First-Ever Photo of a Supermassive Black Hole

Truly a quantum leap, astronomers have “seen the unseeable” and captured an image of a supermassive black hole—a “smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity,” Dennis Overbye writes for the New York Times. A planet-sized network of eight radio telescopes—called the Event Horizon Telescope—peered through interstellar dust and gas to reveal the black hole, located in a galaxy called Messier 87, which exists some …

Self-Driving Protection From Asteroids

Autonomous technology has come for the final frontier. The European Space Agency’s new self-driving spacecraft could potentially protect our planet from catastrophic impacts with asteroids. The project, dubbed Hera, is in the process of getting outfitted with autonomous tech that, when installed, will enable the craft to use sensors to read nearby debris and objects to determine what (if anything) is an inbound target. The …

Link About It: This Week’s Picks

Sleeping over at the Louvre, floating cities, what really happened to the dinosaurs and more from around the internet

The UN’s Floating City Concept Presented by a group of designers, architects and engineers at a United Nations roundtable last week, this floating city could be the future of sustainable (and affordable) living. Built in a lily pad-like array of hexagonal platforms, nearly 10,000 citizens could live in this sea-based city, which would float—but also be moored to the ocean floor—just a mile off the …