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This year marks the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity—which, among other things, helped lead to the discovery of black holes, those mysterious, spacetime-bending collapsed stars. Now Marcia Bartusiak, a professor of the practice in MIT’s Graduate Science Writing Program, has a new book out, “Black Hole,” published today by Yale University Press, which details the history of the discovery of black holes.

There are five motivators for creating novel content online, whether blog posts, shared news stories, images, photos, songs, videos or any of the other digital artifacts users of social media and social networking sites share endlessly. Research just published in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising suggests that these five factors are: entertainment, self-expression, social-belonging, communication, and social-cognition.

Engineers at the University of California, San Diego have discovered a method to increase the amount of electric charge that can be stored in graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon. The research, published recently online in the journal Nano Letters, may provide a better understanding of how to improve the energy storage ability of capacitors for potential applications in cars, wind turbines, and solar power.

Neuropeptides are small proteins in the brains of all animals that bind to receptor proteins and cause activity in cells. The researchers at Queen Mary University of London, led by Professor Maurice Elphick, were investigating whether a particular sea urchin neuropeptide was an evolutionary link between neuropeptides in humans and insects.

Five years after the nation’s worst offshore oil spill, the industry is working on drilling even further into the risky depths beneath the Gulf of Mexico to tap massive deposits once thought unreachable. Opening this new frontier, miles below the bottom of the Gulf, requires engineering feats far beyond those used at BP’s much shallower Macondo well.

Six authors have described their work in harvesting energy in a paper titled “Ultrathin, Rollable, Paper-Based Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Acoustic Energy Harvesting and Self-Powered Sound Recording.” Translation: A paper microphone may help charge your cellphone. Jacob Aron in New Scientist wrote about their work; he said one benefit of such a microphone is that it could harvest acoustic energy to top up a phone charge on the go

New research proposes that chondrules, small glassy beads that make up the bulk of the most primitive meteorites, played a crucial role in the formation of planets. Simulations developed by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, Lund University in Sweden, and collaborating institutions show how asteroid-sized planetesimals—the building blocks of planets—can grow to observed sizes by sweeping up chondrules, each only about the size of a grain of sand

When heated to just above room temperature, the electrical conductivity of vanadium dioxide (VO2) abruptly increases by a factor of 10,000. Experiments coupled with high-performance computation reveal how the unusually large lattice vibrations, which are the oscillations of atoms about their equilibrium positions, stabilize this highly conductive metallic phase.

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers working in Australia has found that bright coloring on female birds appears to be a reproductive disadvantage. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team describes how they tested predation of red-capped plover eggs and discovered that enhanced coloring by the parent tending the nest, made the eggs a more likely target, at least during the day.

(Phys.org)—It was another good week for physics as a team of researchers with the University of Waterloo found that a photon “afterglow” could transmit information without transmitting energy—though the receiver must expend energy to read that information. Also good news for physicists trying to solve the “information loss paradox”—a team of researchers has found a way to show that black holes don’t erase information—they claim that interactions between particles emitted by a black hole can be used to reveal information about material that “disappeared” inside of it