Analysis shows cars in Europe have grown longer, taller and wider every year since 2000

Cars have grown 1.2cm longer, 0.5cm taller and 0.5cm wider each year on average since 2000, analysis of new vehicles sold in Europe has found, in what green groups call “relentless carspreading”.

The increase in size, which leaves people more likely to be killed in a crash and increases emissions that hurt lungs and heat the planet, has progressed at a roughly steady rate for two and half decades even as family sizes have fallen, the campaign group Transport & Environment (T&E) found.

A revealing new book, eight years in the making, singles out rebellious women from US history whose stories have often been sidelined

Margaret Corbin was a hero of the American Revolution, the wife of an artilleryman killed at Fort Washington in New York who took over his gun to fight the British. Grievously wounded, she became the first woman to receive a US military pension. In 1926, 150 years after the battle, her supposed remains were exhumed in Highland Falls, up the Hudson from Manhattan, and buried at the US Military Academy.

“There was so much energy and wonderful intention behind doing this,” said Denise Kiernan, of what remains the only monument to a woman at West Point. “And then in 2016 they took a look and said, ‘Oh wait a minute, not only are the bones not hers, they’re not the bones of a woman.’”

The glittering image, taken by the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope, heralds a new age of planetary discovery

The dazzling sight of more than 60m stars at the heart of Earth’s galaxy has been captured by a space telescope designed to reveal the mysterious dark forces that shape the universe.

Astronomers used the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope to capture the largest, most detailed image ever taken of the visible light pouring from the centre of the Milky Way. The telescope’s camera is rare in being sensitive enough to separate individual stars in the crowded region known as the galactic bulge.

Mace’s TRANS MICE Act is designed to end ‘radical transgender-related experiments on animals’. But is this all a stupid misunderstanding?

First they came for your children. As Donald Trump has claimed without evidence (because facts are woke), US schoolkids have been getting gender-reassignment surgery in between classes. “Can you imagine you’re a parent and … you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation,” Trump said during a rally in 2024. “What the hell is wrong with our country?”

Now it seems the woke brigade has come for poor little mice. According to Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace, who once called herself “Trump in high heels”, American taxpayers are funding transgender rodents. Last week Mace, who is leaving politics next year after coming last in her state’s Republican primary for governor, promoted a new bill called the TRANS MICE Act, designed to “put an end to the use of taxpayer dollars for radical transgender-related experiments on animals”.

Danish shaggy-dog story about a man with a dissociative disorder has a fun premise but wastes it on lots of goofy, humourless violence

Anders Thomas Jensen is an Oscar-winning screenwriter, director and veteran of the Dogme 95 years at Denmark’s Zentropa Studios. He now brings us this slapstick-violent black comedy and shaggy dog story of gruesome silliness. It is well acted but relentlessly and bizarrely unfunny. So unfunny as to be almost funny, but not really, in that the unfunniness approaches the condition of being itself a joke, though without really arriving. It could be that the spectre of Zentropa’s dark master of the prank, Lars von Trier, is hovering somewhere in the corner of the frame.

Mads Mikkelsen is cast against type as nerdy loser Manfred, an abuse survivor with learning disabilities whose tough-guy brother Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) robs a bank. Before being arrested, Anker gives poor twitchy Manfred the key to the railway station locker where he has stashed the loot, and tells him to get the cash once the cops have gone and bury it in the woodland behind their old family home where their dad used to brutalise them.

According to Heidi Blake in the New Yorker, the Tate and Trump circles have overlapped at Mar-a-Lago. What does that mean?

Donald Trump has told many stories and denied many others about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. But those questions center on Epstein’s actions and crimes, which Trump says he denounces and wasn’t a part of. The White House has moved heaven, earth, the truth and much else to protect Trump from what the Epstein files might tell us about him. But there is a larger question about what Trump makes of Epstein’s values. Does he reject them, or does he endorse and embrace them? Looking to his administration’s ties to Andrew Tate may be instructive.

