The narrative that AI spending has been singlehandedly propping up the U.S. economy — a claim that captivated Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington over the past year — is facing serious pushback from economists [non-paywalled source] at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, all of whom now calculate that the AI buildup’s direct contribution to growth was dramatically overstated and possibly close to zero.
The debate hinges on how GDP accounts for imported components: roughly three-quarters of AI data center costs go toward computer chips and gear largely manufactured in Asia, and that spending gets subtracted from domestic output because it boosts foreign economies. Joseph Politano of the Apricitas Economics newsletter pegs AI’s actual contribution at about 0.2 percentage points of the 2.2 percent U.S. growth in 2025, and even Hannah Rubinton at the St. Louis Fed — whose own analysis attributed 39 percent of growth to AI-related business spending through the first nine months of the year — acknowledges that figure is probably the ceiling. “It’s not like AI is propping up the economy,” Rubinton said.
HBO has another critically acclaimed hit with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, based on George R.R. Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas, and it deserves every bit of the praise heaped upon it. The immensely satisfying first season wrapped with last night’s finale, dealing with the tragedy of the penultimate episode and setting the stage for the further adventures of Dunk and Egg. House of the Dragon is a solid series, but Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has reminded staunch GoT fans of everything they loved about the original series in the first place.
(Spoilers below, but no major reveals until after the second gallery. We’ll give you a heads up when we get there.)
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms adapts the first novella in the series, The Hedge Knight, and is set 50 years after the events of House of the Dragon. Dunk (Peter Claffey) is a lowly hedge knight who has just buried his aged mentor, Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb). Ser Arlan was perhaps not the kindest of mentors and often stone drunk, but at least he was hung like the proverbial horse—as viewers discovered in a full-frontal moment that instantly went viral. Lacking any good employment options, Dunk decides to enter a local tournament, since he has inherited Ser Arlan’s sword, shield, and three horses.
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A good pair of noise-canceling earbuds under $50 doesn’t happen often, but right now, these refurbished Beats Studio Buds are $49.99 at Woot. For context, new pairs of this model typically sell between $90 and $99 on Amazon, while used listings often hover around $69. As for their refurbished condition, they’ve undergone diagnostic testing to confirm that everything works properly and should show little to no cosmetic wear. Shipping is free for Amazon Prime members; everyone else pays $6. That said, Woot does not ship this product to Alaska, Hawaii, or P.O. Boxes. This deal runs for another three days or until it’s sold out, whichever comes first.
These IPX4-rated earbuds pair easily with both iOS and Android devices, which isn’t always a given for products owned by Apple. You still get the perks people expect, like simple one-tap pairing and Find My support on iPhone, but Android users aren’t left out. The buds themselves are small and lightweight, and once you find the right fit from the three included ear tip sizes, they stay secure. The glossy finish can make them slightly slippery when you’re putting them in, but they don’t feel bulky once seated. Sound-wise, these lean into bass. Vocals and instruments stay clear enough, but this isn’t a neutral, studio-accurate sound.
The active noise cancellation does a decent job with steady background noise like engine hum on a flight or the rumble of a train. It won’t block out higher-pitched sounds or conversations as effectively as premium models from Sony or Bose, but at this price, having usable ANC at all is notable, according to this PCMag review. There’s also a Transparency mode for when you need to hear what’s going on around you. You can play or pause music, answer calls, and switch between ANC and Transparency directly from the earbuds, though you’ll still need your phone to adjust volume. Battery life runs about five hours with ANC on, or up to eight without it, and the case provides another 10 to 16 hours depending on how you use them.
Emperor Penguin releases kernel 7.0 rc1 with some numerological musingsLinus Torvalds has pondered his professional mortality in a self-deprecating post to mark the release of the first release candidate for version 7.0 of the Linux kernel.…
An immutable law of the universe is that no matter how big your house is, you eventually fill it up with stuff. And if you’re starting off with a small house to begin with, you hit maximum storage pretty quickly. That can make DIY home maintenance and other projects a challenge, because so many of the tools you need are kind of enormous and awkwardly-shaped, making their storage problematic even in spacious homes.
