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jelizondo writes:

The Guardian has a long and very interesting article about pain and its psychology and physiology. Some gripping anecdotes like the soldier who picks his torn arm from the ground and walks to receive medical attention or the woman who worked and walked around for 10 hours with a burst cyst and a "a belly full of blood."

Why some people can withstand high pain while others cry over a little knock in their knee?

Some say it was John Sattler's own fault. The lead-up to the 1970 rugby league grand final had been tense; the team he led, the South Sydney Rabbitohs, had lost the 1969 final. Here was an opportunity for redemption. The Rabbitohs were not about to let glory slip through their fingers again.

Soon after the starting whistle, Sattler went in for a tackle. As he untangled – in a move not uncommon in the sport at the time – he gave the Manly Sea Eagles' John Bucknall a clip on the ear.

Seconds later – just three minutes into the game – the towering second rower returned favour with force: Bucknall's mighty right arm bore down on Sattler, breaking his jaw in three places and tearing his skin; he would later need eight stitches. When his teammate Bob McCarthy turned to check on him, he saw his captain spurting blood, his jaw hanging low. Forty years later Sattler would recall that moment. One thought raged in his shattered head: "I have never felt pain like this in my life."

But he played on. Tackling heaving muscular players as they advanced. Being tackled in turn, around the head, as he pushed forward. All the while he could feel his jaw in pieces.

At half-time the Rabbitohs were leading. In the locker room, Sattler warned his teammates, "Don't play me out of this grand final."

McCarthy told him, "Mate, you've got to go off."

He refused. "I'm staying."

Sattler played the whole game. The remaining 77 minutes. At the end, he gave a speech and ran a lap of honour. The Rabbitohs had won. The back page of the next day's Sunday Mirror screamed "BROKEN JAW HERO".

[...]

How can a person bitten by a shark calmly paddle their surfboard to safety, then later liken the sensation of the predator clamping down on their limb to the feeling of someone giving their arm "a shake"? How is it that a woman can have a cyst on her ovary burst, her abdomen steadily fill with blood, but continue working at her desk for six hours? Or that a soldier can have his legs blown off then direct his own emergency treatment? [16:06 and quite moving.]

Each one of us feels pain. We all stub our toes, burn our fingers, knock our knees. And worse. The problem with living in just one mind and body is that we can never know whether our six out of 10 on the pain scale is the same as the patient in the chair next to us.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

FuguIta has been mentioned here recently.

The creator has released a, "FuguIta desktop environment demo version" featuring:

• Desktop environment: xfce-4.20.0

• Web browser: firefox-137.0
• Mailer: thunderbird-128.9.0
• Office: libreoffice-25.2.1.2v0
• Media player: vlc-3.0.21p2
• Audio player: audacious-4.4.2
• Fonts: noto-cjk-20240730, noto-emoji-20240730, noto-fonts-24.9.1v0

From the creator:

I made a demo version of FuguIta with a desktop environment. This demo version demonstrates that FuguIta can be used with a desktop environment as easily as a regular live system.

This demo version uses the following features of Fuguita and OpenBSD.

• Automatic file saving at shutdown using the /etc/rc.shutdown file
• Automatic startup using the noasks file
• Automatic login using the xenodm-config file
• Additional partition mounting using the /etc/fuguita/fstab.tail file
• Initialization only at first startup using /etc/rc.firsttime

There's also the example on how to setup the Fluxbox Window Manager, too, for example.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Satellite data suggests cloud darkening is responsible for much of the warming since 2001, and the good news is that it is a temporary effect due to a drop in sulphate pollution

Clouds have been getting darker and reflecting less sunlight as a result of falling sulphate air pollution, and this may be responsible for a lot of recent warming beyond that caused by greenhouse gases.

“Two-thirds of the global warming since 2001 is SO2 reduction rather than CO2 increases,” says Peter Cox at the University of Exeter in the UK.

Some of the sunshine that reaches Earth is reflected and some is absorbed and later radiated as heat. Rising carbon dioxide levels trap more of that radiant heat – a greenhouse effect that causes global warming. But the planet’s albedo – how reflective it is – also has a big influence on its temperature.

Since 2001, satellite instruments called CERES have been directly measuring how much sunlight is reflected versus how much is absorbed. These measurements show a fall in how much sunlight is being reflected, meaning the planet is getting darker – its albedo is falling – and this results in additional warming.

