 2018 and served as its director and majority shareholder. He also runs Leo, a venture capital fund he founded in 2009 that focuses primarily on investments in technology companies. According to Reuters, OnlyFans is valued at around $5.5 billion, including debt.

"It is the talk of the town today — the loud boom, the flash of light in the sky experienced by a lot of folks across the Houston area this afternoon," says a local Texas newscaster. "And then there was this — a home in northwest Harris county hit by something that crashed through their roof."

Travelling at very high speed, the six-pound meteorite crashed through their roof and through their attic, crashing again through the ceiling of the floor below. It then bounced off the floor, hit the ceiling again — and then fell onto the bed.

CBS News reports: NASA said in a social media post that the meteor became visible at 49 miles above Stagecoach, northwest of Houston, at 4:40 p.m. local time. The meteor moved southeast at 35,000 miles per hour, breaking apart 29 miles above Bammel, just west of Cypress Station, NASA said. "The fragmentation of the meteor — which weighed about a ton with a diameter of 3 feet — created a pressure wave that caused booms heard by some in the area," NASA said in the post. Across the Houston area, residents described hearing a low, rumbling sound that many compared to thunder, even though the skies were clear, according to CBS affiliate KHOU.

Earlier this week, an asteroid weighing about 7 tons and traveling at 45,000 mph traveled over multiple states. And last June, a bright meteor was seen across the southeastern U.S. and exploded over Georgia, creating similar booms heard by residents in the area.

"Juicier steaks could soon be served up after barley was given the go-ahead to become Britain's first gene-edited crop," reports the Telegraph: In an effort to fatten up cows and get them to market faster, scientists have altered the DNA of Golden Promise barley to increase its fat content... [Regulators have approved the feeding of that barley to cows for further studies.] [T]he small increase reduces the time it takes for farmers to raise animals for slaughter and increases the amount of milk and meat they produce to make the industry more profitable.

The gene-edited barley is also able to cut the amount of methane a cow produces, [Rothamsted Research professor/biochemist Peter] Eastmond said... Reducing methane from cattle is a major goal of the industry, and Professor Eastmond estimated his barley could cut the methane output from a single cow by up to 15%.

The two genetic tweaks to the barley are believed to alter the gut bacteria in cows' stomachs and reduce the amount of methane-generating microbes, cutting the cows' emissions.... [Eastmond] is also working on applying the same two gene edits to rye grass to create pastures and meadows which are lipid-rich and calorie-dense. This, he said, could lead to entire fields of gene-edited grass which could be grazed by cows, sheep, horses and goats to fatten them up and cut emissions... "It would be better to have this technology in a pasture grass that's grown to supply the livestock and graze it directly."
The barley "has been modified to have a single letter of DNA removed from two different genes to switch them off," the article points out. "No genes have been added to its DNA and it is not considered to be genetically modified."

The article points out that Britain "has launched a push towards more gene-edited crops as a key post-Brexit freedom since splitting from the European Union," noting that U.K. scientists and private companies "have created products such as bread with fewer cancer-causing chemicals, longer-lasting strawberries and bananas, sweeter-tasting lettuce and disease-resistant potatoes, although these are yet to be granted permission to land on supermarket shelves..."

But the EU has so far resisted the sale of any gene-edited crops in the EU.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

China's orbital outpost Tiangong was completed in 2022 and is hosting up to three astronauts at a time, reports CNN.

But meanwhile U.S. lawmakers are now signaling there's not time to develop and launch a replacement for the International Space Station — considered the signal most expensive object ever built — before its deorbiting in 2030. A recent Senate bill calls for the U.S. to continue funding it as late as 2032, but that bill still awaits approval from the U.S. Senate and the House.

But some private space companies are already building their alternatives: Private companies that are in the early design and mockup phase of developing these space stations are still waiting on NASA for guidance — and money... [NASA's "Requests for Proposals"] were delayed, in part because it took all of 2025 to cinch a confirmation for Trump's on-again-off-again pick for NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman [confirmed in December]... Similarly, 2025 saw a 45-day government shutdown, the longest in history — adding another hiccup in the space agency's plans to begin formally soliciting proposals from the private sector. Companies now expect that NASA will issue its Request for Proposals in late March or early April, one CEO told CNN...