While hand tools like hammers and screwdrivers can usually be stashed creatively, larger items eat up your spare room pretty quickly—unless you opt for a folding or collapsible version. These tools do the same job, but shrink down when not in use so they can squeeze into tight spots or unexpected locations, solving your storage problems.
A folding ladder is easy to store in a garage or shed
Ladders can be some of the biggest storage challenges because they are, by their very nature, extremely large and rigid. If you don’t have enough vertical or horizontal space to store a ladder, it can wind up just sort of standing in an odd place, collecting dust in between uses and making your home look like a perpetual job site.
You have two small-space options to solve for this, though. The most common is a telescoping ladder, which collapses down to a portion of its height when not in use. This can make it a lot easier to find storage space in a closet or other location, and it can even be hidden behind furniture. Another option is a folding ladder like this one from DuoSaftey, which folds into a stick-like form when not in use, minimizing its horizontal footprint instead of its vertical footprint.
This wheeled cart can be store in a laundry room or closet
A sturdy, wheeled cart is incredibly useful in a lot of maintenance and repair jobs, making it easy to transport tools and materials around the area. But who has the space to have a whole cart just sitting around until it’s needed? A folding cart is the answer: It folds flat for easy storage, but snaps into a sturdy full-sized cart that can handle up to 300 pounds of weight when it’s needed.
Get a collapsible bubble level that folds around corners
A bubble level is a necessity if you want your home projects to look like a sane, rational person performed the work. But a full-size level is often difficult to find space for, and smaller levels aren’t as useful for larger projects.
This folding level not only collapses into a tiny form factor for storage, it can be bent and used to check level around corners, which is one of those DIY superpowers you don’t realize you need until you learn about its existence.
This folding saw is great for the occasional DIY project
Saws are another rigid tool that can be problematic to store. Hanging them on a wall is a good solution that gets them out of the way, but if you need to pack your tools out of sight, you need to consider a folding saw like this one. If you saw wood every day of your life, you might not want this, but if you need a saw for the occasional quick project around the house and don’t have storage space to spare, this will get the job done and fold up and away when not needed.
Store this pop-up workbench in the garage
Like rolling carts, workbenches are incredibly useful when you need a flat surface to work on, but become a real pain when it’s time to store them away. Luckily, you can pick up a folding workbench like this one from DeWalt. It’s a sturdy work surface that can support up to 1,000 pounds, but when the job is done, it folds up to be slid into the tightest spot you have available.
This collapsible bucket fits under the sink or in a utility closet
Everyone needs a job bucket in the house, but the traditional five-gallon bucket not only takes up more space than you realize, it also becomes a place to store stuff in, making it a chore to unpack every time you need to use it. A folding bucket like this one isn’t quite as large (it’s only three gallons), but it collapses into an easily-stored flat configuration when you’re not using it, preventing it from tempting you with all that empty space.
A folding hand truck can transport heavy stuff and then get tucked away in a closet
For years, I had a hand truck stored in my crawl space, because a hand truck was an incredibly useful thing. Any time I had to move bags of cement or large items around, I’d have to climb down into that nightmarish crawl space and retrieve the hand truck, which was a pain in the butt. Now I have this folding handtruck, which does the same job (it can handle more than 300 pounds) but can be tucked away in a closet when not in use.
Use this folding shovel for gardening and clearing out snow
Every house needs a shovel. You either have a garden or backyard where digging will occasionally be needed, or you’ll need to clear snow from your sidewalks and driveway. Or both! Shovels tend to be left in garages or outside when not in use, but if you need to store yours in a small space inside, a folding option is a real space-saver. It collapses into a compact square that will squeeze into any space, but it’s sturdy enough for the toughest jobs you can throw at it.