There are many reasons for the falling albedo, from less snow and sea ice to less cloud cover. But an analysis of CERES data from 2001 to 2019 by Cox and Margaux Marchant, also at Exeter, suggests the biggest factor is that clouds are becoming darker.

It is known that sulphate pollution from industry and ships can increase the density of droplets in clouds, making them brighter or more reflective. This is the basis of one proposed form of geoengineering, known as marine cloud brightening. But these emissions have been successfully reduced in recent years, partly by moving away from high-sulphur fuels such as coal.

upstart writes:

Brothers-in-law use construction knowledge to compete against Comcast in Michigan:

Samuel Herman and Alexander Baciu never liked using Comcast's cable broadband. Now, the residents of Saline, Michigan, operate a fiber Internet service provider that competes against Comcast in their neighborhoods and has ambitions to expand.

[...] "Many times we would have to call Comcast and let them know our bandwidth was slowing down... then they would say, 'OK, we'll refresh the system.' So then it would work again for a week to two weeks, and then again we'd have the same issues," he said.

Herman, now 25, got married in 2021 and started building his own house, and he tried to find another ISP to serve the property. He was familiar with local Internet service providers because he worked in construction for his father's company, which contracts with ISPs to build their networks.

But no fiber ISP was looking to compete directly against Comcast where he lived, though Metronet and 123NET offer fiber elsewhere in the city, Herman said. He ended up paying Comcast $120 a month for gigabit download service with slower upload speeds. Baciu, who lives about a mile away from Herman, was also stuck with Comcast and was paying about the same amount for gigabit download speeds.

Herman said he was the chief operating officer of his father's construction company and that he shifted the business "from doing just directional drilling to be a turnkey contractor for ISPs." Baciu, Herman's brother-in-law (having married Herman's oldest sister), was the chief construction officer. Fueled by their knowledge of the business and their dislike of Comcast, they founded a fiber ISP called Prime-One.

Now, Herman is paying $80 a month to his own company for symmetrical gigabit service. Prime-One also offers 500Mbps for $75, 2Gbps for $95, and 5Gbps for $110. The first 30 days are free, and all plans have unlimited data and no contracts.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/radio-hobbyists-rejoice-good-news-lora-mesh

A set of radio devices and technologies are opening the doorway to new and revolutionary forms of communication. These have the potential to break down the over-reliance on traditional network hierarchies, and present collaborative alternatives where resistance to censorship, control and surveillance are baked into the network topography itself. Here, we look at a few of these technologies and what they might mean for the future of networked communications.

The idea of what is broadly referred to as mesh networking isn't new: the resilience and scalability of mesh technology has seen it adopted in router and IoT protocols for decades. What's new is cheap devices that can be used without a radio license to communicate over (relatively) large distances, or LOng RAnge, thus the moniker LoRa.

Although using different operating frequencies in different countries, LoRa works in essentially the same way everywhere. It uses Chirp Spread Spectrum to broadcast digital communications across a physical landscape, with a range of several kilometers in the right environmental conditions. When other capable devices pick up a signal, they can then pass it along to other nodes until the message reaches its destination—all without relying on a single centralized host.

These communications are of very low bit-rate—often less than a few KBps (kilobytes per second) at a distance—and use very little power. You won't be browsing the web or streaming video over LoRa, but it is useful for sending messages in a wide range of situations where traditional infrastructure is lacking or intermittent, and communication with others over dispersed or changing physical terrain is essential. For instance, a growing body of research is showing how Search and Rescue (SAR) teams can greatly benefit from the use of LoRa, specifically when coupled with GPS sensors, and especially when complimented by line-of-sight LoRa repeaters.

The most popular of these indie LoRa communication systems is Meshtastic by far. For hobbyists just getting started in the world of LoRa mesh communications, it is the easiest way to get up, running, and texting with others in your area that also happen to have a Meshtastic-enabled device. It also facilitates direct communication with other nodes using end-to-end encryption. And by default, a Meshtastic device will repeat messages to others if originating from 3 or fewer nodes (or "hops") away. This means messages tend to propagate farther with the power of the mesh collaborating to make delivery possible. As a single-application use of LoRa, it is an exciting experiment to take part in.

jelizondo writes:

The Wall Street Journal published a look at new automation for farms, as reported by Mint

In the verdant hills of Washington state's Palouse region, Andrew Nelson's tractor hums through the wheat fields on his 7,500-acre farm. Inside the cab, he's not gripping the steering wheel—he's on a Zoom call or checking messages.

