"Scientists have discovered a virus that is a tiny bit human, carrying a gene it stole from our ancestors about 100,000 years ago," writes the New York Times. "And this virus may be using our own gene to infect us."

Phys.org explains that it's "both an important gene for brain function and a jumping gene capable of moving and inserting itself into genomes." BC200 is found only in humans and related primates and was discovered in the late 1980s as an abundant noncoding RNA in human neurons. Although BC200's physiological function is poorly understood, evidence suggests it may be involved in regulating the translation of neuronal messenger RNAs into proteins... The researchers also suspect that BC200 jumped in skin cells because these are the only cells known to be infected by molluscum contagiosum virus (MCV). The gene is also abnormally expressed in some tumors and overexpressed in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease, suggesting its jumping ability could play roles in these diseases.

[Cedric Feschotte, a senior author of the study] said he and his colleagues would like to explore whether the molluscum contagiosum virus uses BC200 to manipulate human host cells. They are also interested in better understanding the gene's role in disease, including breast and other types of tumors in which it is abnormally expressed, and whether it jumps in cancer cells and causes mutations.
Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.

While most magnets have two poles (north and south, or positive and negative), recent advances in quantum mechanics have revealed an "octupolar order," writes Phys.org, where a pattern of particles in a crystalline structure "behaves as if it has eight magnetic poles rather than the familiar two." Now, a team led by quantum physicists at the University of Toronto has established a new method for observing quantum magnetic states using light to probe the atomic vibrations produced as electrons spin. The work is a critical first step toward harnessing multipolar magnetism for practical technologies, including next-generation data storage and computing devices. "We identified new signatures of a hidden type of magnetic state which cannot be detected using ordinary probes," says Arun Paramekanti, a professor in the Department of Physics and the Center for Quantum Information & Quantum Control in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto, and senior author of a study published in Physical Review Letters that describes the findings. "Our research opens up the possibility for using higher-order magnets in several applications including controllable read-write memory elements found in everyday computers...."

By directing a special type of rotating light at magnetic materials, the team observed a clear optical fingerprint of the otherwise hidden magnetic order.... The findings offer a new tool for uncovering and manipulating previously inaccessible forms of magnetism, opening new avenues for quantum technology development.

Spaceflight Now reports: "A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launched from Florida Thursday night on a classified mission for the National Reconnaissance Office, America's spy satellite agency... The NRO has previously flown payloads on 22 Falcon 9 rockets but this is the first time it has used the heavy-lift Falcon Heavy, which consists of three Falcon 9 boosters and an upper stage, topped by a payload fairing.

The powerful rocket, which lifts off under the power of 27 Merlin 1D engines, was introduced to great fanfare in 2018 and made its 14th flight Thursday night... NROL-97 was SpaceX's third Falcon launch of the day. In addition to the Crew 13 mission, the company launched 130 payloads on the Transporter 13 rideshare mission from its West Coast pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. It was the first time the company has landed four boosters in a single day.
CNN reports: As Starship flights ramp up, SpaceX has made clear that the company will phase out the use of two of its most iconic creations: the Dragon spacecraft, which ferries astronauts and cargo to and from the International Space Station, and the Falcon 9 rocket, which for a decade has dominated the global launch market.

These vehicles not only revolutionized the space industry in their own way, they're also still very much essential to ongoing work in Earth orbit, without clear backup options in place. The prospect of this loss is already spurring panic among some satellite operators, said Caleb Henry, director of research at analytics firm Quilty Space... Henry said he expects that most of the remaining space on board Falcon 9 rockets has already been sold and — beyond early 2029 — such flights may be reserved solely for the US government. Even NASA, which currently counts the Dragon capsule as the only US-made spacecraft capable of getting its astronauts to and from the ISS, has also acknowledged the looming retirement of SpaceX's workhorse vehicles....

Despite the success of Falcon and Dragon, a peek at SpaceX's business book may hint at financial reasons for retiring the vehicles. In its first quarterly earnings report, SpaceX revealed its space segment — which includes Falcon, Dragon and Starship — lost $542 million. By comparison, its Starlink internet and connectivity business made nearly $1.7 billion. Starship is expected to continue to cost SpaceX untold millions as it moves out of the prototyping phase. But one reason SpaceX is willing to bet big on Starship is that it's simply "much better" for achieving the company's own long-term goals, said SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell at a recent conference. So it makes sense to shift resources toward the megarocket's future....

