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The notion of black holes is one that invokes terror and dread. They’re inescapable! They devour everything! Nothing ever comes out!

The accuracy of these beliefs falls on the spectrum of debatable to incorrect. And a pair of physicists has now calculated how proverbial blood might be wrung from the black hole stone. According to Zhan-Feng Mai and Run-Qiu Yang of Tianjin University in China, teeny tiny black holes could theoretically be used as a source of power.

Their calculations find that these ultradense objects could work as rechargeable batteries and nuclear reactors, providing energy on the scale of gigaelectronvolts.

That’s good news. Maybe there’s gonna be fewer super bugs springing up.


Researchers have developed a method that identifies bacteria easily, cheaply and more precisely than before. This can help reduce use of antibiotics.

Far too many antibiotics are used around the world. As a result, bacteria are becoming resistant.

Curing bacterial diseases is becoming more difficult than before, because antibiotics are perhaps our foremost weapons in the fight against them.

The brain-computer interface (BCI) space continues to rise in notoriety, and a number of players are throwing their hats in the ring.

Such technologies could enable users to control a computer with their brain, or even go beyond that. Countless immobile people someday could control a mouse cursor, keyboard, mobile device/tablet, wheelchair or prosthetic device by only thinking.

Big names have already established their presence in the space. Elon Musk’s Neuralink continues to make headway, while Bill Gates-and Jeff Bezos-backed Synchron has an innovative catheter-delivered implant. Blackrock Neurotech, which has a next-generation BCI, has been implanting its Utah Array in patients since 2004.

New research at ACR Convergence 2023, the American College of Rheumatology’s annual meeting, demonstrates that CAR-T cell therapy could lead to sustained suppression of autoantibodies in treatment-resistant lupus while maintaining a robust response to vaccines.

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE, lupus) is a complex autoimmune disease marked by the production of autoantibodies to nucleic acid DNA and nuclear protein autoantigens and is associated with dysfunctional B . It mainly affects women and is more common and severe in people who are Black, Hispanic, or Asian. Lupus can lead to a wide range of systemic problems varying in severity, including skin, kidney, lung, joints, and and complications during pregnancy.

The disease often requires life-long treatment with immunosuppressive or immunomodulatory drugs, and a considerable number of patients don’t respond to them. One theoretical option for these patients is (CAR)-T cell therapy, which is successfully used to treat refractory blood cancers by destroying .