A software engineer and fifth-generation farmer, Nelson, 41, is at the vanguard of a transformation that is changing the way we grow and harvest our food. The tractor isn't only driving itself; its array of sensors, cameras, and analytic software is also constantly deciding where and when to spray fertilizer or whack weeds.

Many modern farms already use GPS-guided tractors and digital technology such as farm-management software systems. Now, advances in artificial intelligence mean that the next step—the autonomous farm, with only minimal human tending—is finally coming into focus.

Imagine a farm where fleets of autonomous tractors, drones and harvesters are guided by AI that tweaks operations minute by minute based on soil and weather data. Sensors would track plant health across thousands of acres, triggering precise sprays or irrigation exactly where needed. Farmers could swap long hours in the cab for monitoring dashboards and making high-level decisions. Every seed, drop of water and ounce of fertilizer would be optimized to boost yields and protect the land—driven by a connected system that gets smarter with each season.

[...] "We're just getting to a turning point in the commercial viability of a lot of these technologies," says David Fiocco, a senior partner at McKinsey & Co. who leads research on agricultural innovation.

[...] Automation, now most often used on large farms with wheat or corn laid out in neat rows, is a bigger challenge for crops like fruits and berries, which ripen at different times and grow on trees or bushes. Maintaining and harvesting these so-called specialty crops is labor-intensive. "In specialty crops, the small army of weeders and pickers could soon be replaced by just one or two people overseeing the technology. That may be a decade out, but that's where we're going," says Fiocco of McKinsey.

upstart writes:

DOGE staffer with access to Americans' personal data leaked private xAI API key:

A DOGE staffer with access to the private information on millions of Americans held by the U.S. government reportedly exposed a private API key used for interacting with Elon Musk's xAI chatbot.

Independent security journalist Brian Krebs reports that Marko Elez, a special government employee who in recent months has worked on sensitive systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Social Security Administration, and Homeland Security, recently published code to his GitHub containing the private key. The key allowed access to dozens of models developed by xAI, including Grok.

Philippe Caturegli, founder of consultancy firm Seralys, alerted Elez to the leak earlier this week. Elez removed the key from his GitHub but the key itself was not revoked, allowing continued access to the AI models.

"If a developer can't keep an API key private, it raises questions about how they're handling far more sensitive government information behind closed doors," Caturegli told KrebsOnSecurity.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Despite claims that layoffs target mostly mid-level managers.

Intel this month officially began to cut down its workforce in the U.S. and other countries, thus revealing actual numbers of positions to be cut. The Oregonian reports that the company will cut as many as 2,392 positions in Oregon and around 4,000 positions across its American operations, including Arizona, California, and Texas.

To put the 2,392 number into context, Intel is the largest employer in Oregon with around 20,000 of workers there. 2,392 is around 12% of the workforce, which is a lower end of layoff expectations, yet 2,400 is still a lot of people. The Oregon reduction rose sharply from an initial count of around 500 to a revised figure of 2,392, making it one of the largest layoffs in the state’s history. Intel began reducing staff earlier in the week but confirmed the larger number by Friday evening through a filing with Oregon state authorities.

Intel's Oregon operations have already seen 3,000 jobs lost over the past year through earlier buyouts and dismissals. This time around, Intel does not offer voluntarily retirement or buyouts, it indeed lays off personnel in Aloha (192) and Hillsboro (2,200).

Although Intel officially says that it is trying to get rid of mid-level managers to flatten the organization and focus on engineers, the list of positions that Intel is cutting is led by module equipment technicians (325), module development engineers (302), module engineers (126), and process integration development engineers (88). In fact, based on the Oregon WARN filing, a total of 190 employees with 'Manager' in their job titles (8% of personnel being laid off) were included among those laid off by Intel. These comprised various software, hardware, and operational management roles across the affected sites.