This rocket supply crunch has been looming since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine — which immediately removed Russia's Soyuz and Proton rockets from the commercial market, Henry noted. On top of that, Amazon — which is deploying a space-based internet constellation to rival SpaceX's Starlink — stepped in to buy more than 100 launches from various rocket makers.... Though some satellite manufacturers are hopeful that space onboard future Starship launches will be offered to satellite operators, it's not clear when or if that will happen.... It is possible that a launch supply crunch could be averted, noted Micah Walter-Range, a space analyst and contributor to the VettaFi Space Index. But satellite operators may be wary because newer rockets that have for years promised to step up to compete with the Falcon 9 have not yet begun flying with any regularity.

"The space industry hates uncertainty, particularly when it comes to planning of launches," Walter-Range said.
The article notes that Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, United Launch Alliance, and the Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin "have not yet reached the scale or launch cadence that the industry is demanding."

"The winner of the Nikon Small World in Motion competition is under investigation," writes the photography news site PetaPixel , "after scientists accused Dr Ning Xu of using AI in his video." The Nikon competition is about showcasing the beauty, complexity, and artistry of the microscopic world. The entries are abstract, often baffling to laypeople. But when Dr Xu was announced as the winner last month, members of the scientific community began to cry foul. "There are many serious problems with this video," Edward Phelps, associate professor at Florida University, says on LinkedIn. Phelps points out that "purple structures pop in and out of existence" and "green cilia also appear from nowhere and do not match the known size."

Dr Xu's video is supposed to show the movement of cilia, which are hair-like structures that line part of the lungs... However, since Dr Xu won the prize, Nikon Small World updated its LinkedIn post celebrating his triumph with a note that reads: "Regarding questions raised about this year's Small World In Motion winning video, Nikon is carefully re-reviewing the information provided during the initial vetting, along with additional supporting materials from the entrant." Nikon adds that Dr Xu is "respectfully complying and has provided detailed technical documentation outlining the microscopy equipment, imaging methods, and processing techniques used to create the source video."

Worse still, Ian Donovan, an MD/PhD Student at UT Southwestern Medical Center, says he ran the video through Google Gemini, and the result came back with an invisible Google SynthID watermark that indicates at least some of the video is AI-generated. Dr Xu, an optical engineering researcher at the National University of Singapore, reportedly responded to the LinkedIn post. According to Nature, Dr Xu accepted that he had used an AI model to assist with post-processing but denied breaking the rules of the competition, which clearly state that "AI-generated videos are not permitted."

"It was applied afterwards to the reconstructed grayscale data to distinguish and color structures with similar morphology," he wrote. However, Dr Xu's messages on the LinkedIn post can't be found as of today (October 1), and his LinkedIn profile now appears to have been deleted entirely.
Meanwhile, some college students "see a double standard when colleges penalize them for outsourcing academic work to AI but allow similar use by institutional leaders," writes Entrepreneur magazine: According to a recent report from The New York Times, Dartmouth College students are calling out a top professor for allegedly using AI to help with writing... The school's provost, Santiago Schnell, faced allegations of AI use last week from the college's student-run newspaper, which detected AI in some of his published writing. The college said it was launching an investigation into the written work. Schnell said in a statement to the student-run newspaper, The Dartmouth, that he used AI "for language refinement, copyediting, improving clarity and organization and making writing processes more efficient." The newspaper ran his statement through an AI detector, which said that Schnell had used AI to write it, too.

