(Concluded from yesterday)
The fairytale rise of Lil Nas X
A little over a year ago, Montero Hill had dropped out of university, was living with his sister, had no job, car or even a driver's license.
Today—thanks to the record-breaking single "Old Town Road"—he is the millionaire country-rap superstar known as Lil Nas X.
The song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 19 consecutive weeks between April and August, breaking a record dating to the mid-1990s when Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men spent 16 weeks at number one. Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee with Justin Bieber also topped the charts for 16 weeks with "Despacito" in 2017.
All versions of "Old Town Road" have been played more than 1.3 billion times on streaming site Spotify.
Lil Nas X, 20, composed the song based on a beat he purchased for $30 from a Dutch record producer.
The result merged thumping bass and rap with a twangy banjo sound more associated with country music.
Billboard barred the song from its rankings of country music songs, arguing that it did not have enough elements of that genre to merit inclusion.
A few days later, Lil Nas X released a remix of what was already a hit, starring country star Billy Ray Cyrus, father of pop star Miley Cyrus.
Even with the added legitimacy of Billy Cyrus, a two-time Grammy nominee in country categories, the remix was also left out of the country rankings.
Both versions went on to become number one in the main Billboard charts, catapulting the previously unknown artist into the celebrity stratosphere.
Lil Nas X has also seduced fans with his down-to-earth personality and humour. He has never hesitated to don traditional country clothing, including a cowboy hat, jacket, and boots.
After successfully achieving a rare marriage of rap and country tunes, the young artist shook the hip-hop world in early July by announcing that he is gay.
Although some female rappers had already come out, such as Young M.A, Lil Nas X became the first prominent male rapper to do so.
It was a significant development for an industry that, while less macho than in the past, tends to present a more traditional side of masculinity.
The woman who photographed a black hole
US computer scientist Katie Bouman became an overnight sensation in April for her role in developing a computer algorithm that allowed researchers to take the world's first image of a black hole.
The 30-year-old, currently an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, was a member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration when the team captured the image.
Bouman said she first began working on the EHT as a graduate student studying computer vision at MIT and found that black hole imaging shared striking similarities with work she had done on brain imaging based on limited data from an MRI scanner.
The EHT Collaboration had spent more than a decade building an Earth-sized computational telescope that combined signals received by various telescopes working in pairs around the world.
However, since there were a limited number of locations, the telescopes were able to capture only some light frequencies, leaving large gaps in information.
In 2016, Bouman developed an algorithm named CHIRP to sift through the true mountain of data and fill in the gaps, producing an image.
While the images were captured in 2017, the final result had to be independently validated by four EHT teams working around the world to avoid shared human bias.
On April 10, a final image was released—a moment that Bouman, then a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, described as "truly amazing and one of my life's happiest memories."
Testifying before Congress in May about her research, Bouman praised her team that included several early-career scientists—like herself—whose work had been vital to the project.
"Like black holes, many early-career scientists with significant contributions often go unseen," she said.
But that's not the case with her anymore.