According to Heidi Blake’s thorough investigation of Tate in the New Yorker earlier this month, the Trump administration intervened last year to buffer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan from the consequences of their criminal charges in Romania. The Tate and Trump circles, she also reports, have overlapped at Mar-a-Lago.

A court in Germany found that Google was responsible for what its chatbots say in search summaries. This is the accountability we need

Earlier this month, a German court ruled that Google is liable for its AI search summaries. Rejecting defenses like “users can check for themselves”, and that they generally know “that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted”, the court held that the AI’s summaries are reflections of the company and “above all an expression of Google’s business activities”.

This is the latest skirmish in a decades-old battle over internet publishing. Historically, there were two different types of information distributors: carriers and publishers. A phone company is a carrier. It’ll transmit whatever you say, even discussions about committing a crime. Words are words, and the phone company does not know – nor is it liable for – the words you choose to speak. A newspaper, on the other hand, is a publisher. It decides the words it publishes, and what quotes to include in its articles. If those words or quotes are defamatory or otherwise illegal, it’s liable.

Original Mastodon Post

Believe me, you need this bit of space ASMR today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DtFRq1cgcc

Background info:

▶️ https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid/ESA_s_Euclid_captures_the_Milky_Way_s_crowded_heart

You are looking at the largest and most detailed image ever made of our Milky Way galaxy’s centre in visible light.

Scientifically, the data will be used for microlensing surveys to find exoplanets - and is now fully publicly available. As are the pretty images if you want them as a desktop backgrounds, of course!

#ESA #Euclid #space #astronomy #astrodon

DE BILT (ANP) - In een groot deel van Nederland is om 12.00 uur code oranje ingegaan wegens extreme hitte. De weerwaarschuwing werd maandag al aangekondigd en geldt vooralsnog tot vrijdag 08.00 uur.

Code oranje geldt voor heel het land met uitzondering van Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe en het Waddengebied. Daar wordt het iets minder heet en geldt code geel.

De maximumtemperaturen in het midden en zuiden van het land klimmen naar 34 tot 39 graden, met de hoogste waarden in het zuiden en in grotere steden. De combinatie van hoge temperaturen en luchtvochtigheid "zorgt voor een onaangename, benauwde hitte", aldus het KNMI. Vooral ouderen en mensen met een kwetsbare gezondheid kunnen hierdoor gezondheidsklachten krijgen, stelt het weerinstituut.

Woensdag en donderdag is in heel Nederland het hitteprotocol van kracht, meldde Rijkswaterstaat al. Dat is bedoeld om automobilisten met pech op warme dagen niet langer dan nodig te laten wachten op het hete asfalt. Op diverse plekken in Nederland zijn de programma's van evenementen aangepast wegens de hitte, of zelfs helemaal afgelast.

Sodeknetters, sodeju en meer van zulks. Het is al een week best wel een beetje warm in ons koude landje en vandaag is het in zo'n mate menens dat het KNMI vanaf nu CODE ORANJE uitroept in alle provincies behalve in het noorden. Dit allemaal nog bovenop het al langer geldende Nationaal Hitteplan en het Hitteprotocol van Rijkswaterstaat. 'Zoveel draaiboeken voor een beetje zomers weer, is dat niet wat overdreven?', horen we u dan denken. Nou NEE, we hebben namelijk vanaf vandaag te maken met een HITTEKOEPEL die over ons land hangt. Zo'n hittekoepel, niet te verwarren met de hittedakkapel en de hitteminaret, is dus een soort atmosferische KOEPEL waar heel veel HITTE onder hangt. Hoe dat allemaal kan gebeuren met die extreme hitte zocht gisteren De Volkskrant al voor u uit en het antwoord zal u: verbazen! Dus kom van die zolderkamer af maar blijf binnen, knuffel een ventilator (geen airco, dat mag ook al niet van de krant), houd uzelf en uw naaste NAT en voer geen verhitte discussies. Hot hot hot!