🌐 TODAY IS 19jun24
- Inflation falls to lowest level in almost three years
- A punch-up in parliament reveals Italy’s deepest scars
- Israel and Lebanon escalate rhetoric as US tries to prevent war
📡 PEACE, NITRATE AND WARP FLUID
Nitrate film stopped being used in the early 1950s. What had once been the industry standard was replaced by a variety of “safety” film stocks, so named because they, unlike their predecessor, were not prone to spontaneous combustion into inextinguishable fire. A festival dedicated to the projection of nitrate film will inevitably hit a historical limit. Every year at the Nitrate Picture Show, hosted by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, the prints get older and more brittle. At some not-too-distant point in the future, it will become impossible to run the festival at all.
I liked this bon mot from later on in the piece:
In his opening remarks, Festival Director Peter Bagrov quipped that an “esteemed colleague” likened the festival to “spoiled billionaires eating extinct animals.”
Warp drives could generate gravitational waves. This is a current area of research for me, and there’s all kinds of good stuff in the piece.
“From the perspective of simulating the warp drive dynamically, the key challenge is stability,” the authors explain. Equations show that the Alcubierre Drive can initiate a warp bubble using the Einstein Equation, but no known equations can sustain it.
“There is (to our knowledge) no known equation of state that would maintain the warp drive metric in a stable configuration over time. Therefore, while one can require that initially, the warp bubble is constant, it will quickly evolve away from that state, and, in most cases, the warp fluid and spacetime deformations will disperse or collapse into a central point.”
Though instability is a prime obstacle to warp drives, it’s also what could make them detectable.
After analyzing the remains of 64 ancient sacrificed individuals, most of whom were children, researchers have revealed new details about human sacrifice at the ancient Maya site of Chichén Itzá.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });Published in Nature, these results show that contrary to popular belief, every one of the ritually sacrificed individuals was male. Additionally, many of them were closely related, including two pairs of identical twins, evoking important themes of Mayan mythology.
These ancient genomes also show that despite European colonialism, the genetic legacy of the ancient Maya continues in today’s Indigenous people from the region.
