Monday 20th May 2024

An Exoplanet's Huge Comet-like Tail Hides An Astronomical Secret

WASP-69b offers astrophysicists a window into the dynamic processes that shape planets across the galaxy.

Located 163 light-years from Earth, a Jupiter-sized exoplanet named WASP-69b offers astrophysicists a window into the dynamic processes that shape planets across the galaxy. The star it orbits is baking and stripping away the planet’s atmosphere, and that escaped atmosphere is being sculpted by the star into a vast, cometlike tail at least 350,000 miles long.

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Netflix Just Quietly Added the Most Misunderstood Marvel Movie of the Decade

Is Madame Web a self-aware camp classic, or a spectacular overestimation of Sony’s Spider-Verse? It all depends on who you ask. From a box office standpoint, the 2024 film didn’t make Sony’s nascent franchise any more viable; it’s the lowest-grossing film based on a Marvel character, ever. The box-office and critical reception was so bad, that the failure of Madame Web might have Sony reevaluating its plans for the universe: the studio was reportedly building a handful of spin-offs around Dakota Johnson’s unlikely heroine but might have pulled the plug since.

But perhaps time will be kind to Madame Web. Or rather, maybe Madame Web was never destined to find its audience as a movie theater blockbuster tentpole. Instead, it’s the kind of film that you watch watches with friends and forget a day later. Studios are now hungrier than ever for the next big phenomenon, the film that’s going to reshape the world. Madame Web was never going to be that, because it belongs to a bygone era, one where mid-budget chick flicks and low-risk cult classics had just as much pull as superhero tentpoles. It straddles those two worlds to varying success. Sure, it flopped at the box office, but it’s been getting a much warmer reception with the help of a platform like Netflix.

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How Solar Storms Can Shut Down The Internet, Power Grids, And Even Tractors

The geomagnetic storm that began on May 10, 2024, generated stunning aurora borealis, more commonly known as the northern lights, that could be seen as far south as Mexico. They also generated headaches for farmers whose GPS-guided tractors were idled in the middle of planting season.

Geomagnetic storms occur when a large bubble of superheated gas called plasma is ejected from the surface of the Sun and hits the Earth. This bubble is known as a coronal mass ejection. The plasma of a coronal mass ejection consists of a cloud of protons and electrons, which are electrically charged particles. When these particles reach the Earth, they interact with the magnetic field that surrounds the planet. This interaction causes the magnetic field to distort and weaken, which in turn leads to the strange behavior of the aurora borealis and other natural phenomena.

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Could we recover the radical vision of a free and united Europe? | Aeon Essays

Detail from Jeremiah Greenleaf’s map of Europe in 1840. Courtesy the David Rumsey Collection

Detail from Jeremiah Greenleaf’s map of Europe in 1840. Courtesy the David Rumsey Collection

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The abyss at the edge of human understanding – a voyage into a black hole | Aeon Videos

Even if you were flying in the most sophisticated interstellar craft and wearing the snazziest futuristic spacesuit imaginable, a journey into a black hole would almost certainly be your last trip anywhere. Mercifully for anyone intrigued by the idea of such a voyage, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have developed this simulation of what, to the very best of our knowledge, it would look like if a camera approached and plunged through the event horizon of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. This version of the video simulates the experience of being sucked into the cosmic abyss before walking viewers through the Universe-bending hard science of it all. The resulting visuals are both awesome and deceptively simple – the result of a NASA supercomputer spitting out some 10 terabytes of data in a process that would take a normal personal laptop roughly a decade.

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The Merger Self, the Seeker Self, and the Lifelong Challenge of Balancing Intimacy and Independence

Each time I see a sparrow inside an airport, I am seized with tenderness for the bird, for living so acutely and concretely a paradox that haunts our human lives in myriad guises — the diffic…Continued here

The Messiah in the Mountain: Darwin on Wonder and the Spirituality of Nature

Here we are, matter yearning for meaning, each of us a fragile constellation of chemistry and chance hurtling through a cold cosmos that has no accord for our wishes, takes no interest in our dream…Continued here

Ancient DNA from an extinct native duck reveals how far birds flew to make New Zealand home

Ask a bird lover if they have heard of the extinct giant moa or its ancient predator, Haast’s eagle, and the answer will likely be yes. The same can’t be said of New Zealand’s extinct, but equally unique, mergansers – a group of fish-eating ducks with a serrated bill.

The only southern hemisphere representatives of this group are the critically endangered Brazilian merganser and those from the New Zealand region, which are now extinct.

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Why has an Israel-Hamas ceasefire been so elusive? A timeline of key moments in the search for peace

Ever since armed conflict has existed, ceasefires have been thought of as a bridge between war and peace. Consequently, their success has been measured by their ability to stop violence between warring parties for a period of time.

However, ceasefires are not a panacea. This is as true for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it is for many other conflicts around the world, like Ukraine, Syria and Sudan. Ceasefires are often just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what needs to be done to provide meaningful, structural security for those most affected by complex systems of violence that transcend times of war.

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Australia is set to ban live sheep exports. What will this mean for the industry?

This month the federal government announced a plan to ban live sheep exports, set to come into effect from May 1 2028.

The announcement coincided with the release of a highly anticipated report by an independent panel set up to examine the issue.

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