[...] Interestingly, Intel is implementing a new approach to workforce reductions, allowing individual departments to decide how to meet financial goals rather than announcing large, centralized cuts. This decentralized process has led to ongoing job losses across the company, with marketing functions being outsourced to Accenture and the automotive division completely shut down.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Engineering the Origin of the Wheel:

Some historians believe the wheel is the most significant invention ever created. Historians and archeologists have artifacts from the wheel's history that go back thousands of years, but knowing that the wheel first originated back in 3900 B.C. doesn't tell the entire story of this essential technology's development.

A recent study [2024] by Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering Associate Professor Kai James, Lee Alacoque, and Richard Bulliet analyzes the wheels' invention and its evolution. Their analysis supports a new theory that copper miners from the Carpathian Mountains in southeastern Europe may have invented the wheel. However, the study also recognizes that the wheel's evolution occurred incrementally over time — and likely through considerable trial and error. The findings suggest that the original developers of the wheel benefited from uniquely favorable environmental conditions that augmented their human ingenuity. The study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, has gained the worldwide attention of experts and more than 58 media outlets, including Popular Mechanics, Interesting Engineering, and National Geographic en Español.

"The way technology evolves is very complex. It's never as simple as somebody having an epiphany, going to their lab, drawing up a perfect prototype, and manufacturing it — and then end of story," said James. "The evidence, even before our theory, suggests that the wheel evolved over centuries, across a very broad geographical range, with contributions from many different people, and that's true of all engineering systems. Understanding this complexity and seeing the process as a journey, rather than a moment in time, is one of the main outcomes of our study."

[...] James and his team use computational analysis and design as a forensic tool to learn about the past, studying engineered systems designed by prehistoric people. Computational analysis offers a deeper understanding of how these systems were created.

"We have to interpret clues from ancient societies without a writing system — artifacts like bows and arrows, flutes, or boats — but we need to use additional tools to do this," James explained. "Carbon dating tells us when, but it doesn't tell us how or why. Using solid mechanics and computational modeling to recreate these environments and scenarios that gave rise to these technologies is a potential game-changer."

upstart writes:

GPUhammer is the first to flip bits in onboard GPU memory. It likely won't be the last:

Nvidia is recommending a mitigation for customers of one of its GPU product lines that will degrade performance by up to 10 percent in a bid to protect users from exploits that could let hackers sabotage work projects and possibly cause other compromises.

The move comes in response to an attack a team of academic researchers demonstrated against Nvidia's RTX A6000, a widely used GPU for high-performance computing that's available from many cloud services. A vulnerability the researchers discovered opens the GPU to Rowhammer, a class of attack that exploits physical weakness in DRAM chip modules that store data.

Rowhammer allows hackers to change or corrupt data stored in memory by rapidly and repeatedly accessing—or hammering—a physical row of memory cells. By repeatedly hammering carefully chosen rows, the attack induces bit flips in nearby rows, meaning a digital zero is converted to a one or vice versa. Until now, Rowhammer attacks have been demonstrated only against memory chips for CPUs, used for general computing tasks.

[...] The researchers' proof-of-concept exploit was able to tamper with deep neural network models used in machine learning for things like autonomous driving, healthcare applications, and medical imaging for analyzing MRI scans. GPUHammer flips a single bit in the exponent of a model weight—for example in y, where a floating point is represented as x times 2y. The single bit flip can increase the exponent value by 16. The result is an altering of the model weight by a whopping 216, degrading model accuracy from 80 percent to 0.1 percent, said Gururaj Saileshwar, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and co-author of an academic paper demonstrating the attack.

"This is like inducing catastrophic brain damage in the model: with just one bit flip, accuracy can crash from 80% to 0.1%, rendering it useless," Saileshwar wrote in an email. "With such accuracy degradation, a self-driving car may misclassify stop signs (reading a stop sign as a speed limit 50 mph sign), or stop recognizing pedestrians. A healthcare model might misdiagnose patients. A security classifier may fail to detect malware."

upstart writes:

Belkin shows tech firms getting too comfortable with bricking customers' stuff:

In a somewhat anticipated move, Belkin is killing most of its smart home products. On January 31, the company will stop supporting the majority of its Wemo devices, leaving users without core functionality and future updates.

In an announcement emailed to customers and posted on Belkin's website, Belkin said:

After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to end technical support for older Wemo products, effective January 31, 2026. After this date, several Wemo products will no longer be controllable through the Wemo app. Any features that rely on cloud connectivity, including remote access and voice assistant integrations, will no longer work.