Mafia: The Old Country demands to be played on an enormous screen. As much as I love my 32-inch Alienware OLED gaming monitor, it doesn’t do justice to Mafia’s cinematic vistas of Sicily. But, I also wanted to play that game in its full 4K glory, with none of the compromises of today’s game consoles. So why not just shove a tiny gaming desktop under my home theater? Enter the Fragbox, Falcon Northwest’s revamped small form factor gaming PC. While it’s very expensive, starting at $3,997, it’s incredibly powerful and gives you the freedom to easily upgrade the hardware down the line.
I know what you’re thinking: “A $4,000 desktop, in this economy?” That pricing also doesn’t include upgrading from the stock NVIDIA’s RTX 5070 GPU, as well as adding more RAM and larger SSDs, all of which could drive the price up thousands more. I initially planned to review the FragBox back in early December 2025, before the AI-induced RAMaggedon made memory, storage and other components dramatically more expensive. Falcon Northwest is mainly known as a boutique and high-end system builder, so its wealthier clientele can likely weather the pricing storm. If you’re looking for a deal, though, you won’t find it here.
So what, exactly, is a FragBox? Imagine a typical mid-tower desktop squashed down to a system that’s only 10.2-inches tall, 10.5-inches wide and 15.9-inches deep. When Falcon initially debuted the FragBox in 2004, it was notable for being a genuinely small PC that used full-sized parts. That’s still a main selling point today: It can still fit in large NVIDIA GPUs, including the beefy RTX 5090, as well as either Intel’s latest Core Ultra chips or AMD’s Ryzen 9000 CPUs. A huge 280mm radiator sits at the top pulling out hot air, and it also serves as an All-in-One (AIO) liquid cooler for the CPU.
At 25 pounds, the FragBox isn’t exactly light, but its sturdy metal handle makes it easy to move around. Most mid-tower desktops usually weigh between 20 and 35 pounds, depending on their case material. But they’re also much larger and harder to squeeze into tight spaces. The FragBox’s relatively squat size makes it easy to shove into a home entertainment center, or just sit on the corner of your desk. I do wish the handle was removable, though. It was about half an inch too tall for one of my shelves.
Falcon Northwest FragBox
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
Despite its density, the FragBox’s elegant design makes it a cinch to access to all of the system’s components. Just unscrew the side and top panels and you can easily remove the GPU, RAM, storage and other major components. There are three slots of M.2 SSDs, as well as two locations for 2.5-inch drives and a spot for a large 3.5-inch HDD. The system is bundled with a 1,200W power supply, which should be more than enough to handle future GPUs and CPUs.
Ports are plentiful as well: There are two USB-A and one USB-C connections right up front, alongside a headphone jack. On the rear, you’ve got your typical assortment of mid-tower connections, including four USB-A 2.0 connections, seven USB-A 3 ports, one 20G USB-C 3.2 port, 2.5G Ethernet, HDMI and DisplayPort. Our RTX 5090 review unit also included three DisplayPort jacks and one HDMI connection (which you’ll see on most GPUs). Wi-Fi 6E is also built-in, though at this price it would have been nice to see Wi-Fi 7.
Falcon Northwest FragBox
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
The FragBox, thankfully, lacks the garish LEDs and cheesy thermal glass you find on more ostentatious gaming rigs. Falcon Northwest’s aluminum case looks and feels stately, like an old-school luxury car. If you want something flashier, you can shell out an additional $400 for a custom UV printed case or $149 for a UV-printed front panel.
