Canada’s citizens are finding unity again in the story of the man who ran cross-country on one leg to raise awareness for children’s cancer research
Rob Stickle was six years old and waiting to see The Empire Strikes Back when a ripple passed through the crowd. His mother hoisted him on to her shoulders to see a man loping down one of Toronto’s busiest streets.
“I was a Star Wars fanatic, and I remember saying to mom: ‘He has a robot leg.’”
Continue reading...Exclusive: key White House loyalist orchestrating multi-agency effort condemned by critics as cruel and racist
Stephen Miller is leading an unprecedented and intense White House drive across a host of government departments to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children from the US, using tactics that critics say are cruel and racist and, in some cases, flout federal law, the Guardian has learned.
As deputy chief of staff at the White House, focused on immigration policy, Miller is seen as the mastermind and enforcer behind Donald Trump’s hardline anti-immigration agenda.
Continue reading...Silicon Valley China hawks, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei among them, fear the country surpassing US’s AI lead as much as superintelligence destroying humanity
When reporters asked Donald Trump this week if he supported calls to slow down the development of artificial intelligence out of growing fears for cybersecurity, public safety and the fate of humanity, he said no. His argument: China.
“We’re leading China in AI,” Trump said. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins.”
Continue reading...From the blissful threat of ‘death by chocolate’, to a book made of sponge and the lemon drizzle to end them all, these are the bakes that left the biggest impressions
The Sorting Hat sponge I made for my son’s Harry Potter party is not the best cake I’ve ever tasted. That would be anything baked by my granny, or the coffee religieuse au cafe (a choux pastry puff) I ate in Boulogne-sur-Mer with my mum. But it’s the most surprisingly edible cake I’ve ever made – a vaguely Jamie-Oliver-esque recipe with buttercream filling and tinned mandarin slices. It didn’t only work; it tasted great, and wasn’t quite as teeth-screechingly sweet as expected. My one regret is that I over-pimped the decoration: it looked so sinister in the fridge with its cold, Sorting Hat stare that the next day I stuck on googly eyes and further sparkles. This perhaps explains why everyone assumed it was a poo emoji cake, despite it being a Harry Potter party with heavy-touch theming. That people thought I actually wanted children to eat shit is a shame, but it still remains my greatest culinary success. Catherine Shoard
Continue reading...On holiday in Greece the photographer came across two elderly people bathed in the beautiful evening light
Amit Lennon describes his approach to portrait photography as “always respectful and collaborative”. Originally from Israel but now living in London, Lennon was holidaying in Greece in 2023 when he took this image of an elderly couple.
“I’d been for a swim in the sea, then ambled through the outskirts of Poros town, looking for a restaurant for dinner that evening,” Lennon says. It was late afternoon when he happened upon the couple. He tried to strike up a conversation, but they only spoke Greek. As Lennon did not, “the interaction became entirely nonverbal”, he says. “I play-acted that I wanted to take their photo and whether that would be OK. I’m not interested in taking a photo without someone noticing. I prefer to make a connection, however fleeting,” he says.
Continue reading...
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that ate well, moved mountains, grew brains, and saved medieval texts.
First, scientists set out to understand why Venus doesn’t have a moon and discover even more unnerving stuff about this delightfully nightmarish planet. Then: a hidden range of primordial supermountains, a literal brain-space, and evidence of Tudor-era subterfuge.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Venus is a bizarro world with a year that is shorter than its day, a surface shaped by diabolical heat and pressure, and skies soaked in sulfuric acid. Frankly, this planet is metal enough as it is, but scientists have now suggested that Venus is also a moon-eater.
For years, researchers have pondered why Venus lacks a moon, in contrast to all other planets except Mercury. One possibility is that Venus was once orbited by a primordial satellite that it ultimately tore apart and swallowed, according to a new study. And honestly, that sounds like something Venus would do. It’s in character.
To reach this conclusion, scientists ran simulations of Venusian moons ranging from half to ten times as massive as Earth’s Moon. Because Venus has a very slow rotation rate equal to 243 Earth days, most of the modeled satellites were drawn inward, ultimately crashing into Venus. Earth’s fast rotation rate, in contrast, has pushed the Moon to recede farther from our world, at a rate of about 1.5 inches each year.
“The absence of a Venusian satellite can be understood as a natural consequence of tidal evolution alone,” said researchers led by Stephen Kane of the University of California, Riverside. The researchers added that the obliteration of a past moon around Venus may offer one reason why the planet became so aggressively inhospitable, while Earth evolved into a comfy haven for life.
“The fate of a Venus moon carries direct implications for early Venus habitability,” the team said. “The eventual destruction of the moon…would deliver a massive energy pulse to the Venusian surface and atmosphere, with potential implications for the loss of surface water and the onset of a runaway greenhouse state.”
It’s possible that NASA’s DAVINCI orbiter, which is due for launch to Venus in 2029, could search for the chemical signatures of an ancient obliterated moon, according to the study. In the meantime, my takeaway is that Majora’s Mask is based on a true Venusian story.
In other news…
Shout out to my fellow Gondwana-heads! Just a week after a study came out minting Gondwana as a bonafide “supercontinent,” another work has probedthe remnants of Himalaya-scale “Gondwana supermountains” buried deep under Antarctica’s ice sheet.