Several commercial outfits have recently announced big funding influxes aimed at speeding up the development and launch of new orbiting outposts. Houston-based Axiom Space announced a $350 million funding round last month. Its California-based competitor Vast then notched a $500 million raise in early March. Vast is determined to launch a bare-bones station to orbit as soon as possible, with or without federal input, according to the company. "Our approach is to actually not wait for (NASA) and get going and build a minimum viable product, single-module space station called Haven-1, which we're launching into orbit next year," Vast CEO Max Haot told CNN in a phone interview earlier this month. Similarly, Axiom Space is working toward a 2028 launch date for a module that it plans to initially attach to the ISS before breaking off to orbit on its own. A spokesperson told CNN that it the company is "committed" to winning the NASA contract money and may continue pursing such goals even without contract awards.

Still, there's lingering doubt that any of the companies pursuing space stations will be able to stay afloat without securing a coveted NASA contract or at least cinching significant business from the public sector.
The article includes "Another complicating fact: Russia, the United States' primary partner on the ISS, has not pledged to keep operating its half of the space station past 2028." NASA will eventually evaluate proposals for an ISS alternative from Vast, Axiom Space, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, Max Space and several competitors including Voyager Technologies, CNN notes, ultimately handing out an estimated $1.5 billion in contracts between 2026 and 2031.

And while those companies may wait decades before a return on their investment, the article includes this quotes from the cofounder/general partner of Balerion Space Ventures, which led the fundraising for Vast. " What's obvious to us is you're going to have multiple vehicles with myriad companies go into space. You're going to have vehicles leaving from celestial bodies, like the moon. And we need a habitat."

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope unexpectedly captured a rare, early-stage breakup of comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) just days after it first began disintegrating. Phys.org reports: "Sometimes the best science happens by accident," said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. "This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. We had to find a new target -- and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances."

Noonan didn't know K1 was fragmenting until he viewed the images the day after Hubble took them. "While I was taking an initial look at the data, I saw that there were four comets in those images when we only proposed to look at one," said Noonan. "So we knew this was something really, really special." Hubble caught K1 fragmenting into at least four pieces, each with a distinct coma, the fuzzy envelope of gas and dust that surrounds a comet's icy nucleus. Hubble cleanly resolved the fragments, but to ground-based telescopes, at the time they only appeared as barely distinguishable, bright blobs. [...]

"Never before has Hubble caught a fragmenting comet this close to when it actually fell apart. Most of the time, it's a few weeks to a month later. And in this case, we were able to see it just days after," said Noonan. "This is telling us something very important about the physics of what's happening at the comet's surface. We may be seeing the timescale it takes to form a substantial dust layer that can then be ejected by the gas." The findings have been published in the journal Icarus.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: In The Martian, fictional astronaut Mark Watney survives the wasteland of Mars by growing potatoes in lunar soil -- with a bit of help from human poop. The idea may not be so far-fetched. In a preprint posted this month on bioRxiv, researchers show potatoes can indeed grow in the equivalent of Moon dust, though they need a lot of help from compost found on Earth. To make the discovery, scientists first had to re-create lunar regolith -- the loose, powdery layer that blankets the Moon's surface. To replicate that in the lab, David Handy, a space biologist at Oregon State University (OSU), and his colleagues used a mix of crushed minerals and volcanic ash that matched the chemistry of the Moon.

But lunar regolith is entirely devoid of the organic matter that plants need to grow. "Turning an inorganic, inhospitable bucket of glorified sand into something that can support plant growth is complex," says Anna-Lisa Paul, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Florida not involved with the work. So Handy and his colleagues added vermicompost -- organic waste from worms -- into the regolith. They found that a mix with 5% compost allowed the potatoes to grow while still emulating the stressful conditions of the lunar environment. After almost 2 months of growth, the team harvested the tubers, freeze-dried them, and ground them up for further testing.

Analysis of the potatoes' DNA showed stress-related genes had been activated. The potatoes also had higher concentrations of copper and zinc than Earth-grown ones, which may make them dangerous for human consumption. The plants' nutritional value, though, was similar to traditional potatoes -- a surprise to the scientists, who expected lower levels of nutrition "because the plants might have been working overtime to overcome certain stressors," Handy says.

Nvidia unveiled its Vera Rubin Space-1 system for powering AI workloads in orbital data centers. "Space computing, the final frontier, has arrived," said CEO Jensen Huang. "As we deploy satellite constellations and explore deeper into space, intelligence must live wherever data is generated." CNBC reports: In a press release, the company said that its Vera Rubin Space-1 Module, which includes the IGX Thor and Jetson Orin, will be used on space missions led by multiple companies. The chips are specifically "engineered for size-, weight- and power-constrained environments." Partners include Axiom Space, Starcloud and Planet.

