I was intrigued by this demonstration of a plane that has no moving parts and moves silently through space, accompanied by just a blue glow. The abstract of the paper describing it can be read here but the paper itself is behind a paywall.
The first detection of gravitational waves was in November 2015, a century after Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicted their existence. It was a discovery of such importance that the Nobel prize for physics was awarded for it soon after in 2017. But since then there have been a flurry of such waves that are caused by the collisions of massive stellar objects.
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This is the question that is on people’s minds after Donald Trump tweeted his name following his awkward performance at the G20 meeting in Argentina.
Seth Meyers looks into this question.
In an irony that Meyers missed, it turns out that the phrase ‘scot free’ may have originated to describe someone who avoids paying taxes.
Today was the day when the civil trial brought by the lawyer of some of the accusers against sleazy convicted sex offender multi-millionaire Jeffrey Epstein was to go to trial. Last week, the Miami Herald released a bombshell investigation into the allegations and cover up of the abuse of young girls by Epstein who had plenty of friends in high places. But at the last minute a settlement was announced that included an apology by Epstein to Bradley Edwards, the lawyer who brought the case.
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One of the goals of the Israel lobby in the US is to make sure that the ‘two-state’ solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict remain the only option that is discussed, even though the expansionist settler policies of successive Israeli governments has made that option dead. The only possibility now is a single state and the debate really should be about what form that state should take, whether it be a democratic state in which Israelis and Palestinians everywhere in Israel and the Occupied Territories and Gaze have equal rights, or a formalized theocratic Apartheid state to replace the informal Apartheid state that currently exists.
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In the last show before he goes on break until 2019, he tackled the topic of the dangerous spread of false information on the internet and how companies like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are conveniently switching between portraying themselves as publishers and platform providers to escape responsibility for not doing much to stop it.
An Australian journalist was asked to leave the premises of the parliament because because her outfit was too revealing in that “you can allegedly see too much skin”. I naturally had to click on the article to see what scandalous clothing had prompted this decision. See-through blouse? Plunging neckline? Very short skirt? Here is a photograph of Patricia Karvelas in her offending outfit.
Remember when I wrote about the 13-stop North American tour that Bill and Hillary Clinton were going to make where people were charged pricey amounts to watch them talk on stage, though if you were willing to fork out even more hundreds dollars, you could also get a brief meet-and-greet with them? I wondered at that time whether we hadn’t had our fill of the Clintons and whether enough people would be willing to pay such amounts.
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Some time ago, I wrote about the The Negro Motorist Green Book , which was a travel guide written by Victor Hugo Green. It was first published in 1936 and regularly updated to inform black Americans during the Jim Crow days what places they could shop, eat, and stay the night during road trips across the US, and what towns were “Sundown Towns” where black people were banned from being outside after dark.
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Whale evolution has always fascinated me, ever since I learned that their evolutionary path took them from sea to land and then back to the sea. Here’s an animation showing how the land-to-sea-again transition may have occurred.