Astronomers may have discovered a new kind of survival story: a star that had a brush with a giant black hole and lived to tell the tale through exclamations of X-rays.

Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton uncovered the account that began with a red giant star wandering too close to a supermassive black hole in a galaxy about 250 million light years from Earth. The black hole, located in a galaxy called GSN 069, has a mass about 400,000 times that of the Sun, putting it on the small end of the scale for supermassive black holes.

Once the red giant was captured by the black hole's gravity, the outer layers of the star containing hydrogen were stripped off and careened toward the black hole, leaving the core of the star - known as a white dwarf - behind.

"In my interpretation of the X-ray data the white dwarf survived, but it did not escape," said Andrew King of the University of Leicester in the UK, who performed this study. "It is now caught in an elliptical orbit around the black hole, making one trip around about once every nine hours."

Today Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture hosted a webinar on whale evolution, and it was way oversubscribed. We apologize to anyone who wasn't able to make it into the crowded virtual seminar room. Robert Crowther welcomed biologists Jonathan Wells and Richard Sternberg, and they discussed the new Long Story Short video, "A Whale of an Evolution Tale," and much else. Responding to questions from the audience, they ranged across the thoughts of Theodosius Dobzhansky, David Berlinski, and James Shapiro, microevolution versus macroevolution, the thorny problems of convergent evolution and of waiting times, fruit fly experiments and how echolocation in bats and dolphins differ, and much else. They were joined by a surprise guest, the video's animator, who here goes by a first name only, Evan, for reasons you can imagine: even an animator has to worry that Darwinists will try to destroy him professionally (as they sought to do to Dr. Sternberg).

You can watch Evan's video for yourself now:

Researchers in The University of Texas at El Paso's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry have developed a nanohybrid vehicle that can be used to optimally deliver drugs into the human body.

The research was published in April 2020 in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Leading the study are Mahesh Narayan, Ph.D., professor, and Sreeprasad Sreenivasan, Ph.D., assistant professor, both from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Border Biomedical Research Center (BBRC) in UTEP's College of Science.

Drug candidates that show promise against a particular disease often are toxic to other cell types. One such drug is the polyphenol ellagic acid (EA). This antioxidant, derived from nature, demonstrates the potential to mitigate pathologies including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. To selectively use EA in the brain against neurodegenerative disorders requires that its cytotoxic potential be reduced and only its anti-oxidant potential be exploited. Narayan, Sreenivasan and colleagues created a nanohybrid vehicle to circumvent this problem.

Momentum is building to speed the development of coronavirus vaccines by intentionally infecting healthy, young volunteers with the virus. A grass-roots effort has attracted nearly 1,500 potential volunteers for the controversial approach, known as a human-challenge trial.

The effort, called 1Day Sooner, is not affiliated with groups or companies developing or funding coronavirus vaccines. But co-founder Josh Morrison hopes to show that there is broad support for human-challenge trials, which have the potential to deliver an effective coronavirus vaccine more quickly than standard trials.

Typical vaccine trials take a long time because thousands of people receive either a vaccine or a placebo, and researchers track who becomes infected in the course of their daily lives. A challenge study could in theory be much faster: a much smaller group of volunteers would receive a candidate vaccine and then be intentionally infected with the virus, to judge the efficacy of the immunization.

The novel coronavirus was engineered in a lab using HIV. Stem cells are a potent weapon against the new pandemic. People with blood type A are more susceptible to COVID-19.

None of these "discoveries" have been proven. But all have been widely disseminated.

They're examples of what many scientists are beginning to fear is an erosion of traditional safeguards against bad science under the pressing need for answers to the wave of sickness sweeping the globe.

Live Science reports:

Is life a gamble? Scientist models universe to find out

Scientists suspect that the complex life that slithers and crawls through every nook and cranny on Earth emerged from a random shuffling of non-living matter that ultimately spit out the building blocks of life.

Even so, the details to support the idea are lacking.

But researchers recently got creative in figuring out the probability of life actually emerging spontaneously from such inorganic matter — a process called abiogenesis.

In the study, Tomonori Totani, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Tokyo, modeled the microscopic world of molecules across the epic scale of the entire universe to see if abiogenesis is a likely candidate for the origin of life. He was essentially looking at whether there were enough stars with habitable planets in the universe at the time to allow complexity to arise. His results, published Feb. 3 in the journal Nature, show the betting odds for life emerging are not good, at least for the observable universe.