Both studies argue that the geological upheaval associated with Gondwana’s formation directly led to the Cambrian “explosion” of complex life that began about 538 million years ago. But the new study focuses on the role of Gondwana’s colossal mountain range and the massive submarine “fan” system underneath it.
“It is unlikely to be a coincidence that Earth’s most dramatic period of evolution correlates with the planet’s most important period of mountain building: the formation and erosion of the Gondwana Supermountains,” said authors Bei Chen and Ian H. Campbell of the Australian National University.
By studying 1,700 zircons—hardy minerals that can be used to reconstruct continental timelines—the researchers found a disproportionate spike in Antarctic zircons dating from 650 and 450 million years ago, consistent with the formation of Gondwana. The supermountains and their underlying fan systems provided the necessary nutrients for the meteoric rise of animals and other complex life in the Cambrian period, according to the study.
“Analyses of detrital zircons from Antarctica show that its tectonics were dominated by Himalayan-style mountains, the roots of which now underlie the ice sheet,” the team concluded.
Gondwana broke apart during the age of dinosaurs, but as these studies show, its body parts live on, scattered under ice and dispersed across new continents. This has been Gondwana News.
Konstantin Kaganovsky, Kevin W. Kelley, Tilo Gschwind, Paul M. Harary et al.
“Developmental xenocortication using human-derived organoids in mice.” Nature.
It is notoriously challenging to study human brain tissue in vivo on both practical and ethical levels. It’s not as if you can just cut open someone’s noggin and rummage around in there like you’re Victor Frankenstein.
But scientists have now discovered a promising workaround by transplanting human brain “organoids”—lab-grown structures based on human stem cells—into the heads of mice that have been engineered to have open space in their brains instead of a cortex. Scientists who developed this new experimental technique of “xenocortication” report that the human organoids grew to occupy the cavities in the rodents’ heads, and showed analogous development to real brain tissues.
The xenocortical (abbreviated XCX, no relation to Charli) mice seemed to behave more or less normally, despite having millions of human-derived neurons in their heads.
“We envision that xenocortication will be useful for obtaining circuit- and behaviour-level readouts using human neurons to study neurodevelopment, model disease and develop therapeutics,” said researchers co-led by Konstantin Kaganovsky, Kevin W. Kelley, Tilo Gschwind, and Paul M. Harary of Stanford University.
“Generating XCX mice with more mature and canonical cortical organization will require early and proactive engagement to establish ethical guidance,” the team emphasized.
Talk about living rent-free in someone else’s head.
King Henry VIII, the English monarch notorious for disposing of wives and Catholic hegemony, relied on the courtier Sir John Gage to dissolve and plunder monasteries during his consequential reign.
But the discovery of long-lost pages that were once possessed by Gage reveals that this royal ally may have saved an outlawed manuscript from destruction, hinting at a dangerous act of subterfuge.
Katie Walter of the University of Sussex and James Wade of Girton College, Cambridge identified a six-page fragment of a popular medieval text that had been misplaced within Gage’s belongings. The fragment came from Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, which was popular in the 15th century, but had fallen out of favor by Henry VIII’s reign. It seems that Gage nonetheless saved a copy, despite orders to destroy such texts.
“One consequence of this puzzle is that the fragment, hereafter referred to as The Keep fragment, has gone undescribed,” said Walter and Wade in their new study. “John Gage possibly acquired the book at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries” and it later became “hidden in plain sight” in his belongings.
And Gage would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling historians!
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
Hee, daar heb je het met belastinggeld betaalde VPRO-platform Dikke Vette Leugens weer, waar ze denken dat iedereen die het niet met ze eens is uitmaken voor leugenaar een slimme manier van discussiëren is. Van de week zagen we deze video op TikTok (hier even een riedeltje over X boycotten en niet TikTok, red.) voorbij komen, van Romy Noach. U hoort het, Noach is een Joodse achternaam. In de video legt Romy uit dat ze last heeft van antisemitische comments online en dat taxichauffeurs haar weigeren mee te nemen vanwege haar achternaam. Dat is discriminatie en normaal volgt bij de NPO dan een verhaal over hoe verschrikkelijk dit soort patronen zijn en dat de daders moeten worden aangepakt.
Maar nu niet. Nu zegt Romy namelijk eerst: "Hoezo? Want ik heb echt al die tijd aan de kant van de Palestijnen gestaan." En daar stopten wij met kijken. Antisemitisme is dus wel ok als het gericht is tegen mensen die niet al die tijd aan de kant van de Palestijnen staan, bijvoorbeeld op 7 oktober 2023? Dat zou wat zijn jongens. Als al die zwaar beveiligde Joodse instellingen nu ook even een video opnemen om uit te leggen dat ze aan de kant van de Palestijnen staan, dan zijn de problemen daar ook voorbij.
Prima dat een meisje dat slachtoffer is van discriminatie een video over haar eigen ervaringen maakt, prima dat ze aan de kant van de Palestijnen staat, stoer dat ze haar eigen leed nuanceert, maar misschien had iemand van die meer dan 300 fte even kunnen nadenken over WTF je nou met deze video wilt zeggen. En misschien kan er iemand in de Tweede Kamer zich afvragen of een omroep die dit soort bagger uitzendt met belastinggeld betaald moet worden. Je kan toch ook gewoon zelf op YouTube TikTok video's maken?
