Despite their depiction as massive monsters that simply suck in everything, including light, astronomers know black holes actually spin. And they spin really, really quickly. Determining just how quickly is key to understanding how they affect their immediate vicinity and the galaxies that surround them. A new paper by Tegan Thomas of the University of Virginia and her colleagues, available on the arXiv preprint server, has good news and bad news on that front. The bad news is that we currently can’t determine how fast black holes are actually spinning. The good news is that, hopefully in the next few years, we will have a new tool that will allow us to do so.
To measure a black hole’s ultimate spin, we have to go to space
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Since the early 1970s, when the Nixon administration launched the “war on drugs,” Gallup has been asking Americans how they feel about problems surrounding illicit drugs. But the war has not gone well and Gallup’s [...]
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Americans are dissatisfied with the state of leadership in the United States across several sectors—business, education, government and health care—a Harris poll showed in 2025. The survey raised a foundational question about developing the next [...]
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One of the most intractable, contentious and niche issues in U.S. politics has come back into the spotlight. This week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to make daylight saving time permanent in the United [...]
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Radicalization is a complex process, influenced by many variables that interact to varying degrees. AI scientist Mijke van den Hurk investigated whether artificial intelligence could help unravel this intricate interplay. She defended her Ph.D. thesis [...]
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Why do countries go to war? While economic, military and geopolitical factors are often part of the answer, researchers have also pointed to exclusionary nationalism—the belief that one’s own nation is superior to others. One [...]
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How do journalists act as watchdogs of science? New qualitative research led by University of Amsterdam media scholar Alice Fleerackers sheds light on the labor-intensive nature of watchdog science journalism, a form of critical journalism [...]
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A study of China’s participation in United Nations human rights reviews argues that its public statements are more than diplomatic rhetoric. The paper published in the International Journal of Public Law and Policy also suggests [...]
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The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines play a pivotal role in some of the federal government’s most consequential drug policy decisions. Two recurring themes have been the balancing—or lack of balancing—between drug weight and the defendant’s role [...]
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Law enforcement agents misused crowd-control weapons during protests against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations in 412 verified incidents across 16 U.S. cities from when immigration enforcement protests escalated in Los Angeles in June 2025 [...]
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Deep inequalities in taxation played a key role in fueling the French Revolution, according to a new study published by the ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin). For the first time, economists have substantiated this with figures. [...]
