Now that everyone saw and talked about the EHT black hole image, it's probably a good time to catch up on all the details the popular explainers missed, like what's inside a black hole, what happens to the matter that falls into it, why they're so important for us to investigate as we keep exploring space and the ultimate fate of our universe, and perhaps most importantly of all, how and why they burp when they eat.

Thanks to an experiment to better understand brain structure and function, and how well brains of the deceased could help us test potential treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, we've accidentally entered a brave new world in which reanimated minds hooked up to machines and computers aren't nearly as impossible as we might like. What does that mean for the future of neurology and medical treatments? Are some of the studies we want to do even ethical? Do we really need to worry about science going too far, and is there really such a thing, especially if we have a chance to save lives and understand ourselves better than ever before?

We might talk a lot about sex in the West these days, but that doesn’t mean we’ve been able to successfully debunk a lot of myths that have been floating around for generations. Can you be addicted to sex? How pervasive is hookup culture? Does size matter, and if so, to what extent? Are we going to become obsessed with sex bots or use them to cure social ills? What’s the most horrifying way to reproduce on our planet? And why do we reproduce sexually in the first place if the process takes so much time and effort? Believe it or not, science has weighed in all these topics, and we’re going to dive into what it has to say.

Science fiction universes have an impressive array of horrifying weapons. From antimatter bombs to plasma rifles, to the many iterations of death stars, fictional characters often face certain death facing down glowing barrels that would produce little more than a fizzle and a spray of sparks if fired in the real world, be so ridiculously unstable and overpowered, they’d destroy anyone crazy enough to use them, do far more damage to the person or alien using them, or just plain violate the laws of physics and impossible to build in the first place. We’re going to take a critical look at some of the most popular examples and explain why if you’re trying to design a doomsday weapon or a game-changing gun, you might want to look for inspiration somewhere other than comic books.

Sci-fi author Charlie Jane Anders wanted to give us an idea of what life would be like on a tidally locked world, a planet orbiting so close to its star that it can’t rotate around its axis, in an article for The Atlantic. Unfortunately, it turned out to be less of a dissection of a hypothetical colony on a completely alien world, and more of a stealthy ad for her science fiction novel, which... really, who’d do something like that? (Me, actually. I would do that.) In the interest of providing a more or less realistic answer, we’re going to talk about how astronauts would cope with spending their lives in permanent twilight of one of the most common types of terrestrial planets out there.

Earth can be our home for many millions of years to come, but at some point, we will absolutely venture away from it and start surfing the solar winds, or powering up our ion drives, to navigate the many worlds our solar system has to offer. We’ll swing around gas giants and play on their moons. We’ll build cities on the Moon and Mars. We’ll mine asteroids for all the water ice, ore, and precious metals we’ll ever need. It’s not just a fantasy. In fact, the required technology is just around the corner. We just need to make the first steps, right after we explain why we’d ever want to leave a planet on which we evolved, especially when not everyone could join us on this adventure.

Tech evangelists have found the solution to everything from our economic woes to a cure for cancer, from an airtight defense from fake news and internet hoaxes to a way to prevent an evil AI from deciding to kill all humans. That solution? The blockchain. But just as Sawbones taught us, cure-alls cure nothing, a technology meant to fix everything is highly unlikely to succeed and the blockchain is no exception. It was invented to disrupt the global financial system, but despite its inability to succeed in this space, its fans are trying to find a problem it can actually tackle. And that prompts the question of what exactly is the blockchain and what can it really do?

Fake news seems to be the term of everyone’s lips today, even if its meaning seems to change from person to person. While what we consider fake news might vary, we know that bots and trolls on social media are fanning propaganda and disinformation for profit and political gain, a potent reminder that yes, anyone can have a site and publish pretty much whatever they want. But how do conspiracy theories and hoaxes that used to be fringe views constantly ending up on the news and in your timelines? The answer is complicated and a little disturbing...

The Western far right appears convinced that taking better care of our planet, ourselves, and making our cities greener and more walkable, are actually just sinister plots to enslave them. Why? There’s an entire industry of conspiracy theorists making millions of convincing mostly older, whiter, more rural, conservatives that the government, their neighbors, and even their kids, are out to get them. We may have found ourselves looking down the barrel of an environmental crisis unintentionally, but the efforts to stop us from doing anything about it are both willful and coordinated.

While the crew of Futurama figured out what dark matter is, and the sinister secret behind how it was harnessed as starship fuel, scientists haven’t been as successful. What we do know is that it makes up nearly a quarter of the universe while all but 4% of the remaining mass is attributed to a force called dark energy, so we can’t just ignore it while we study the cosmos. And with so many experiments ruling out hypothesis after hypothesis as to what these two might be, some researchers are asking whether dark matter exists and if instead of running in circles, we should try to answer a question that’s also stumped us for a long time: how does gravity work?