An estimated 2.3 million cancer cases worldwide in 2024, about one in eight, were attributable to infections, according to a study published in The Lancet Oncology. "This recent Lancet data is a profound reminder that a significant portion of our global cancer burden is fundamentally preventable," said David Greenberg, MD, of Hackensack Meridian Jersey Shore University Medical Center, in a news release. "We have historically siloed infectious diseases and oncology, but they are deeply intertwined. By shifting our focus toward aggressive infection control, we can literally vaccinate and treat our way out of millions of future cancer diagnoses." From a report: The study found that an estimated 2.3 million new cancer cases were attributable to infections globally in 2024, equivalent to 12% of all cancer cases. Of these, the largest number (760,000 cases, or 4%) were caused by H. pylori, followed by HPV (750,000 cases, or 4%), HBV (360,000 cases, or 2%), EBV (260,000 cases, or 1%) and HCV (160,000 cases). More than three quarters of infection-attributable cancers occurred in low- and middle-income countries. Eastern Asian had the largest burden, with 990,000 cases (42% of the global total). Rates were also higher than the global average in sub-Saharan Africa, Central and Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

Longtime Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis shares a report from NPR: Google just put a refrigerator-sized satellite into space, part of a research project the company hopes can pave the way for orbiting AI data centers powered by the sun. The prototype satellite has four specialty chips in it called Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, that Google designed for machine learning and has already deployed in data centers on Earth. The chips will run a version of the company's Gemma AI model for 15 minutes at a time due to heat management constraints, using the open weight model to answer simple queries.

In a blog post, Google said the mission will gauge how the TPUs handle "the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space." The satellite launched October 1 is a prototype that Travis Beals, senior director and lead of Project Suncatcher, called "a very minimal test" to make sure the chips can run in space. A SpaceX rocket carried it into orbit, and Planet will get it up and running. Beal said Google will then fire up and test the TPUs. The goal is for the mission to be operational for a year.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Nanoparticles could someday provide a new way to help soldiers fight back against deadly nerve agents on the front lines. In a new study, Northwestern University scientists developed a nanoparticle-based compound that, when mixed into clothing dyes, could limit the impact of chemicals commonly found in pesticides, insecticides and nerve agents. Manufacturers could potentially add the nanoparticles to clothing used by those most at risk, such as farmers' masks and gloves or soldiers' uniforms and tactical gear. Or, if someone is exposed to a potentially deadly chemical, they could spray their clothing with water mixed with the compound to deactivate the chemical before its damaging effects take hold. The study has been published in the journal ACS Nano.

fjo3 quotes a report from The Guardian, written by Tove Danovich: Every year, the night sky is becoming 10% brighter. Eighty percent of people live under light-polluted skies. And while the UN declared a healthy environment -- clean air, clean water -- to be a human right, I believe we also all have a right to darkness as well. This doesn't mean turning off every streetlamp. But do we really need bright white floodlights at the front of every garage? Replacing lights with ones that are bright enough to do the job -- and no brighter -- might make it so I wouldn't have to get in my car and drive for hours to see the night sky as it actually shines above us. To preserve the darkness would mean rules and enforcement around the warmth of the lights, where they point, and how bright they can be. It would mean not putting in three lights when one would do. If we recognized that darkness is something we need, we'd become more careful about chasing it away.

[...] Access to darkness is about more than stargazing. The night is its own habitat. Artificial lights confuse animals who use the moon to navigate, whether they're baby sea turtles navigating toward a parking lot instead of the ocean or moths who fly in circles around a lightbulb. Lightning bugs and frogs need darkness to complete their courtship rituals. Migrating birds get thrown off course by the bright lights of big cities. But the effects of light pollution linger even after it's daylight again, becoming visible. Research has shown light pollution is breaking the relationship between plants and pollinators, changing the time of year trees break into flower, and disrupting circadian rhythms for all living creatures. This includes humans. Whether it's artificial lights indoors or creeping in through the window at night, studies have found that we need darkness in order to rest, recover and stay healthy.

New research suggests Enceladus may be an especially promising place to search for extraterrestrial life: microbes similar to those found near Earth's hydrothermal vents survived in lab conditions designed to mimic the Saturnian moon's subsurface ocean. A separate study also found that material blasted from Enceladus' plumes may naturally separate and concentrate salts, organics and potential biosignatures into individual ice grains, potentially making them easier for future spacecraft to detect.

