Physicists caught Hawking's glow in a lab, cracking a cancer mystery

Published in Nature on July 1, the experiment did something nobody had managed before: it detected Hawking radiation, the faint thermal glow Stephen Hawking predicted should leak from a black hole's edge, and also caught that glow feeding energy back into the object that made it, the elusive "back reaction" that could someday cause a real black hole to evaporate. The light behaved exactly like a warm object radiating heat, with a real temperature and a spectrum that faded predictably at higher frequencies, holding up even in a regime where the textbook black hole equations should have broken down.

A team at Johns Hopkins, led by Cynthia Sears and working with Harvard Medical School, ran a genome-wide CRISPR screen and found the missing piece: a receptor called claudin-4 that the toxin has to grab onto first, like a key finding the one lock it fits. Once they knew the lock, they built a decoy protein that intercepted the toxin in mice and stopped it from tearing into the colon's protective barrier.

Researchers identified the answer: a low-volatility compound called isopropyl myristate, which shows up heavily on queens and barely at all on non-breeders. Other mole-rats can smell it through neurons built specifically to detect it, and it visibly makes high-ranking animals back off. Add the scent daily to a colony that's lost its queen and no new queen rises to replace her; take it away and the colony erupts into aggressive competition for the throne.

In one experiment, people split $10 with a stranger of the opposite political leaning, and a "referee" judged whether the split was fair. When the referee crowd was neutral, a clean 50-50 split drew the least punishment. Once the crowd polarized, people started punishing a fair split almost as harshly as an unfair one, and splits got roughly 50% more lopsided in response. The gap between the country people imagine and the one they actually live in has a name: the perception gap.

New Jersey caught heat for $150 round-trip train tickets, and Kansas City's shuttle buses got stuck in traffic on day one. But as the tournament reached its final stage, the predicted meltdown simply didn't happen. Los Angeles, mid-way through what advocate Eli Lipmen calls a "major cultural shift," opened three new subway stations in May, its first in over two decades, and absorbed record ridership with what Lipmen described as pleasant surprise. Seattle's Sound Transit shuttled huge crowds too.

Every year between June and November, the whales migrate from Antarctic feeding grounds toward the Abrolhos Bank, one of the most biodiverse coral reef stretches in the Atlantic, passing close enough to Rio de Janeiro for tour boats to follow them. "It shows that the whales are making a recovery, are healthy and thriving, and hopefully they'll continue to do so," says Enrico Marcovaldi, co-founder of the Humpback Whale Project.

Restaurants and retailers selling these products have to comply too. It's one of the most comprehensive animal welfare labeling laws attempted anywhere.