The company said that people with affected devices that are under warranty on or after January 31 "may be eligible for a partial refund" starting in February.

The 27 affected devices have last sold dates that go back to August 2015 and are as recent as November 2023.

The announcement means that soon, features like the ability to work with Amazon Alexa will suddenly stop working on some already-purchased Wemo devices. The Wemo app will also stop working and being updated, removing the simplest way to control Wemo products, including connecting to Wi-Fi, monitoring usage, using timers, and activating Away Mode, which is supposed to make it look like people are in an empty home by turning the lights on and off randomly. Of course, the end of updates and technical support has security implications for the affected devices, too.

[...] Belkin acknowledged that some people who invested in Wemo devices will see their gadgets rendered useless soon: "For any Wemo devices you have that are out of warranty, will not work with HomeKit, or if you are unable to use HomeKit, we recommend disposing of these devices at an authorized e-waste recycling center."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Details behind HoloMem’s holographic tape innovations are beginning to come into clearer view. The UK-based startup recently chatted with Blocks & Files about its potentially disruptive technology for long-term cold storage. HoloMem is another emerging storage idea which relies on optical technology - to enable holographic storage. However, it cleverly melds the durability and density advantage of optical formats with a flexible polymer ribbon-loaded cartridge, so it can usurp entrenched LTO magnetic tape storage systems with minimal friction.

According to the inventors of HoloMem, their new cold storage technology offers far greater capacity than magnetic tape, with a much longer shelf life, and “zero energy storage” costs. HoloMem carts can fit up to 200TB, which is more than 11x the capacity of LTO-10 magnetic tape. Also, the optical-based new tech’s touted 50-year life is 10x the life of magnetic tape.

Magnetic tape has been around for 70 years or more, so it isn’t surprising that a new technology has at last been designed as a serious replacement, beating it by all key metrics. However, the HoloMem makers have revealed quite a few more attractive features of their new storage solution, which could or should lead to success.

Probably one of the biggest attractions of HoloMem is that it minimizes friction for users who may be interested in replacing existing tape storage. The firm claims that a HoloDrive can be integrated into a legacy cold storage system “with minimal hardware and software disruption.” This allows potential customers to phase-in HoloMem use, reducing the chance of abrupt transition issues. Moreover, its LTO-sized cartridges can be transported by a storage library’s robot transporters with no change.

Another feather in HoloMem’s cap is the technology’s reliance on cheap and off-the-shelf component products. Blocks & Files says that the holographic read/write head is just a $5 laser diode, for example. As for media, it makes use of mass-produced polymer sheets which sandwich a 16 micron thick light-sensitive polymer that “costs buttons.” The optical ribbon tapes produced, claimed to be robust and around 120 microns thick in total, work in a WORM (write-once, read-many) format.

Thanks to the storage density that the multiple layers of holograms written on these ribbons enable, HoloMem tapes need only be around 100m long for 200TB of storage. Contrast that with the 1,000m length of fragile magnetic tape that enables LTO-10’s up to 18TB capacity.

Blocks & Files shares some insight gained from talking to HoloMem founder Charlie Gale, who earned his stripes at Dyson, working on products like robot vacuum cleaners and hair dryers. During his time at Dyson, Gale helped devise the firm’s multi-hologram security sticker labels. This work appears to have planted the seed from which HoloMem has blossomed.

Rival would-be optical storage revolutionaries like Cerabyte or Microsoft’s Project Silica may face far greater friction for widespread adoption, we feel. Their systems require more expensive read/write hardware to work with their inflexible slivers of silica glass, and will find it harder to deliver such easy swap-out upgrades versus companies buying into HoloDrives.

HoloMem has a working prototype now and is backed by notable investors such as Intel Ignite and Innovate UK. However, there is no official ‘launch date’ set. Blocks & Files says the first HoloDrives will be used at TechRe consultants, in its UK data centers to verify product performance, reliability, and robustness.

Original Submission

hendrikboom writes:

Contrary to popular belief, using cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools slowed down experienced software developers when they were working in codebases familiar to them, rather than supercharging their work, a new study found.

AI research nonprofit METR conducted the in-depth study of seasoned developers earlier this year while they used Cursor, a popular AI coding assistant, to help them complete tasks in open-source projects they were familiar with.