"That is great news in the search for life," Frank Postberg, lead author of one and co-author of the other of these new studies and professor at Freie Universitat Berlin, said in a statement. "Future spacecraft will have to analyze many individual ice particles in the plume. But if they come across one with microbial material in it, they could identify biosignatures in the particle relatively easy with already available technology." Space.com reports: Enceladus isn't the only place in our solar system with water -- so, why is it so exciting in the search for life? Well, it has to do with the seafloor of its extensive, liquid ocean. Down deep at the bottom of this body of water, scientists think hydrothermal processes, or movement or reactions with hot water under the surface, are taking place. The plumes shooting upward from the ocean also contain trace amounts of salts and organic compounds. NASA's Cassini spacecraft found these traces when it flew through the plumes over a decade ago. Between the hydrothermal activity and the organics and minerals in the water, this moon's ocean has a number of aspects that could be involved in supporting life.

What's more, using a combination of Cassini data, theoretical models and laboratory experimentation, in Postberg's new study the team found that the plume's water droplets blasting out into space at up to 621 miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per hour) don't freeze as quickly as expected. Before, scientists thought the freeze would happen instantaneously once the droplets reached space, but Postberg and fellow researchers say they found the freezing would actually happen much slower.

They also found that during this freezing process, the salt, organic compounds (and maybe possible signs of life) in the water droplets separate from one another. Not only that, but the team says that as the particles are blasted out into space, they should often collide with the icy cracks of the planet's surface. This ultimately would leave behind tiny shards of frozen droplets with individually separated out components. Essentially, it's like the planet has organized its oceanic ingredients into tiny, frozen particle fragments. This work is described in two new studies published in the journal Science Advances here and here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: It is the bane of every fruit bowl: sliced banana that turns brown before it has reached the table. But such woes could soon be a thing of the past, with gene-edited bananas that keep their freshly peeled color now one step closer to reaching British shoppers. According to Tropic, the Norwich-based agricultural-biotechnology company that developed the fruit, the bananas have the same taste and texture but stay "fresh, yellow and appetizing long after peeling and slicing."

Gilad Gershon, the chief executive of Tropic, said the flesh of the new banana resisted browning for an extra day or two -- and longer if chilled. He added that the innovation could make it easier to add bananas to prepackaged products such as fruit salads and breakfast pots, as well as reducing waste. [...] Tropic developed the bananas by using a gene-editing technology called Crispr-Cas9 to alter all three copies of a single gene within the fruit. As a result, they were able to reduce the production of polyphenol oxidase, an enzyme that causes browning. A similar approach has been effective in reducing browning in other produce, including mushrooms.

Tropic said the non-browning bananas could reduce food waste and CO2-equivalent emissions along the supply chain by more than 25%. "This could support an annual reduction in CO2 emissions of over 9m tonnes in the banana export market alone," the company said. [...] Gershon said Tropic had gained regulatory approval for the non-browning bananas in 10 other countries including Japan, Brazil and the Philippines. The fruit is already being grown in Latin America.

SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time, successfully deploying 26 operational Starlink V3 satellites after overcoming an early Raptor 3 engine shutdown during ascent. "SpaceX plans to eventually deploy 100,000 upgraded Starlink V3s to expand the company's wireless satellite internet services," notes Space.com. Here's the latest update from the report: SpaceX has decided to return Starship from orbit earlier than expected. After valuating the upper stage Ship's status during its first orbital checkpoint, SpaceX technicians have decided to return the spacecraft to Earth earlier than expected. Rather than spending another 7.5 hours on orbit, Ship 41 will perform its deorbit burn at approximately 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT), with splashdown in the Northern Pacific. You can watch a recorded livestream of the launch on X.

Developing...

Could this push solar cell efficiency beyond the theoretical 33% limit? Interesting Engineering reports: Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that tin-based perovskite solar cells can slow heat loss from high-energy "hot electrons..."

When sunlight strikes a panel, photons jump-start electrons into action. The most energetic photons create super-charged hot electrons... [but] in fractions of a trillionth of a second, these high-energy particles rapidly cool, dumping their bonus energy as waste heat before ever leaving the solar cell... In collaboration with Maria Antonietta Loi, professor of Photophysics and Optoelectronics, the team created an experimental setup. Using a specialized solar cell material called tin-based perovskite, Loi's lab performed a feat many thought impossible: she slowed the heat loss down by a factor of 1,000.

