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Academic World News

Black hole behind a cosmic ring of dust

At the heart of the galaxy NGC 1068 lurks a supermassive black hole, hidden behind a cosmic dust cloud. Using the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), an international team of astronomers has unveiled this supermassive gravity trap. The researchers, including scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for Astronomy and Radio Astronomy, gained new insights into the mechanisms of active galactic nuclei, some of the brightest and most enigmatic objects in the universe. They also confirmed a 30-year-old theory.

Indian Ocean warming could weaken Summer Monsoon rainfall in South Asia

Paleoclimate data retrieved from ocean sediment cores dating back 130,000 years show that sustained warming in the Indian Ocean during the Last Interglacial increased convective rainfall above the ocean, but weakened Indian Summer Monsoon rainfall on land.

Potato genome decoded

More than 20 years after the first release of the human genome, scientists at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, have for the first time decoded the highly complex genome of the potato. This technically demanding study lays the biotechnological foundation to accelerate the breeding of more robust varieties - a goal in plant breeding for many years and an important step for global food security.

An app for COVID-19 studies

CoroNotes can be a great help for Covid-19 research since the app can be used to collect urgently needed data on Sars-CoV-2 infections quickly and efficiently. Scientists at the Tübingen AI Center, a joint facility of the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, have developed CoroNotes in cooperation with physicians at the University Hospital Tübingen.

Optical fibre with Einstein effect

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen have discovered a new mechanism for guiding light in photonic crystal fibre (PCF). PCF is a hair-thin glass fibre with a regular array of hollow channels running along its length. When helically twisted, this spiralling array of hollow channels acts on light rays in an analogous manner to the bending of light rays when they travel through the gravitationally curved space around a star, as described by the general theory of relativity.

A signal like none before

The expectations of the gravitational-wave research community have been fulfilled: gravitational-wave discoveries are now part of their daily work as they have identified in the past observing run, O3, new gravitational-wave candidates about once a week.

Critical “Starbleed” vulnerability in FPGA chips

FPGA chips which are used, for example, in cloud data centers and mobile phone base stations have a vulnerable feature. Field Programmable Gate Arrays, FPGAs for short, are flexibly programmable computer chips that are considered very secure components in many applications.