Our review unit was equipped with AMD’s Ryzen 9950X3D CPU, NVIDIA’s RTX 5090, 96GB of DDR5 RAM and a 2TB SSD. So sure, even before benchmarking or running any games, I expected it to be a beast. In PCMark 10, the FragBox scored a whopping 13,810, which is around 500 points higher than my mid-tower system with the same CPU and GPU. It also scored the highest 3DMark Speedway and Port Royal ray tracing scores I’ve ever seen. Even more impressive, the FragBox’s fans were barely audible under load, and the CPU and GPU sat at a chill 52C and 65C, respectively
CPU
GeekBench 6 CPU
GeekBench 6 GPU
Cinebench 2024
Falcon Northwest FragBox
3,445/22,787
390,148
N/A
Desktop with AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, RTX 5090
3,366/18,950
381,400
134/2,124
Desktop with AMD Ryzen 9 7900X, RTX 5090
2,822/14,216
358,253
113/1,103
Apple Mac Studio M4 Max
4,090/26,394
116,028
190/2066
To get back to my initial point, it ran Mafia: The Old Country in 4K flawlessly, with every graphics setting cranked all the way up. While playing on my 120-inch projector home theater setup, the game reached 62 fps natively, and flipping on DLSS upscaling and frame generation bumped that up to 120 fps. Not that you need a super higher framerate for a slow-paced, mostly cinematic action game. I was just happy to be playing without any compromises — even the PS5 Pro can’t reach the same level of graphical fidelity as the monstrously powerful RTX 5090.
Falcon Northwest FragBox
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
I’m no stranger to big-screen PC gaming, but previously I’ve had to run a laughably long HDMI cable from my desktop to make it work. I’m just too old for that mess now. And it also doesn’t work consistently, especially at higher framerates, thanks to the massive bandwidth required to pump out 4K at high refresh rates. In-home game streaming is also an option, but that’s not great when you’re blowing games up to an enormous TV or projector screen. It’s just too hard to ignore the imperfections of streaming compression. (Admittedly, I need to test newer high-bandwidth options, especially after I was impressed by NVIDIA’s GeForce Now upgrade last year.)
The FragBox also made it easy to jump into all of my recent Steam titles, including Mewgeneics and Arc Raiders on a big screen. Unfortunately, Windows itself remains a key stumbling block for home theater PC gaming. You’ll still need to keep a keyboard and PC around to deal with the initial OS configuration. And even once I enabled Steam’s Big Picture mode, which offers excellent controller options, I still occasionally had to deal with Windows Updates and other annoyances.
Falcon Northwest FragBox
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
Microsoft is currently trying to optimize Windows for gaming handhelds, and it’s reportedly doing even more to make a future PC-powered Xbox feel more console-like. For now, though, using a Windows PC in your home theater doesn’t feel much different than it did a decade ago. Steam is your savior, Windows is your enemy. Or you could just save thousands of dollars and buy a $500 PlayStation 5 or $700 PS5 Pro, instead. The latter will still get you smooth framerates and a healthy dose of ray tracing, without the annoyance of Windows, keyboards and mice.
But if you just want a compact and insanely powerful gaming desktop, and you don’t mind spending a premium, it’s hard to deny that the FragBox gets everything right.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/falcon-northwest-fragbox-review-a-compact-gaming-rig-that-does-everything-right-130000837.html?src=rss
The popular Iceni Women’s Series is back, celebrating Women’s History Month with a 5-week series inspired by the legendary WorldTour Spring Classics! Presented by The Warrior Games and The Femme Cycle Collab, each race mimics the demands of an iconic race, from relentless tempo to all-out attacks, delivering a true test of strength, strategy, and resilience.
Weekly races begin on March 3rd. Here are the details…
About the Name
The Iceni tribe was ‘peacefully annexed’ by the Roman Empire at some point before 47 AD, though it was allowed some autonomy. When the king died and Boudicca I became High Queen of Iceni, the Roman Empire saw her unfit to rule and invaded the region. Iceni led a revolt against the Roman Empire and regained its independence, along with the independence of several other tribes. This led to the subsequent formation of the Comhairle, an alliance of the British tribes. Iceni had a major say in Comhairle affairs and became an important center of trade, military, and leadership.
Schedule and Route Details
Races are held on Tuesdays, and there are two time slots to choose from:
Slot 1: 6pm UTC/1pm ET/10am PT
Slot 2: 12am UTC/7pm ET/4pm PT
* note that daylight savings time happens in the US on March 8, so these times will shift to 1 hour later starting with the March 10th race
The overall series GC ranking is based on your points total for the series across Challenges 1-5. In the event of a tie, the rider with the highest total QOM points will be declared the winner.