Before the study, the open-source developers believed using AI would speed them up, estimating it would decrease task completion time by 24%. Even after completing the tasks with AI, the developers believed that they had decreased task times by 20%. But the study found that using AI did the opposite: it increased task completion time by 19%.

The study's lead authors, Joel Becker and Nate Rush, said they were shocked by the results: prior to the study, Rush had written down that he expected "a 2x speed up, somewhat obviously."

The findings challenge the belief that AI always makes expensive human engineers much more productive, a factor that has attracted substantial investment into companies selling AI products to aid software development.

This is now a loaded question: "Do artificial-intelligence tools speed up your work?"

-- Hendrik Boom

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Industrial Waste Is Turning Into Rock in Just Decades, Study Suggests:

The geological processes that create rocks usually take place over thousands if not millions of years. With the help of a coin and a soda can tab, researchers have identified rocks in England that formed in less than four decades. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the cause is human activity.

Researchers from the University of Glasgow's School of Geographical and Earth Sciences discovered that slag (a waste product of the steel industry) formed a new type of rock in West Cumbria in 35 years—at most. As detailed in a study published April 10 in the journal Geology, the researchers claim to be the first to fully document and date a complete "rapid anthropoclastic rock cycle" on land: a significantly accelerated rock cycle that incorporates human-made materials. They suggest that this phenomenon is likely harming ecosystems and biodiversity at similar industrial waste locations around the world.

"When waste material is first deposited, it's loose and can be moved around as required. What our finding shows is that we don't have as much time as we thought to find somewhere to put it where it will have minimal impact on the environment–instead, we may have a matter of just decades before it turns into rock, which is much more difficult to manage," co-author Amanda Owen said in a university statement.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, Derwent Howe in West Cumbria hosted heavy iron and steel industries. The 953 million cubic feet (27 million cubic meters) of slag generated by the factories turned into cliffs along the coastline, where strange formations along the human-made cliffs caught Owen and her colleagues' attention, according to the statement.

Merger of Two Massive Black Holes is One for the Record Books

upstart writes:

Merger of two massive black holes is one for the record books:

Physicists with the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration have detected the gravitational wave signal (dubbed GW231123) of the most massive merger between two black holes yet observed, resulting in a new black hole that is 225 times more massive than our Sun. The results were presented at the Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves in Glasgow, Scotland.

The LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration searches the universe for gravitational waves produced by the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. LIGO detects gravitational waves via laser interferometry, using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, Advanced Virgo, came online in 2016. In Japan, KAGRA is the first gravitational-wave detector in Asia and the first to be built underground. Construction began on LIGO-India in 2021, and physicists expect it will turn on sometime after 2025.

To date, the collaboration has detected dozens of merger events since its first Nobel Prize-winning discovery. Early detected mergers involved either two black holes or two neutron stars.  In 2021, LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA confirmed the detection of two separate "mixed" mergers between black holes and neutron stars.

LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA started its fourth observing run in 2023, and by the following year had announced the detection of a signal indicating a merger between two compact objects, one of which was most likely a neutron star. The other had an intermediate mass—heavier than a neutron star and lighter than a black hole. It was the first gravitational-wave detection of a mass-gap object paired with a neutron star and hinted that the mass gap might be less empty than astronomers previously thought.

Until now, the most massive back hole merger was GW190521, detected in 2020. It produced a new black hole with an intermediate mass—about 140 times as heavy as our Sun. Also found in the fourth run, GW231123 dwarfs the prior merger. According to the collaboration, the two black holes that merged were about 100 and 140 solar masses, respectively. It took some time to announce the discovery because the objects were spinning rapidly, near the limits imposed by the general theory of relativity, making the signal much more difficult to interpret.

The discovery is also noteworthy because it conflicts with current theories about stellar evolution. The progenitor black holes are too big to have formed from a supernova. Like its predecessor, GW190521, GW231123 may be an example of a so-called "hierarchical merger," meaning the two progenitor black holes were themselves each the result of a previous merger before they found each other and merged.

"The discovery of such a massive and highly spinning system presents a challenge not only to our data analysis techniques but will have a major effect on the theoretical studies of black hole formation channels and waveform modeling for many years to come," said Ed Porter of CNRS in Paris.