Astronomers are closer to solving the mystery of how supermassive black holes feed themselves thanks to new images from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST. The images provide the clearest view ever seen of gaseous filaments connecting a galaxy’s hot atmosphere to the rotating disk of gas that feeds its central supermassive black hole.  

Photoacoustic computed tomography can provide rich optical contrast over extended penetration depth of biological tissues. However, its capability of multi-scale multi-contrast structural and functional imaging is limited by the inherent size-dependent sensitivity, narrow bandwidth and high material rigidity of the state-of-the-art piezoelectric transducer arrays. The team from Jinan University has proposed a novel sheet-like focusing dual-frequency fiber ultrasound transducer, avoiding the use of multiple transducers to simultaneously capture photoacoustic signals of different frequencies. This design enables deep penetration, high resolution, and precise functional imaging at the entire brain scale and also screening for malignant brain tumors.