Huang said Nvidia is working with partners on a new computer for orbital data centers, but there are still engineering hurdles to overcome. "In space, there's no convection, there's just radiation," Huang said during his GTC keynote, "and so we have to figure out how to cool these systems out in space, but we've got lots of great engineers working on it."

Samples from the asteroid Ryugu contain all five nucleobases -- the key building blocks of DNA and RNA. "This strengthens the idea that asteroids may have brought the ingredients for the first living organisms to Earth long ago," reports New Scientist. From the report: Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft visited Ryugu in 2018, where it shot two projectiles -- one small and one large -- into the surface of the asteroid and collected the resulting debris. It arrived back at Earth with the samples in 2020 and researchers have been analyzing these in detail ever since. Yasuhiro Oba at Hokkaido University in Japan and his colleagues examined two samples, one from the asteroid's surface and one comprised of subsurface materials excavated by the projectiles. In both, the team found all five primary nucleobases, which are the compounds that make up the nucleic acids DNA and RNA when combined with sugars and phosphoric acid.

This isn't the first time that nucleobases have been found in asteroid samples: they have been seen in meteorites, too, and in samples from the asteroid Bennu. The researchers did find different abundances of the various nucleobases among the various samples, though, which hints that these compounds might be useful for tracing asteroids and meteorites back to the parent bodies that they broke off from in the distant past, as well as understanding the evolution of those parent bodies over time. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Last June Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said in a statement that Texans "have a God-given right to know what's on their plate, and for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab. It's plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives."

But California company Wildtype sells lab-grown salmon — and is suing Texas over its ban on cell-cultivated meat, the Austin Chronicle reported this week. The company's founder says lab-grown salmon eliminates the mercury, microplastic, and antibiotic contamination commonly found in seafood. And one chef in Austin, Texas says lab-grown salmon is "awesome" and "something new"-- at the only Texas restaurant that was serving it last summer: Just two months after the salmon hit the menu, Texas banned the sale of cell-cultivated meat... A lawsuit from Wildtype and one other FDA-approved cultivated meat company [argues] it's anti-capitalism and unconstitutional... This law "was not enacted to protect the health and safety of Texas consumers — indeed, it allows the continued distribution of cultivated meat to consumers so long as it is not sold. Instead, SB 261 was enacted to stifle the growth of the cultivated meat industry to protect Texas' conventional agricultural industry from innovative competition that is exclusively based outside of Texas...." [according to the lawsuit]. It was filed in September, immediately after the ban took effect, and cell-cultivated companies are awaiting judgment.
That Texas ban would last two years, notes U.S. News and World Reports, adding that Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Nebraska have also passed bans, some temporary "on the manufacturing, sale or distribution of cell-cultured meat." Meanwhile, a new five-year moratorium on lab-grown meat was signed this week by the governor of South Dakota "after rejecting a permanent ban last month," reports South Dakota Searchlight: The new law bars the sale, manufacture or distribution of "cell-cultured protein" products from July 1 this year through June 30, 2031. Violations are punishable by up to 30 days in jail, a fine of up to $500, or both.
"But supporters of lab-grown meat are not going down without a fight," adds U.S. News and World Reports, with another lawsuit also filed challenging a ban in Florida: When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the ban in Florida, he described it as "fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals." He added that his administration "will save our beef."

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Cloud storage company Backblaze has partnered with StorageReview to make a massive dataset containing 314 trillion digits of Pi publicly accessible. The digits were calculated by StorageReview in December 2025 after months of heavy computation designed to stress modern hardware. The dataset now hosted in the cloud weighs in at over 130TB, while the full working dataset used during the calculation reached about 2.1PB when intermediate checkpoints were included. The report notes that the Pi digits have been broken into roughly 200GB chunks to make it more practical for researchers or enthusiasts to download.

