I wonder how rogue black holes formed, was the dying star already rogue before it "turned", or did it turn first and then go rogue. There's also the possibility that it just ran out of fuel by absorbing everything around it.

Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported

Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station during rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her completely blind in her 30s. “I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.”

It wasn’t her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she’d been able to see with the implant’s help vanished.

Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004 and the subsequent Argus II implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology, spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder at a conference. “[I] went from being just a person that was doing the testing to being a spokesman,” he remembers.

Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant system is still working, he doesn’t know how long that will be the case. “As long as nothing goes wrong, I’m fine,” he says. “But if something does go wrong with it, well, I’m screwed. Because there’s no way of getting it fixed.”

Ross Doerr, another Second Sight patient, doesn’t mince words: “It is fantastic technology and a lousy company,” he says. He received an implant in one eye in 2019 and remembers seeing the shining lights of Christmas trees that holiday season. He was thrilled to learn in early 2020 that he was eligible for software upgrades that could further improve his vision. Yet in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he heard troubling rumors about the company and called his Second Sight vision-rehab therapist. “She said, ‘Well, funny you should call. We all just got laid off,’ ” he remembers. “She said, ‘By the way, you’re not getting your upgrades.’ ”

These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget. One technical hiccup, one broken wire, and they lose their artificial vision, possibly forever. To add injury to insult: A defunct Argus system in the eye could cause medical complications or interfere with procedures such as MRI scans, and it could be painful or expensive to remove.

Magpies have outwitted scientists by helping each other remove tracking devices

When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn't expect to discover an entirely new social behaviour rarely seen in birds.
Watch Catalyst: The secret life of urban birds

Our goal was to learn more about the movement and social dynamics of these highly intelligent birds, and to test these new, durable and reusable devices. Instead, the birds outsmarted us.

As our new research paper explains, the magpies began showing evidence of cooperative "rescue" behaviour to help each other remove the tracker.

While we're familiar with magpies being intelligent and social creatures, this was the first instance we knew of that showed this type of seemingly altruistic behaviour: helping another member of the group without getting an immediate, tangible reward.

Winged reptiles known as pterosaurs -- airplane-size creatures that swooped through the skies as dinosaurs walked the Earth -- were the first vertebrate animals to evolve powered flight.

A spectacular three-dimensional fossil of one previously unknown pterosaur has been discovered on the shore of the Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland.

With a wingspan of more than 2.5 metres (8.2 feet), it's the biggest pterosaur ever discovered from the Jurassic period and last flapped its wings 170 million years ago. Its sharp teeth, which would have snapped up fish, still retain their shiny enamel.

Sensor breakthrough paves way for groundbreaking map of world under Earth surface

An object hidden below ground has been located using quantum technology—a long-awaited milestone with profound implications for industry, human knowledge and national security.

University of Birmingham researchers from the UK National Quantum Technology Hub in Sensors and Timing have reported their achievement in Nature. It is the first in the world for a quantum gravity gradiometer outside of laboratory conditions.

The quantum gravity gradiometer, which was developed under a contract for the Ministry of Defense and in the UKRI-funded Gravity Pioneer project, was used to find a tunnel buried outdoors in real-world conditions one meter below the ground surface. It wins an international race to take the technology outside.

The sensor works by detecting variations in microgravity using the principles of quantum physics, which is based on manipulating nature at the sub-molecular level.

The success opens a commercial path to significantly improved mapping of what exists below ground level.

A new study suggests it's becoming increasingly common for octopuses to use bottles, cans and other human trash to shelter themselves, camouflage their dens and even house their young.