Astronomers have discovered the closest black hole to our solar system — it's just 1,000 light-years away.

Scientists from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) detailed the findings in a study published Wednesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Since black holes exert a force of gravity so strong that not even light can escape, you can't see them directly — but you can see some of the stuff that orbits them. That's how the researchers stumbled upon this black hole. They were studying double-star systems and noticed that one of the stars they were watching was orbiting an invisible object every 40 days. 

Image: In this computer-simulated image of a black hole, the black region in the center represents the event horizon, where no light can escape the black hole's gravitational grip. NASA, ESA, and D. Coe, J. Anderson, and R. van der Marel (STScI)

As most of the world continues to socially distance because of the coronavirus, Switzerland’s infectious disease chief wants to loosen restrictions for children — so they can hug their grandparents.

It’s a poignant move, as it was made in part to benefit older people’s mental health. But it’s also very risky, as it’s unclear whether or not young children, who generally seem to get mild cases of Covid-19, transmit the disease to others at similar rates as adults.

Scientists across America are working hard to develop treatments for and vaccines against the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19. Unfortunately, several activist groups are making their jobs harder.

Doctors Without Borders is urging governments to seize the patents on any coronavirus therapies that benefited from taxpayer-funded research. Universities Allied for Essential Medicines is making a similar push. These groups claim that such steps are necessary to prevent industry price gouging.

The latest US Census Bureau metropolitan area population estimates (for 2019) were largely lost in the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the new results, released a few weeks ago, indicate that people are moving to where social distancing is less challenging — the suburbs and exurbs, with their lower density and perhaps from a pandemic point of view, their lower exposure density — with less intense human interaction and hence lower infection risk associated with ground-oriented housing (detached and attached houses and townhouses), travel by car and generally less crowded conditions, such as in stores.

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

That future of work we’ve been talking about this whole time? That future is here. One need only consider how you got your last restaurant meal or grocery delivery to see that.

It’s time to stop thinking about the gig economy as some novel idea, and to start addressing the reality that this is how millions of people in this country earn some or all of their livings. That’s why I prefer to call it the freelance or independent economy. “Gig” suggests a temporary, transient sort of work, but if this type of work had a more permanent name, perhaps we would be more inclined to look for longer-term solutions—especially now.

Image: Photo: Brett Jordan/Unsplash

Aprecipitous surge in unemployment continues to shake the US workforce in the wake of COVID-19. Total claims reached 30 million in the six weeks since March 14th. And even as initial steps are underway to ease lockdowns, up to a third of all US jobs remain vulnerable.1 One of the challenges for policy makers and executives is figuring out how to get these employees back to work.

Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard freely admits that she’s hanging out in her kitchen while working from home during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown.

“I’ve had many meetings where my kids walk behind me and get a snack out of the cabinet,” she said. “It doesn’t bother me.”

That’s because Rothbard is a self-described “integrator,” a term she uses for people who don’t mind blurring the boundary between work and home. Integrators are the opposite of segmentors – people who have a strong desire to separate business from personal life.

"Big four" accountancy firm Deloitte has scrapped its summer internship scheme for students as it looks to cut costs during the coronavirus crisis.

Candidates will be handed a £500 "goodwill payment", which is a sixth of the amount some would have earned over the summer.

Instead, the 350 university students who were offered a place on the scheme will be able to join an online training programme.

Deloitte said safety was its priority.

May 5 is National Teacher Appreciation Day, and teachers are doing the most they can to continue their students' education during the novel coronavirus outbreak. Although teachers have the incredibly important job of educating the next generation of Americans, their earnings vary widely across the country.

The coronavirus pandemic has left higher-education leaders facing difficult decisions about when to reopen campuses and how to go about it. The Chronicle is tracking individual colleges’ plans.

New additions to the list include Arkansas State, Austin Peay State, Averett, Belhaven, Chowan, Marymount, Missouri State, Otterbein, Schreiner, Southeastern Oklahoma State, Southwestern Oklahoma State, and Texas Christian Universities; Colleges of the Desert and Idaho; Concordia University Nebraska; Holy Cross, Lewis & Clark, and Sierra Colleges; Missouri University of Science and Technology; Rochester Institute of Technology; and the Universities of Hawaii and North Carolina at Charlotte.

