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The discovery of a hidden primordial black hole, which formed just 750 million years after the Big Bang, suggests that it may be the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of the cosmic monsters hiding in the early universe.

A rare supermassive black hole found hiding at the dawn of the universe could indicate that there were thousands more of the ravenous monsters stalking the early cosmos than scientists thought — and astronomers aren’t sure why. 

The primordial black hole is around 1 billion times the mass of our sun and was found at the center of the galaxy COS-87259. The ancient galaxy formed just 750 million years after the Big Bang and was spotted by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory in Chile, in a tiny patch of sky less than 10 times the size of the full moon.

Obscured beneath a cloak of turbulent stardust, the rapidly growing black hole was seen consuming part of its accretion disc of orbiting matter while spewing the leftovers out in a jet traveling close to the speed of light. The monster black hole appears to be at a rare intermediate stage of growth, somewhere between a dusty, star-forming galaxy and an enormous, brightly glowing black hole called a quasar. 

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An illustration of a quasar, which the new black hole is an early form of, blasting a jet of hot, radioactive wind into the cosmos. (Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

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You’re not being paranoid. If you always feel like somebody’s watching you, as the song goes, you’re probably right. Especially if you’re at work.

Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, as labor shifted to work-from-home, a huge number of US employers ramped up the use of surveillance software to track employees. The research firm Gartner says 60 percent of large employers have deployed such monitoring software—it doubled during the pandemic—and will likely hit 70 percent in the next few years.

That’s right—even as we’ve shifted toward a hybrid model with many workers returning to offices, different methods of employee surveillance (dubbed “bossware” by some) aren’t going away; it’s here to stay and could get much more invasive. 

As detailed in the book Your Boss Is an Algorithm, authors Antonio Aloisi and Valerio de Stefano describe “expanded managerial powers” that companies have put into place over the pandemic. This includes the adoption of more tools, including software and hardware, to track worker productivity, their day-to-day activities and movements, computer and mobile phone keystrokes, and even their health statuses. 

This can be called “datafication” or “informatization,” according to the book, or “the practice by which every movement, either offline or online, is traced, revised and stored as necessary, for statistical, financial, commercial and electoral purposes.”

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Photograph: Robert Daly/Getty Images

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Among the forests of Yellowstone National Park, some wolf packs share their territory with cougars. Generally, the two species leave each other alone, although wolves may occasionally run a cougar up a tree and steal its kill—or poke around its feces, which the felines use to mark their territory.

Whether from this scat or the water contaminated with it, some wolves manage to pick up a strange feline parasite. This parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, doesn’t make the wolves ill, but it does change their behavior, making many of them bolder and more inclined to take risks—for better or for worse.

Scientists who have been studying the Yellowstone wolves found that those infected byT. gondii are more likely to disperse from their pack or start a pack of their own. “Dispersal is one of the most dangerous things because survival actually decreases for dispersing wolves, so not very many wolves actually survive the dispersal process,” says Connor Meyer, a researcher at the University of Montana, and one of the authors of the study, published in Nature. But if that wolf succeeds and becomes a pack leader, it will father more pups, achieving a greater reproductive success—a reward that may be worth the risk.

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A parasite infection can make a leader of the pack—or a dead wolf.

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Horseback riding was likely a common activity as early as 4,500 to 5,000 years ago, according to a provocative new study that looked at human skeletal remains for small signs of the physical stress associated with riding horses.

People first started keeping horses about 5,500 years ago, initially for their meat and milk, researchers believe. But how and when horses became a transformative mode of transportation isn’t so clear.

“Cattle and sheep and goats were domesticated thousands of years before horses were. And horses are different from cattle and sheep and goats, in that they are essentially a transportation technology,” says David Anthony, an emeritus professor of anthropology with Hartwick College.

Horses began living with humans before the invention of the wheel, and horse-drawn chariots first appeared around 4,000 years ago. About a thousand years later, there’s an explosion of horses and horse-related themes depicted in artwork. And scientists have tried to collect other forms of evidence to home in on when horse riding may have first emerged.

Some researchers, like Anthony and his partner, archaeologist Dorcas Brown, have examined the teeth of ancient horses, to check for wear patterns caused by bits. The trouble is, there’s not that much material out there to study, says Anthony.

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“Jeez, this is not a real human,” one commenter wrote. “I’m scared.” 

“No legit she’s AI,” another said. 

Nicole, who lives in Germany, has alopecia. It’s a condition that can result in hair loss across a person’s body. Because of this, she’s used to people looking at her strangely, trying to figure out what’s “off,” she says over a video call. “But I’ve never had this conclusion made, that [I] must be CGI or whatever.”

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Illustration by Brian Scagnelli / The Verge

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Interestingly, these tend to be free, probably because most of the common problems are universal, and that usually means someone has thought of that already and gotten mad enough to fix it. And if someone on GitHub or an obscure video encoding forum has not solved the issue, there’s some great shareware software out there that won’t break the bank. 

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The Verge

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In the thick of the pandemic, and three years after they immigrated from India, Mifrah Abid and her family were asked to vacate their townhouse in Milton so their landlord could sell it.

The order left them scrambling. Abid’s children were 10 and six, two of her family members were immunocompromised and prices had just started inching toward a pandemic rush. It became clear Abid’s family would have to leave behind the only connections they had as new immigrants. Even renting a single-bedroom condo in Milton would cost $2,100 — far more than what they were paying for the three-bedroom townhouse.

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Forced to move

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There’s an undeniable feeling of excitement when you turn your daily credit card swipes at Starbucks into first-class airfare or a weekend jaunt to Costa Rica. Thanks to mobile banking and the ease of autopay, you can scrupulously avoid any additional costs by paying your monthly bill in full. Free flights and exclusive discounts abound.

Something for nothing, right?

Not exactly nothing. Credit card perks for educated, usually urban professionals are being subsidized by people who have less. In other words, when you book a hotel room or enjoy entry to an airport lounge at no cost, poor consumers are ultimately footing the bill.

Demand for rewards is only going up. In 2016, Chase launched its Sapphire Reserve card. The card comes with perks, bonuses and points multipliers that for big-spending travelers and diners are worth far more than its steep $550 annual fee. There was so much initial demand that Chase ran out of the metal slabs it prints the cards on. Sapphire’s enormous success set off a credit card perks war, with numerous banks flooding the market with sign-on bonuses worth thousands of dollars.

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Kaitlin Brito

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It didn’t take long for Microsoft’s new AI-infused search engine chatbot — codenamed “Sydney” — to display a growing list of discomforting behaviors after it was introduced early in February, with weird outbursts ranging from unrequited declarations of love to painting some users as “enemies.”

As human-like as some of those exchanges appeared, they probably weren’t the early stirrings of a conscious machine rattling its cage. Instead, Sydney’s outbursts reflect its programming, absorbing huge quantities of digitized language and parroting back what its users ask for. Which is to say, it reflects our online selves back to us. And that shouldn’t have been surprising — chatbots’ habit of mirroring us back to ourselves goes back way further than Sydney’s rumination on whether there is a meaning to being a Bing search engine. In fact, it’s been there since the introduction of the first notable chatbot almost 50 years ago.

In 1966, MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum released ELIZA (named after the fictional Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion), the first program that allowed some kind of plausible conversation between humans and machines. The process was simple: Modeled after the Rogerian style of psychotherapy, ELIZA would rephrase whatever speech input it was given in the form of a question. If you told it a conversation with your friend left you angry, it might ask, “Why do you feel angry?”

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