Suddenly, the extra energy lingered for nanoseconds instead of vanishing in picoseconds... To solve the puzzle, Koster and PhD student Tim Faber built digital simulations to peel back the quantum layers. And discovered a surprising double-action mechanism at work... The simulations matched the exact nanosecond delay observed in the lab... These specialized materials could be used to build a new generation of super-efficient solar cells.

Tin-based metal halide perovskites are non-toxic, eco-friendly crystalline materials for high-performance solar energy conversion... The material possesses an unusually low electron mass. As a result, electric charges move quickly and retain extra thermal energy for extended periods. This combination of broad light absorption, efficient charge movement, and prolonged energy retention makes these materials prime candidates for next-generation solar panels.
"There are many other questions that still need answers," the team said in their announcement, "but in theory, this discovery could allow the creation of more efficient solar cells, beyond the theoretical limit of 33 percent."

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

"Weird Al" Yankovic's name has just been approved for a new asteroid — (14331) Alyankovic = 1981 EC26 — by the International Astronomical Union, reports Space.com.

Yankovic's asteroid was championed by planetary scientist Allison McGraw joined by "several heavy hitters in the planetary science field, according to the Tucson Star. (Astrophysicist Steve Desch from the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University; Tim McCoy, one of the main curators of meteorites at the Smithsonian Institution; and University of Arizona research scientist Melissa Brucker, leader of the Spacewatch program, which has discovered more than 179,000 asteroids.) The scientists also convinced the International Astronomical Union to name an asteroid after one of Yankovic's major influences, famous musical humorist and political satirist Tom Lehrer, who died last year at age 97. Lehrer's work includes "The Elements," a 1959 song in which he recites the entire periodic table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Major-General's Song." "He was a mathematician and teacher and also wrote math- and science-themed songs," McGraw said. "We felt that someone who had that kind of science enthusiasm really deserved to have their name up in the sky...." McGraw is hoping that naming space rocks after stars like Lehrer and "Weird Al" will cast some reflected light on two things she's passionate about: asteroid research and science communication.
Six years ago a 92-year-old Tom Lehrer released all his lyrics into the public domain. (Wikipedia notes he'd "largely retired" by the 1970s to become a mathematics teacher at the University of California, Santa Cruz.) Slashdot ran a brief career retrospective when Lehrer died last year at age 97.

And the IAU writes that "Generations of scientists have been inspired" by Weird Al Yankovic's "comedic musical works, including 'It's All About the Pentiums' and 'White and Nerdy'." ("I'm fluent in JavaScript as well as Klingon," Yankovic sings in the latter.) He appears in a song envisioning a rap battle between Bill Nye the Science Guy and Sir Isaac Newton... And in 1999 he recorded a five-minute summation of Star Wars: Phantom Menace, sung to the wistful tune of Don McLean's American Pie. Performing it last month in a NPR Tiny Desk concert, "most of the audience was singing along," remembers an interviewer at NPR. "It felt like something that was very personal to them." Weird Al: It's one of those songs that means a lot to people, particularly "Star Wars" fans, of course. But I mean, I see a lot of people in the audience cosplaying as Jedi Knights and waving their light sabers... I've even heard that, you know, they play that song at "Star Wars" conventions, and people get weepy... [I]t really hits people in a tender place somehow...

"Oh my, my, this here Anakin guy
may be Vader someday later, now he's just a small fry.
And he left his home and kissed his mommy goodbye,
sayin' soon, I'm gonna be a Jedi."
Yankovic has led a geek-friendly career. In the heyday of Napster, he released an anthem-style parody mocking the arguments of the Recording Industry Association of America, titled "Don't Download This Song. ("Even Lars Ulrich knows it's wrong...")

"Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge
To break international copyright law...
you start out stealing songs, then you're robbing liquor stores
And selling crack and running over school kids with your car..."

As a student at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, Yankovic bootstrapped a career in 1979 by recording his first novelty song "My Bologna" (a parody of "My Sharona" by the Knack) while playing his accordion in a bathroom for its acoustics. And even the IAU acknowledged the geeky themes in his 1999 song "It's All About the Pentiums" (a filk on Puff Daddy's "It's All About the Benjamins").