Sprint and QOM segments listed for each race award points to the first 6 riders across the line:
1st – 10 points
2nd – 8 points
3rd – 6 points
4th – 4 points
5th – 2 points
6th – 1 point
Riders also receive points based on their finishing position in their category for each race. The top five score 100, 95, 90, 86, 83, and every place after that drops by 1 point.
Each time slot will have its own league on ZwiftPower. If you’re going for the overall series competition, you’ll need to finish all five races in the same timeslot.
Team Competition
For Team GC, the top three riders from each team will combine their points to determine the overall team ranking.
Sign Up
Want to race the series? Start by signing up for the race events! Numbers attract numbers, so women are encouraged to sign up early.
Meta announced it’s separating Horizon Worlds from the Quest platform, as the one-time social VR app is going “almost exclusively mobile” moving forward.
The News
“Our goal remains constant: to empower developers and creators as they build long-term, sustainable businesses,” said Samantha Ryan, VP of Content at Reality Labs. “We used to have a pretty well-defined audience for VR, but as we’ve grown, we’ve attracted new audiences—who want different things—and the onus is on us to make sure that each of these distinct groups can find the apps and games that appeal to them.”
Here, Ryan is referring to evolution of it userbase. In February 2025, the company announced that younger users were helping to push a new emphasis on free-to-play content.
Image courtesy Meta
“That’s why we’re changing our roadmaps to increase your chances for success. We’re explicitly separating our Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform in order to create more space for both products to grow,” Ryan said. “We’re doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem while shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile. By breaking things down into two distinct platforms, we’ll be better able to clearly focus on each.”
This largely echoes statements made by Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth last month defending layoffs affecting 10 percent of its Reality Labs, wherein he explained that higher costs and a fractured development process led to the decision.
“Having to build everything twice—once for mobile and once for VR—is a tremendous tax on the team. You’d rather grow a giant audience and then work from a position of strength,” Bosworth said.
While Worlds promotion is being removed from Quest’s suggested content feed, at the time of this writing Horizon Worlds is still downloadable from the Horizon Store for Quest. It remains to be seen when Worlds will be decoupled entirely.
My Take
While Meta has never shared concurrent user numbers for Horizon Worlds, one of the key limiters in the beginning was undoubtedly the need for a Quest headset to play. It wasn’t available on anything else, which is fine when you have a addressable concurrent userbase in the multimillions—something even the most popular VR platform can’t claim at this point.
Notably, before Meta released on Android and iOS in late 2023, other social VR platforms had already made strides in the direction of bringing support to mobile, including class leaders VRChat and Rec Room. So, Meta followed suit, and quickly found out that kids with cellphones were spending more time and money in Horizon Worlds than Quest users.
And ultimately, some of this came down to control. Ostensibly hoping to avoid publicly-damaging controversy from the get-go, Meta initially kept a fairly tight leash on user-generated content, including complexity and visual richness of worlds. Even now, user avatars are fairly basic, with the pipeline of customization funneled to purchasable accessories rather than user-generated avatars, like you might see in VRChat.
That said, Horizon Worlds experienced a much slower and rockier start than Meta likely thought it would following its initial release on Quest in 2021. In retrospect, Meta’s more recent decision to mix user-generated Worlds with actual VR apps in the Store feed was probably a last ditch effort to get Quest users finally interested in Worlds—even if by accident.
“In August 2025, TypeScript surpassed both Python and JavaScript to become the most-used language on GitHub for the first time ever…” writes GitHub’s senior developer advocate.
They point to this as proof that “AI isn’t just speeding up coding. It’s reshaping which languages, frameworks, and tools developers choose in the first place.”
Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week. Those early exposures reset the baseline for what “easy” means. When AI handles boilerplate and error-prone syntax, the penalty for choosing powerful but complex languages disappears. Developers stop avoiding tools with high overhead and start picking based on utility instead.
