r/NewsStarWorld

At the cosmic dawn, the universe was sprinkled with giant black holes—monstrosities so huge that scientists are still struggling to explain how they could have even existed. The answer may lie in a never-before-seen object from this cosmic era.

In a paper published today in Nature, astronomers report the discovery of an extremely unusual, bright spot of red from the early universe. Externally, it looks like an enormous star about the size of the entire solar system. It’s radiating about 100 billion times more energy than any known star, making it more like a black hole. After careful analysis, the team concluded that it’s an entirely new type of object: a “black hole star.” This black hole star, named MoM (Mirage or Miracle)-BH*-1, “is so swaddled within shrouds of dense gas that it effectively radiates in a manner reminiscent of stellar phenomena,” Rohan Naidu, the study’s lead author, told Gizmodo.

“It is a very special thing to find an object with no comparison given the vast stores of data on billions of stars, galaxies, and black holes that we have in our archival databases,” added Naidu, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii. “MoM-BH*-1 is one in a billion!

Millions of people witnessed the most significant eclipse in Europe for decades on Wednesday as the Sun disappeared behind the Moon for a few fleeting moments.

Onlookers in the much of the UK saw the Moon cover more than 90% of the Sun - the most since 1999 - while parts of Greenland, Iceland and Spain saw a rare total eclipse.

Cuneiform is one of the earliest writing systems in human history. Archaeologists have traced its beginnings to around 3400–3300 BC, more than 5,000 years ago. It also lasted for a remarkably long time: the last securely dated cuneiform text comes from 75 AD.

Researchers have found hundreds of thousands of texts written in cuneiform, many of them in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. Now, they’ve also trained a neural network that can translate digitized Akkadian cuneiform into English.

An old, mysterious language

The Akkadian language is one of the earliest known Semitic languages, a family that includes modern languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. It was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, primarily in the Akkadian Empire that was situated in the region that is today parts of Iraq and northeastern Syria. Akkadian is named after the ancient city of Akkad, one of the major centers of the Akkadian civilization.

Akkadian was used for a wide range of purposes, from administrative and legal documents to literature and science texts. It was written using cuneiform script on clay tablets, and its decipherment in the 19th century opened up a new window into the ancient world, providing scholars with valuable insights into the history, culture, and scientific achievements of the time.

Meanwhile, Sumerian is one of the world’s oldest known languages, and it has the distinction of being a language isolate, meaning it has no known relatives. It was spoken in ancient Sumer, a region located in the southern part of what is now modern-day Iraq. The Sumerians are credited with establishing one of the world’s earliest civilizations around 4500 BCE, and their society flourished until about 2000 BCE.

Both languages used the cuneiform writing system, as did several other languages. Cuneiform is therefore a script rather than a language in itself (it’s not exactly an alphabet, either). It was adapted to write at least 15 languages, including Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite and Elamite.

Cuneiform, meet AI

In recent years, language translations have come a long way — and AI is greatly accelerating these trends in automation. AI translations are nearing a watershed moment, with some pretty striking achievements. In the new study, Shai Gordin and colleagues from Ariel University described an AI model that can automatically translate Akkadian text written in cuneiform into English. For now, this is only available for this particular language (not all languages that use the cuneiform script work at the moment), but it’s still remarkable.

​

A U.S. appeals court on Monday allowed thousands of lawsuits to move forward against Meta Platforms, Alphabet's Google, ByteDance's TikTok, and other social media companies over claims they designed their products to be addictive to ‌young users.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the companies' bid to reverse a lower court's ruling forcing them ‌to face more than 3,000 lawsuits over the claims filed in federal court, concluding that the appeal came too early in the litigation.

The 120th Congress is set to feature an unusually large number of new faces.

Ahead of the November elections, at least 83 incumbents across the U.S. House and the Senate won’t be returning to their seats.

Even now, the 119th Congress already looks different from when it began in January 2025, after a handful of resignations as well as deaths.

But the expected turnover at the end of the term will be even higher. The reasons vary: some members announced their retirement after decades of service, others have sought different offices. More than usual have lost primaries.

Staying at one company for decades was once a badge of honor. But as layoffs have become more common and workers have turned to job hopping for higher pay and career growth, employee loyalty has become harder to find. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, however, still believes earning employee loyalty is worth every penny.

That's why his hedge fund Pershing Square, which manages roughly $35 billion in assets, offers its four dozen employees generous workplace benefits, including broad ownership and an even rare degree of flexibility for Wall Street.

"There's not a person at Pershing Square that doesn't own multiple millions of dollars of stock in the company—whether you're cleaning the space or at the front desk or another role in the company," Ackman told Fortune's Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell on a recent episode of Fortune's Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. "We believe in taking care of our people."

Ackman's approach to retention goes beyond financial incentives. While Perishing employees are required to work from the office five days a week—that policy only applies for 10 months of the year. During July and August, employees can spread out as they like, with the company's investment team moving to the Hamptons together, either in homes they rent or own, to work.

Pershing also invests heavily in employees' health and well-being, Ackman said, offering everything from healthy meals in its cafe to gym access and comprehensive healthcare benefits. With a staff of just 48 people, Pershing has not had one "undesired departure" from the firm.

"I think everyone here feels accurately that they're a big contributor to our success, and the result is we can accomplish an enormous amount," Ackman added.