The merger of two massive (about 30 solar masses) black holes has been detected in gravitational waves. This discovery validates recent predictions that massive binary black holes would constitute the first detection. Previous calculations, however, have not sampled the relevant binary-black-hole progenitors—massive, low-metallicity binary stars—with sufficient accuracy nor included sufficiently realistic physics to enable robust predictions to better than several orders of magnitude. Here...
Tag Archives: mass
Video: Futuristic Chinese bus glides over the top of cars in concept for mass transit
A video making the rounds on Facebook shows off a futuristic bus that looks like nothing you’ve ever seen on the clogged streets of Seattle or elsewhere.
The mass-transit concept created...
Senator: let’s fix “third-party doctrine” that enabled NSA mass snooping
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) gave the keynote address on Wednesday at RightsCon in San Francisco. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)
SAN FRANCISCO—This past week hundreds of lawyers, technologists, journalists, activists, and others from around the globe descended upon a university conference center to try to figure out the state of digital rights in 2016. The conference, appropriately dubbed...
Dengue virus disables the immune system by blocking mass transit
A virus in the same family as Dengue. (credit: Oak Ridge National Lab)
The Dengue virus comes in four distinct but related varieties called serotypes, and they're all bad. Rather than inducing tolerance for each other, infection with one Dengue serotype actually makes people more sensitive to the other three. Victims infected by a second serotype...
10,000-year-old mass killing is still a mystery
Here you can see an obsidian bladelet embedded in the victim's skull on the left side. (credit: Marta Mirazon Lahr)
Depending on your perspective, it was a war or just a violent encounter between two groups. Left in the shallow waters of a lagoon in Nataruk, Kenya, the victims' skeletons were preserved for 10,000 years in the positions they held...
Spatial and temporal distribution of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet since AD 1900
The response of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) to changes in temperature during the twentieth century remains contentious, largely owing to difficulties in estimating the spatial and temporal distribution of ice mass changes before 1992, when Greenland-wide observations first became available. The only previous estimates of change during the twentieth century are based on empirical modelling and energy balance modelling. Consequently, no observation-based estimates of...
Rarity in mass extinctions and the future of ecosystems
The fossil record provides striking case studies of biodiversity loss and global ecosystem upheaval. Because of this, many studies have sought to assess the magnitude of the current biodiversity crisis relative to past crises—a task greatly complicated by the need to extrapolate extinction rates. Here we challenge this approach by showing that the rarity of previously abundant taxa may be more important than extinction...