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One of the most powerful telescopes in the world is on the brink of collapse.

Arecibo, a giant radio observatory nestled in the lush mountains of Puerto Rico, did some of the dreamiest work in astronomy. But it was forced to stop operations this year after suffering unprecedented damage, and officials now believe that it is beyond repair. Instead of trying to fix it, they’re going to tear it down.

The trouble began in August. A metal support cable weighing thousands of pounds slipped out of its socket and plummeted into the cavernous, 1,000-foot-wide radio dish in the middle of the night. The cable, installed in the 1990s, was considered fairly new for an observatory that began operations in 1963, and the incident confounded Arecibo’s stewards. The cable “definitely should not have failed in the way it did,” Ashley Zauderer, the Arecibo program director at the National Science Foundation,which owns the telescope, said during a press conference today.

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Ricardo Arduengo / AFP / Getty

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One fascinating quirk of the Universe is that shapes and patterns can be found in hugely different contexts: the Golden Spiral can be seen in the human cochlea and the shape of a spiral galaxy; the fractal geometry of veins echoed in the branching of lightning.

In a bold new pilot study, an astrophysicist and a neurosurgeon have bumped it up a notch, using quantitative analysis to compare two of the most complex systems in nature: the neuronal network in the human brain and the cosmic network of galaxies in the Universe.

It’s actually not that peculiar a comparison. You may have seen an image that occasionally gets shared around, showing a human neuron and a simulated galaxy cluster, side-by-side; the two look startlingly similar.

But there’s a lot more to the human brain – and the Universe – than how it looks.

So astrophysicist Franco Vazza of the University of Bologna in Italy and neurosurgeon Alberto Feletti of the University of Verona in Italy have spent the last few years investigating to determine if the similarities are more than skin-deep.

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A simulated galaxy cluster (Illustris Collaboration)

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“The city of Shenzhen in July. The weather is hot, the trees brimming with life … ”

So begins the baritone voice-over in a video shot in the summer of 2018 by the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei and posted to YouTube. It chronicles a corporate event in the slightly corny style of a 1960s educational film, starting with aerial drone footage of Huawei’s campus—an island of lush greenery surrounded by the high-rise buildings of the city known as China’s Silicon Valley. A spirited orchestral version of Beethoven’s “Turkish March” plays as a town car wends its way through the campus, pulling up to a stately white structure mixing classical Greek architecture and the wide overhanging rooftops of China’s great pagodas. There’s a bit of the White House tossed in too.

Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. Guo Ping, one of Huawei’s rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges. After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom. Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly. The guest is welcomed by Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.

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Illustration: MOJO WANG

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