I Never Expected This

It's unexpected, surprising — and for me incredibly exciting. To be fair, at some level I've been working towards this for nearly 50 years. But it's just in the last few months that it's finally come together. And it's much more wonderful, and beautiful, than I'd ever imagined.

In many ways it's the ultimate question in natural science: How does our universe work? Is there a fundamental theory? An incredible amount has been figured out about physics over the past few hundred years. But even with everything that's been done — and it's very impressive — we still, after all this time, don't have a truly fundamental theory of physics.

Back when I used do theoretical physics for a living, I must admit I didn't think much about trying to find a fundamental theory; I was more concerned about what we could figure out based on the theories we had. And somehow I think I imagined that if there was a fundamental theory, it would inevitably be very complicated.

But in the early 1980s, when I started studying the computational universe of simple programs I made what was for me a very surprising and important discovery: that even when the underlying rules for a system are extremely simple, the behavior of the system as a whole can be essentially arbitrarily rich and complex.

And this got me thinking: Could the universe work this way? Could it in fact be that underneath all of this richness and complexity we see in physics there are just simple rules? I soon realized that if that was going to be the case, we'd in effect have to go underneath space and time and basically everything we know. Our rules would have to operate at some lower level, and all of physics would just have to emerge.

By the early 1990s I had a definite idea about how the rules might work, and by the end of the 1990s I had figured out quite a bit about their implications for space, time, gravity and other things in physics — and, basically as an example of what one might be able to do with science based on studying the computational universe, I devoted nearly 100 pages to this in my book A New Kind of Science.

The discovery of the earliest known modern amphibians in Antarctica provides further evidence of a warm and temperate climate in the Antarctic Peninsula before its separation from the southern supercontinent Gondwana.

The fossils, which belong to the family of helmeted frogs, are described in a paper in the journal Scientific Reports by researchers from Sweden, Argentina and Switzerland.

They discovered the remains of a hip bone and ornamented skull bone during expeditions to Seymour Island between 2011 and 2013. The specimens are about 40 million years old, from the Eocene period. Both belong to the Calyptocephalellidae family.

No traces of cold-blooded amphibians or reptiles from families still in existence had previously been found in Antarctica.

"Among Recent amphibians, the frogs (Anura) have the widest distribution, covering all continents except Antarctica, where the conditions have been uninhabitable for over tens of millions of years," the researchers write.

Have you ever wondered what kind of rocks make up those bright and dark splotches on the moon? Well, the USGS has just released a new authoritative map to help explain the 4.5-billion-year-old history of our nearest neighbor in space.

For the first time, the entire lunar surface has been completely mapped and uniformly classified by scientists from the USGS, in collaboration with NASA and the Lunar Planetary Institute.

The lunar map, called the "Unified Geologic Map of the Moon," will serve as the definitive blueprint of the moon's surface geology for future human missions and will be invaluable for the international scientific community, educators and the public-at-large. The digital map is available online now and shows the moon's geology in incredible detail (1:5,000,000 scale).

"People have always been fascinated by the moon and when we might return," said current USGS Director and former NASA astronaut Jim Reilly. "So, it's wonderful to see USGS create a resource that can help NASA with their planning for future missions."

There's an asteroid closing in on a safe Earth flyby. That's nothing unusual - near-Earth space has a lot of rocks in it. But 1998 OR2 is distinguishing itself in a series of happy snaps as it draws closer to periapsis.

Both the Virtual Telescope Project in Rome and the Arecibo Observatory in Chile have managed to catch glimpses of the asteroid as it grows brighter in our skies, travelling through space at around 31,320 kilometres per hour (19,461 miles per hour).

We have nothing to fear from 1998 OR2. It's relatively large, but it's not going to come close enough to threaten Earth. The asteroid was discovered in 1998, and astronomers have been watching it carefully to calculate its orbital path, which is projected all the way until the year 2197.

This year, 2020, will mark the asteroid's closest flyby in at least a century, and it's going to sail harmlessly past at a distance of 6.3 million kilometres (around 4 million miles). That's over 16 times the average distance between Earth and the Moon.