The language adoption data shows this behavioral shift:
— TypeScript grew 66% year-over-year
— JavaScript grew 24%
— Shell scripting usage in AI-generated projects jumped 206%
That last one matters. We didn’t suddenly love Bash. AI absorbed the friction that made shell scripting painful. So now we use the right tool for the job without the usual cost.
“When a task or process goes smoothly, your brain remembers,” they point out. “Convenience captures attention. Reduced friction becomes a preference — and preferences at scale can shift ecosystems.”
“AI performs better with strongly typed languages. Strongly typed languages give AI much clearer constraints…”
“Standardize before you scale. Document patterns. Publish template repositories. Make your architectural decisions explicit. AI tools will mirror whatever structures they see.”
“Test AI-generated code harder, not less.”
No one knows exactly when the vehicles we drive will finally wrest the steering wheel from us. But the age of the autonomous automobile isn’t some sudden Big Bang. It’s more of a slow crawl, one that started during the Roosevelt administration. And that’s Theodore, not Franklin. And not in America, but in Spain, by someone you’ve probably never heard of.
His name was Leonardo Torres Quevedo, a Spanish engineer born in Santa Cruz, Spain, in 1852. Smart? In 1914, he developed a mechanical chess machine that autonomously played against humans. But more than a decade earlier, he pioneered the development of remote-control systems. What he wrought was brilliant, if crude—and certainly ahead of its time.
The first wireless control
It was called the Telekino, a name drawn from the Greek “tele,” meaning at a distance, and “kino,” meaning movement. Patented in Spain, France, and the United States, it was conceived as a way to prevent airship accidents. The Telekino transmitted wireless signals to a small receiver known as a coherer, which detected electromagnetic waves and transformed them into an electrical current. This current was amplified and sent on to electromagnets that slowly rotated a switch controlling the proper servomotor. Quevedo could issue 19 distinct commands to the systems of an airship without ever touching a control cable.
Fewer than 20 per cent of riders polled by the Cyclistes Professionnels Associés (CPA) were against the UCI’s proposed gearing restriction trial, claims the body’s president, Adam Hansen.
Writing for Domestique, Hansen explains that, while the proposal didn’t come from the CPA – the union that represents professional cyclists – it supports the move because it is “committed to following the collective voice of the peloton”.
Planned to take place at the Tour of Guangxi in October, the test would have seen riders restricted to gearing limited to 10.46 metres development – roughly equivalent to a 54x11t with a 28mm tyre.
SRAM was set to be keenly affected by the UCI’s proposal. Andy Lloyd / Our Media
At the time, the BCA said the trial didn’t “meet the required conditions of objectivity and transparency” and risked creating “serious and difficult to repair” harm for SRAM.
In a statement published following the original ruling, the UCI contested the BCA’s decision, questioning its authority to make a decision: “[the ruling] is issued by a Belgian authority responding to a complaint from a US company against a Swiss sports association regarding a test to be carried out on Chinese territory.”
SRAM to fund litigation against itself
Cyclingnews reports that UCI president David Lappartient – pictured right – proposed the UCI would take over management of SafeR due to a lack of unity. in Kigali, Rwanda. (Photo by Dario Belingheri/Getty Images
As reported by Cyclingnews, the UCI will contest the BCA’s ruling using funds from the SafeR budget, following a meeting of the SafeR supervisory board.
The CPA is one of four stakeholders that make up SafeR, along with the UCI, Association of Professional Cycling Teams (AIGCP), and the International Association of Race Organisers (AIOCC). Cyclingnews reports that all parties, except the AIGCP, voted for the proposal.
SafeR is part-funded by contributions from teams. This latest move means SRAM-sponsored teams will, in effect, be funding litigation against their sponsor.
Hansen notes that, along with the support of riders, the CPA’s decision to support the move is “based on a vote by the national associations”, and that if the test doesn’t go ahead, “then SafeR has no purpose”.
SRAM did not respond to requests for comment on Hansen’s claims or the latest developments in time for publication.
