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Like a shaggy dog in springtime, some black holes have to shed. New computer simulations reveal how black holes might discard their magnetic fields.

Unlike dogs with their varied fur coats, isolated black holes are mostly identical. They are characterized by only their mass, spin and electric charge. According to a rule known as the no-hair theorem, any other distinguishing characteristics, or “hair,” are quickly cast off. That includes magnetic fields.

The rule applies to black holes in a vacuum, where magnetic fields can simply slip away. But, says astrophysicist Ashley Bransgrove of Columbia University, “what we were thinking about is what happens in a more realistic scenario.” A magnetized black hole would typically be surrounded by electrically charged matter called plasma, and scientists didn’t know how — or even if — such black holes would undergo hair loss.

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Is there ever really a good time to launch a startup?

That’s the question Javier Luraschi was asking and sort of answering for himself in discussing his effort to “democratize artificial intelligence” through his new company called Hal9.

And while getting a startup off the ground is challenging enough under normal circumstances, Luraschi made his move during the COVID-19 pandemic and while suffering the effects of and searching for answers to long COVID, a condition in which people experience symptoms of the illness for extended periods of time.

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The scientists found evidence that “beauty” quarks do not decay in the way they should following the Standard Model.

Beauty quarks, particles similar to but heavier than electrons, interact with all forces in the same way, so they should decay into muons and electrons at the same rate.

However, the data collected by the LHCb seems to show that these quarks are decaying into muons less often than they decay into electrons, which should only be possible if unknown particles are interfering and making them more likely to decay into electrons.

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For the first time in Israel, a doctor at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva has used a da Vinci robot to perform the complex surgery of untrapping a man’s ureter from behind his vena cava — the largest vein in the body that carries blood to the heart from other areas.

Last month, a 41-year-old patient checked in to Beilinson suffering from the effects of retrocaval ureter, a ureter that abnormally encircles the inferior vena cava. Only one in 1500 people are born with this deformity, which worsens over decades until eventually it leads to sepsis.

With a retrocaval ureter, the ureter passes behind the large vein instead of in front of it or right by it. The only way to cure the person is to perform a complex operation to move the ureter.

Usually “open” surgery is performed, meaning the patient is cut open. But Dr. Shay Golan, head of the Urologic Oncology Service at Beilinson, decided to try something new and, for the first time in Israel, a robot performed the surgery in 50 minutes, making only three very small incisions (each less than 1 centimeter) in his belly and without any blood loss.

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