Here's what StorageReview founder Brian Beeler said about the project: "Pushing [Pi] to 314 trillion digits was far more than a headline number. It was a sustained, months-long computational challenge that stressed every layer of modern infrastructure, from high core-count CPUs to massive high-speed storage, and it gave us valuable insight into how extreme, real-world workloads behave at scale. Making this dataset available in the Backblaze cloud takes the project a step further by opening access to one of the largest raw outputs ever generated in a single-system calculation. Hosting multi-petabyte files for the broader community is no small feat, and we appreciate Backblaze stepping up to ensure researchers, developers, and enthusiasts can explore and build on this record-setting achievement."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In a paper, published last month in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers offered a novel take on falling felines. Their evidence suggests new insights into the so-called falling cat problem, particularly that cats have a very flexible segment of their spines that allows them to correct their orientation midair. [...] People have been curious about falling cats perhaps as long as the animals have been living with humans, but the method to their acrobatic abilities remains enigmatic. Part of the difficulty is that the anatomy of the cat has not been studied in detail, explains Yasuo Higurashi, a physiologist at Yamaguchi University in Japan and lead author of the study. [...]

Modern research has split the falling cat problem into two competing models. The first, "legs in, legs out," suggests that cats correct their falling trajectory by first extending their hind limbs before retracting them, using a sequential twist of their upper and then lower trunk to gain the proper posture while in free fall. The second model, "tuck and turn," suggests that cats turn their upper and lower bodies in simultaneous juxtaposed movements. [...]

The researchers found that the feline spine was extremely flexible in the upper thoracic vertebrae, but stiffer and heavier in the lower lumbar vertebrae. The discovery matches video evidence showing the cats first turn their front legs, and then their lower legs. The results suggest the cat quickly spins its flexible upper torso to face the ground, allowing it to see so that it can correctly twist the rest of its body to match. "The thoracic spine of the cat can rotate like our neck," Dr. Higurashi said.

Experiments on the spine show the upper vertebrae can twist an astounding 360 degrees, he says, which helps cats make these correcting movements with ease. The results are consistent with the "legs in, legs out" model, but definitively determining which model is correct will take more work, Dr. Higurashi says. The results also yielded another discovery: Cats, like many animals, appear to have a right-side bias. One of the dropped cats corrected itself by turning to the right eight out of eight times, while the other turned right six out of eight times.

Van Allen Probe A, a 1,300-pound (600 kg) NASA satellite launched in 2012 to study Earth's radiation belts, is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere this week. While most of it is expected to burn up during descent, "some components may survive," reports the BBC. "The space agency said there is a one in 4,200 chance of being harmed by a piece of the probe, which it characterized as 'low' risk." From the report: The spacecraft is projected to re-enter around 19:45 EST (00:45 GMT) on Tuesday the U.S. Space Force predicted, according to Nasa, though there is a 24-hour margin of "uncertainty" in the timing. [...] The spacecraft and its twin, Van Allen Probe B, were on a mission to gather unprecedented data on Earth's two permanent radiation belts. It was not immediately clear where in Earth's atmosphere the satellite is projected to re-enter. NASA and the U.S. Space Force has said it will monitor the re-entry and update any predictions. [...] Van Allen Probe B is not expected to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere before 2030.

Since 1999, Slashdot has been covering the annual Ig Nobel prize ceremonies -- which honor real scientific research into strange or surprising subjects. "After 35 years in Boston, the annual prize ceremony will take place in Zurich, Switzerland, this year and will continue to be held in a European city for the foreseeable future," reports Ars Technica. "The reason: concerns about the safety of international travelers, who are increasingly reluctant to travel to the U.S. to participate."

"During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country," Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of The Annals of Improbable Research magazine, told The Associated Press. "We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the U.S. this year." It comes on the heels of our recent story that many international game developers are opting to skip this year's weeklong Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, citing similar concerns. Ars Technica reports: Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." As the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of scientific merit. The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures, in which experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and again in just seven words.

Traditionally, the awards ceremony and related Ig Nobel events have taken place in Boston at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston University. However, four of last year's 10 winners opted to skip the ceremony rather than travel to the U.S., and the situation has not improved. [...] [T]his year, the Ig Nobel organizers are joining forces with the ETH Domain and the University of Zurich for hosting duties. "Switzerland has nurtured many unexpected good things -- Albert Einstein's physics, the world economy, and the cuckoo clock leap to mind -- and is again helping the world appreciate improbable people and ideas," Abraham said.

The Ig Nobels will not be returning to the U.S. any time soon. Instead, the plan is for Zurich to host every second year; every odd-numbered year, the ceremony will be hosted by a different European city. Abraham likened the arrangement to the Eurovision Song Contest.