The black hole is made from "60 concentrically arranged layers of circuit board," where each layer (actually created of so-called metamaterials) is coated with copper and "etched with intricate structures whose characteristics change progressively from one strip to the next, so that the permittivity varies smoothly." Since I can't even begin to wrap my head around this stuff, I'm going to let the experts explain it:

"When the incident electromagnetic wave hits the device, the wave will be trapped and guided in the shell region towards the core of the black hole, and will then be absorbed by the core," says Cui [one of the inventors]. "The wave will not come out from the black hole." In their device, the core converts the absorbed light into heat.

As if it weren't badass enough that somebody made a black hole small enough to fit on a table-top, the invention has legitimate real-world applications—most notably in solar energy panels. Think about it: You wouldn't need giant plates to capture the sun if you had a device that attracted light to it. This kind of thing is cool enough to make me want to go back and read more than twelve pages of A Brief History of Time. [New Scientist via Wired]

Entropy is the big topic in the whole "end of the universe" reasearch. Basically there's speculation about whether there is such a thing as a maximum level of entropy, a point at which all molecular motion (and therefor life) will stop. The concept is thought of as "heat death" and these researchers want to know when it might happen.

In order to even attempt to estimate the end of life, they need to quantify the level of disorder in the universe , which isn't exactly an easy task. So, it's no surprise that previous estimates were a tiny bit off:

An analysis by Chas Egan of the Australian National University in Canberra and Charles Lineweaver of the University of New South Wales in Sydney indicates that the collective entropy of all the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is about 100 times higher than previously calculated. Because supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to cosmic entropy, the finding suggests that the entropy of the universe is also about 100 times larger than previous estimates.

Researchers still can't know if their new calculations are truly more accurate than prior estimates. What they can know is that no one accounted for supermassive black holes during the last number crunching. Wonder if a Muse song inspired someone to remember it this time. [US News via Pop Sci]

The mystery event was a "firefly" type flare some 2 billion light years away from Earth. The event occurred in the middle of a void. Nothing should have been there, and yet, there this flare was, lasting 100 days or so before fading away into nothingness. That's about 80 days longer than a traditional super nova.

Today, however, astronomers might have an answer: It was "just" your average run-of-the-mill rogue "free floating" black hole eating a star that was, until said black hole devoured it, residing in a galaxy to dim to view using existing technology.

Lucky for us, one of Hubble's new additions could help us find more "fireflies" in the void. The Wide Field Camera 3, installed by members of the Atlantis crew earlier this month, might be able to determine if there was actually a host galaxy around the mysterious flare that was just too faint to see (thereby making this one-of-a-kind flare a bit more common). [New Scientist]

Scientists at the University of Indiana have shown the incredible density and molecular strength of neutron stars, which as all you amateur astronomers know is the leftover from a gravitational collapse of a star during a supernova. The research was started out of concern that the intense gravitational pull of these things could cause ripples in space-time, but could lead to new understanding of star quakes or magnetar giant flares.

So the next time you're about to push your glasses up your nose and toss an esoteric insult at your lab partner, consider "as dense as a neutron star." [Eureka via Crunchgear]

One branch of theoretical physics believes that the Universe is just a holographic version of 2D information. And scientists have observed such being true, the 2D horizon around a black hole encoding the data from its earlier 3D star stage. You've observed the idea yourself as well, as it's not so different from a 3D movie playing from a DVD, or even music playing from data on a CD, really.

From New Scientist:

If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized [ed: uber tiny] squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.

Since the volume of the spherical universe is much bigger than its outer surface, how could this be true? Hogan realised that in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. "Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry," says Hogan.

We won't rewrite New Scientist's entire brilliant piece, but needless to say, that Hogan guy in the quote above not only thinks that a new experiment may have found that noise in our holographic signal—he predicted the experiment's results before they happened. Hit the link to blow your pea brain for the day. Then ask yourself if we're all just bits of information on God's hard drive. [New Scientist and image]

Normally dust clouds between our solar system and the galaxy core get in the way of observing the region near the center. The team achieved the feat not through a Wayne's World-style camera trick, but by observing at 1.3 mm radio wavelengths (which can traverse the dust) and using a Very Long Baseline Interferometry telescope. This links up radio telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona and California to make an effective compound radio telescope that's about 2,800 miles wide. As a result they could make images with a resolution about 1,000 times greater than the Hubble telescope.

But even that's not quite enough. Imaging SgrA* has supported the theory that a supermassive black hole is right there at the galactic central point ("our results are more evidence that we are looking at a black hole," as the team puts it), but despite being among the highest resolution astronomical observations ever made, the data's not quite good enough to image the shape of the glowing cloud. That data would reveal whether it's a true disc, with or without jets, and whether there's a dimmer region in the middle as gas is sucked into the black hole. We'll have to wait for a few years until future shorter-wavelength telescopes come online. Maybe then we'll be able to see if there's a huge robot-populated spaceship hovering just outside the hole. [New Scientist via Physorg]