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Birds of Georgia, John Abbot, United States, 1804. (Egerton Ms 1137, f. 28

Don't Miss: Centuries worth of artefacts from documenting animals

3 May 2023

New Scientist's weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn't miss

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) ??? a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration ??? was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole???s boundary ??? the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name ??? is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 microarcseconds across ??? equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon. Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks ??? hydrogen masers ??? which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data ??? roughly 350 terabytes per day ??? which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers ??? known as correlators ??? at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

Don’t Miss: Learning about how the first black hole image was taken

15 February 2023

New Scientist's weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

(from left) M3GAN and Cady (Violet McGraw) in M3GAN, directed by Gerard Johnstone.

M3gan review: A chilling sci-fi film about the dangers of AI care

25 January 2023

It pays to know what you really need from a sophisticated learning machine, particularly if you don't want a killer robot on your hands, says Simon Ings

The best films of 2023, from Dune: Part Two to Patrick and the Whale

29 December 2022

From blockbuster sci-fi to epic biopics and jaw-dropping documentaries, here are the films we can’t wait to see in 2023

Don't miss: Troll, where heroes fight to save Oslo from an ancient foe

23 November 2022

New Scientist's weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Don’t miss: Strange World, animated sci-fi with Jake Gyllenhaal

16 November 2022

New Scientist's weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Angela Bassett as Ramonda in Marvel Studios' Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. ?? 2022 MARVEL.

Don’t Miss: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – the fight for survival

9 November 2022

New Scientist's weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Oliver Stone interviews Dr. Ashley Finan, Director of the National Reactor Innovation Center, at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, USA.

Nuclear review: Oliver Stone's paean to a nuclear future

5 October 2022

A new documentary explores the promise of nuclear energy as an antidote to the climate crisis, but the result may be a little too one-sided

The Directors review: Five intimate short films about psychosis

31 August 2022

Five people in recovery from psychosis guide artist Marcus Coates as he recreates aspects of their experience in this series of disorienting and sometimes very frightening short films, finds Simon Ings