While these days nearly every major desktop Linux distribution is using Wayland or at least making it available, a decade ago before reaching that maturity one of the options for showing off the potential of Wayland was the oddly-named RebeccaBlack OS. With “RBOS” it shipped the very latest Wayland components and different desktop and toolkit options to easily try out Wayland-based environments from a live Linux environment. Released overnight was a surprise update to RBOS…
Red Hat engineers this weekend released Tuned 2.27, the newest version of their open-source project to provide a tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux. Tuned makes it easier to adjust Linux power and performance characteristics depending upon the hardware and the different workload(s) for your Linux system deployment. Tuned is a replacement/alternative to Linux’s cpupower and power-profiles-daemon utilities…
FFmpeg developer Lynne is most known recently for all the Vulkan Video work to this open-source multimedia library while merged today to FFmpeg is another great contribution outside the scope of that: xHE-AAC MPS212 audio decoding support…
OnLogic has introduced the Factor 101, a compact fanless industrial system built around Qualcomm’s QCS6490 platform. The unit targets edge deployments that need wired networking, basic display output, and local inference acceleration in a small enclosure. The platform is based on an 8-core Qualcomm Kryo 670 CPU clocked at up to 2.1GHz, paired with 8GB […]
The bash (Bourne-Again SHell) is a sh-compatible command-line interpreter that reads from standard input or from a file and gives you the resulting output.
“A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules,” reports Live Science. “It’s not only exceeding the ‘speed limit’ of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions — two features that are not predicted to coexist…”
“How is this rule-breaking behavior even possible? In a paper published Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of researchers observed ID830 in multiple wavelengths to find an answer….”
As they attract gas and dust, this material accumulates in a swirling accretion disk. Gravity pulls the material from the disk into the black hole, but the infalling material generates radiation pressure that pushes outward and prevents more stuff from falling in. As a result, black holes are muzzled by a self-regulating process called the Eddington limit… Its X-ray brightness suggests that ID830 is accreting mass at about 13 times the Eddington limit, due to a sudden burst of inflowing gas that may have occurred as ID830 shredded and engulfed a celestial body that wandered too close. “For a supermassive black hole (SMBH) as massive as ID830, this would require not a normal (main-sequence) star, but a more massive giant star or a huge gas cloud,” study co-author Sakiko Obuchi, an observational astronomer at Waseda University in Tokyo, told Live Science via email. Such super-Eddington phases may be incredibly brief, as “this transitional phase is expected to last for roughly 300 years,” Obuchi added.
ID830 also simultaneously displays radio and X-ray emissions. These two features are not expected to coexist, especially because super-Eddington accretion is thought to suppress such emissions. “This unexpected combination hints at physical mechanisms not yet fully captured by current models of extreme accretion and jet launching,” the researchers said in a statement. So while ID830 is launching massive radio jets, its X-ray emissions appear to originate from a structure called a corona, produced as intense magnetic fields from the accretion disk create a thin but turbulent billion-degree cloud of turbocharged particles. These particles orbit the black hole at nearly the speed of light, in what NASA calls “one of the most extreme physical environments in the universe.” Altogether, ID830’s rule-breaking behaviors suggest that it is in a rare transitional phase of excessive consumption — and excretion. This incredible feeding burst has energized both its jets and its corona, making ID830 shine brightly across multiple wavelengths as it spews out excess radiation.
Additionally, based on UV-brightness analysis, quasars like ID830 may be unexpectedly common, the researchers said. Models predict that only around 10% of quasars have spectacular radio jets, but these energetic objects could be significantly more abundant in the early universe than previously suggested. Most importantly, ID830 also shows how SMBHs can regulate galaxy growth in the early universe. As a black hole gobbles matter at the super-Eddington limit, the energy from its resultant emissions can heat and disperse matter throughout the interstellar medium — the gas between stars — to suppress star formation. As a result, ancient SMBHs like ID830 may have grown massive at the expense of their host galaxies.
