Caffeine Powers More than Just Mathematicians

A team of chemists at Chiba University in Japan has discovered that fuel cells with platinum electrodes run considerably more efficiently with a bit of caffeine. They found that caffeine increases oxygen reduction 11 times, which improves the flow of electrons. This, the researchers say, could be a simple way to cut back on platinum in fuel cell production without sacrificing performance. I wish that caffeine would work that well on my brain, too. Press release here, paper here.

This episode of Science News covers black holes. Black holes are weird already, but it turns out that the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy is a particularly weird one. Sagittarius A* is about 26,700 light-years away from Earth and has some pretty odd properties that surprised astronomers who have been studying it. Let’s take a look at what they’ve found out about our friendly neighbourhood black hole. You can take the quiz here.

The Most Detailed Map of Supermassive Black Holes Yet

Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Simons Foundation; K. Storey-Fisher et al. 2024

Astronomers just unveiled the most extensive map of supermassive black holes ever made. Nestled at the hearts of galaxies, supermassive black holes spin and kick up nearby gas. Sometimes this leads to the emission of bright directed jets called quasars. The new groundbreaking catalogue, dubbed “Quaia”, used data from the Gaia Space Telescope to produce a 3D chart of about 1.3 million quasars. They don’t just do this for fun: The distribution of visible masses in the universe should be correlated with the ancient light of the cosmic microwave background radiation, and just how they are correlated contains information about dark energy and dark matter. So there will, without a doubt, be more papers to come about this. Press here, paper here, raw data here.

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1 in 7 Papers Might be Fraudulent, Major Publisher Finds

The major Scientific Publisher Wiley has announced they have begun using a paper mill detection service. Paper mills produce fraudulent scientific works and try to get them published in scientific journals, often selling authorships for a fee. Wiley reports that they used AI to scan thousands of journals of their Hindawi subsidiary. The AI flagged about 1 in 7 manuscripts that were forwarded for closer inspection to human editors. It’s going to take a while until they are done with the review… Wiley also recently announced that they will discontinue the Hindawi brand because of its poor quality and says they want to use the problematic content to learn how to recognize fraudulent publishing practices. It will be interesting to see how other publishers stack up as similar tools are adopted industry-wide. More about this here.

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