It goes without saying that we are living in unprecedented times.

With nearly 22 million people filing for unemployment (at the time of writing this) due to the coronavirus pandemic, millions more working remotely and commerce slowing to a crawl, the impact on the U.S. economy and the lives of everyday Americans have already been significant, and it could get worse before it gets better.

Another potential vaccine against the virus that causes Covid-19 hit the clinic in the U.S. Tuesday as the companies sponsoring its development gave the first Stateside shots in their clinical trial.

New York-based Pfizer and Mainz, Germany-based BioNTech said they had dosed the first American participants in the Phase I/II trial of BNT162, as part of a global clinical development program. The participants were taking part at the medical schools of New York University and the University of Maryland, in Baltimore. The first cohort of participants in Germany completed dosing last week, Pfizer and BioNTech said.

Image: https://medcitynews.com - The entrance to a Pfizer office in Cambridge, Massachusetts

If you’re an entrepreneur in tech, you know what it feels like to be caught in the middle of two competing business models. On the one hand, there are venture firms that can keep you private, but at the cost of hyper-growth. On the other are public investors who’ll demand profitability, perhaps long before your company is ready to provide it. 

For the entrepreneur, either route is fraught with peril. Your company needs capital to grow, but you don’t want that money to put its long-term health at risk or turn your life into a nonstop juggling act to keep stock prices rising. 

When VAST Data hit the hallmark of this era’s Silicon Valley start-up boom last month, a $1 billion so-called unicorn valuation, it didn’t come through a perfect pitch delivered in a venture capital firm’s conference room. Face-to-face interactions typically considered crucial to VC transactions have moved online as Covid-19 spreads, but for VAST the virtual meetings weren’t deal breakers.

Image: A man cleans up on the trading floor, following traders testing positive for Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., March 19, 2020. Lucas Jackson | Reuters

When resources are scarce, what is the best way to thrive?

With lockdowns closing schools and offices around the world, it’s become commonplace to see dogs and kids barge into business meetings as the boundaries between work and life have blurred. A seamless balance is impossible. We have to do both – work plus managing our lives, our spouses, kids, pets and home – all at once.

Doing both depends on our ability to adopt a paradox mindset, to consider the world with a “both/and” approach instead of an “either/or” one. In times like these, times of change, uncertainty and scarcity, we need to do many tasks together. And people need to feel comfort with discomfort – these hurdles aren’t going away.

Image: https://knowledge.insead.edu

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread around the globe, the world is facing an unprecedented crisis, carrying enormous financial and social costs unimaginable until recently. But these great difficulties also present opportunities for bold innovators to bypass bureaucracy and leapfrog their competitors, while rolling out revolutionary products at speed and scale. With the right leadership, innovative startups can use downturns to their advantage in the midst of economic crises. This can clearly be seen in Israel’s unique digital health innovation ecosystem. 

Image: https://www.forbes.com

According to the World Economic Forum, “The pace of change over the past 50 years has been extraordinary. The global economy has expanded fourfold, over a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty, we live significantly longer and childbirth mortality had significantly dropped.” However, the planet has paid a heavy price for this growth, and now it is incumbent upon the profiting corporations to focus on sustainability. Yet, many don’t know where to begin or how to change their legacy approaches. Partnering with startups gives corporations the inventive solutions needed to drive change.

You join a video conference call. You’re one of nine faces on the screen. About 10 minutes into the call, your mind starts to wander and you realize you have no idea what the last person just said. You pretend to keep listening while also checking your inbox. By the end of the meeting, you’ve caught up on some email but ultimately feel like it was another waste of time. For many of us right now, this scenario sounds all too familiar.

Image: HBR Staff

Despite the unprecedented numbers of people filing for unemployment, the job market hasn’t come to a complete halt. There are companies who are still hiring and many who were in the process of interviewing when social distancing measures went into effect.

WASHINGTON — The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today unveiled a new web-based intellectual property (IP) marketplace platform, Patents 4 Partnerships, to provide the public with a user-friendly, searchable repository of patents and published patent applications related to the COVID-19 pandemic that are indicated as available for licensing.

The new platform will facilitate the voluntary licensing and commercialization of innovations in a variety of key technologies, and help disseminate valuable patent information.