"You're usin' a 286? Don't make me laugh
Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half?
You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette
You're the biggest joke on the Internet..."

"New research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years," Stanford Medicine announced this week: The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts' beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins. The discovery could help explain why scientists have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in the laboratory — and it opens new avenues for studying devastating diseases that affect the brain stem...

[S]cientists have struggled for decades to generate human hindbrain neurons in the laboratory. This gap has hampered research into devastating diseases affecting the brain stem, including spinal muscular atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis... The researchers' breakthrough came from studying the earliest moments of embryonic development... [Study co-authors Carolyn Dundes and Rayyan Jokhai] discovered that the hindbrain follows a separate developmental path, running in parallel to — rather than branching off from — the pathway that creates the forebrain and midbrain... This revelation explained decades of frustration in the field — scientists had been trying to turn one type of progenitor cell into another that it is fundamentally incapable of becoming... Armed with this knowledge, the researchers for the first time successfully coaxed human pluripotent stem cells (a kind of cell that can create any cell in the human body) to become functional hindbrain motor neurons in the laboratory...

Finally, the researchers looked back over 550 million years of evolutionary time. They found the same two-origin brain pattern in chickens; zebrafish; and, remarkably, in acorn worms, tiny creatures living on the ocean floor that share a distant common ancestor with humans. Jellyfish, which diverged from humans about 600 to 700 million years ago, have two nervous systems at different ends of their body. "Our research suggests that evolution took two existing neural systems and pushed them together spatially," Loh said. "Having the brain as one organ would probably be more efficient, but we rely on this primordial way to make the brain as two separate pieces."
Thanks to Slashdot reader Beeftopia for sharing the article.

The James Webb Space Telescope has been picking up little red dots in almost every image, writes Quanta magazine. And now two teams of astronomers propose they're looking at a new astronomical object: a black hole star. It shines with the light of billions of suns — and hides a black hole in its core. But Quanta adds that "not everyone agrees with this bold interpretation." [Two Webb telescope surveys of distant objects included little red dots] for hours at a time. They tabulated precisely what shades of light were coming from each dot, and how bright the shades were... The bombshell discovery in the little red dot spectra was that the colors of hydrogen were smeared out across multiple shades. Usually, seeing such an effect means you're looking straight at an exposed black hole. Black holes whip hydrogen clouds around them at furious rates, with the clouds emitting slightly different colors depending on their speed...

Then, in the spring of 2025, [two of the paper's astronomers] de Graaff and Naidu's teams unveiled the two strangest dots yet... The new little red dots couldn't literally be stars — they were way too bright. And they didn't look much like black holes either. Black holes have an assortment of ringlike structures of different temperatures... Naidu and de Graaff concluded that they were[ looking at the first examples of something combining the vigor of a black hole with the outward appearance of a star: a black hole star... This black hole would pull gas around it, dramatically heating it and pushing light and energy outward, which would keep the outer layers of hydrogen from collapsing inward. In this way, the black hole would form the "engine" of the star, analogous to the fusion-powered core of our sun... "We are seeing the seed," Naidu said. "This is the birth of potentially every massive black hole in the universe."
"Astronomers have spent the last year in a lively debate about what's really going on," Quanta adds. And this week simulations using the Japanese Supercomputer ATERUI III "have explained the nature of the Little Red Dots without requiring any exotic assumptions," writes Phys.org — by conducting the most detailed cosmological simulations yet of conditions in the early universe: The simulations show that the Little Red Dots are black holes growing at a rate that would be impossible today because of conditions in the early universe. The simulations show that in the early universe, intense far-ultraviolet (FUV) radiation from nearby galaxies suppresses star formation in gas clouds, so rather than forming many small stars, the gas can form a single supermassive star, which then collapses into a black hole seed.

The simulations show that, once formed, these black hole seeds are surrounded by dense gas disks. This environment traps radiation, enabling the black holes to grow at rates dozens of times faster than would be possible in the modern universe. The simulated properties of these rapidly growing black holes provide a good match to the Little Red Dots (LRDs) observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).