Inspired by the human visual system, scientists in China have developed a bioinspired phototransistor with tunable sensitivity that significantly enhances the detection of low-contrast targets. By embedding a reverse-biased photodiode into the gate structure, the device achieves dynamic voltage redistribution and light-dependent conductance tuning, boosting sensitivity by more than 1000 times. The technology offers a powerful new strategy for intelligent machine vision under complex illumination.

A team of astronomers led by the Flatiron Institute’s Kishalay De discovered that a star in the Andromeda Galaxy disappeared without going supernova, and instead collapsed directly into a black hole. The team’s analysis of the star, reported in Science, reveals what happened and helps explain why some massive stars turn into black holes while others don’t.

Researchers at Oxford University and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) are proposing a new way to observe tightly bound supermassive black hole binaries. Formed naturally when galaxies merge, only widely separated systems have confidently been observed to date. In a paper published today in Physical Review Letters, the researchers suggest hunting down the hidden systems by searching for repeating flashes of light from individual stars lying behind the black holes as they are temporarily magnified by gravitational lensing as the binary orbits.