This glittery spray of ancient stars is about 16,700 light-years away from Earth toward the constellation Tucana. Globular clusters like this one are isolated star cities, home to hundreds of thousands of stars that are held together by their mutual gravity. And like the fast pace of cities, there’s plenty of action in these stellar metropolises. The stars are in constant motion, orbiting around the cluster’s center.
Past observations have shown that the heavyweight stars tend to crowd into the “downtown” core area, while lightweight stars reside in the less populated suburbs. But as heavyweight stars age, they rapidly lose mass, cool down and shut off their nuclear furnaces. After the purge, only the stars’ bright, superhot cores – called white dwarfs – remain. This weight loss program causes the now lighter-weight white dwarfs to be nudged out of the downtown area through gravitational interactions with heftier stars.
Until these Hubble observations, astronomers had never seen the dynamic conveyor belt in action. The Hubble results reveal young white dwarfs amid their leisurely 40-million-year exodus from the bustling center of the cluster.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
Dobescrusher on werewolves and WEREWOLVES VERSUS as a way to explore identity
We continue our series of testimonials from WEREWOLVES VERSUS: Volume 1 contributors with this missive from illustrator, comic artist, and thrifter Dobescrusher, who speaks on the project and werewolves in general as an outlet for queer expression and exploration.
Werewolves Versus is so much fun because it invites endless possibilities and interpretations of werewolves and what werewolves mean to us culturally. The werewolf is a pop culture icon, a historical figure, a folklore tale, a cryptid, and in a lot of ways a very personal monster we can examine ourselves through. As a queer person I’ve always related to monsters and the idea of “the other” in media and the werewolf is such a figure that is always so interesting for me to explore. Participating in Werewolves Versus has always been a chance for me to be playful and creative with my illustrations, imagining tongue-in-cheek takes on how werewolves would navigate the “human” world- perhaps as a mirror to how I navigate the world myself.
Dobecrusher’s illustration “Hollywolf Boulevard” can be found in WEREWOLVES VERSUS: HOLLYWOOD (available on Gumroad and Itch.io), and of course in our massive print collection, WEREWOLVES VERSUS: VOLUME 1. We’ve got less than two weeks to go on the campaign, and some ground to cover, so if you can pledge (or even just share this post), please do!
Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. Those are the countries. It will be drought-resistant species, mostly acacias. And this is a brilliant idea you have no idea oh my Christ
This will create so many jobs and regenerate so many communities and aaaaaahhhhhhh
it’s already happening, and already having positive effects. this is wonderful, why have i not heard of this before? i’m so happy!
Oh yes, acacia trees.
They fix nitrogen and improve soil quality.
And, to make things fun, the species they’re using practices “reverse leaf phenology.” The trees go dormant in the rainy season and then grow their leaves again in the dry season. This means you can plant crops under the trees, in that nitrogen-rich soil, and the trees don’t compete for light because they don’t have any leaves on.
And then in the dry season, you harvest the leaves and feed them to your cows.
Crops grown under acacia trees have better yield than those grown without them. Considerably better.
So, this isn’t just about stopping the advancement of the Sahara - it’s also about improving food security for the entire sub-Saharan belt and possibly reclaiming some of the desert as productive land.
Of course, before the “green revolution,” the farmers knew to plant acacia trees - it’s a traditional practice that they were convinced to abandon in favor of “more reliable” artificial fertilizers (that caused soil degradation, soil erosion, etc).
This is why you listen to the people who, you know, have lived with and on land for centuries.
On this day, 2 August 1924, James Baldwin, gay African-American author and social critic was born. Frustrated with endemic racism in the United States, he moved to France where he spent most of his life. However he did return to the US during the civil rights movement and played an active role in fighting racism, despite the official movement’s homophobia, encouraging civil disobedience and taking part in the March on Washington in 1963 and the Selma march in 1965. In 1968 he also pledged to refuse to pay tax in protest against the Vietnam war. For these “subversive” activities, Baldwin was subjected to illegal surveillance by the FBI, who collated 1884 pages of documents on him.
A key organiser of Vietnam tax resistance was Noam Chomsky. In our podcast he tells the story of the Vietnam war: https://workingclasshistory.com/2018/10/31/e14-the-vietnam-war-with-noam-chomsky/
Pictured: Baldwin in London https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1179836165534865/?type=3
The best thing about modern technology is exposing the way cops fuck
over black people to white people. Literally no black person is
surprised that they would do this to a black mother grieving over her
child.
Elon Musk probably just attempted murder by cop on one of his employees bc he leaked info about tesla factories
So Musk sent out his people to stalk and defame this man, even going so far as putting a tracking bug in his cell phone to track his communication in REAL TIME and then telling the police he was threatening to shoot up the place, all because he told the press the factory was creating too much scrap, making it an unsafe work environment. (Not to mention how the factory is so unsupervised they have employees doing meth in their bathrooms and sleeping on the grounds of the factory)
can’t wait for him to get charged with 16 felonies for filing a false report and wasting police time 🙃🙃🙃
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“March 2019 - Protesters in Chile molotov an armoured police car. [video]
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