Monday 13th May 2024

Monster galactic outflow powered by exploding stars

Galaxies pass gas—in the case of galaxy NGC 4383, so much so that its gas outflow is 20,000 light-years across and more massive than 50 million Suns.

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Forget aerobars: Ars tries out an entire aerobike

My brain registered that I was clearly cycling. My feet were clipped in to pedals, my legs were turning crank arms, and the arms were linked via a chain to one of the wheels. But pretty much everything else about the experience felt wrong on a fundamental, almost disturbing level.

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In the race for space metals, companies hope to cash in

In April 2023, a satellite the size of a microwave launched to space. Its goal: to get ready to mine asteroids. While the mission, courtesy of a company called AstroForge, ran into problems, it’s part of a new wave of would-be asteroid miners hoping to cash in on cosmic resources.

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The 2025 Aston Martin Vantage gets a bold new body and big power boost

It's high time Aston Martin had a winner on its hands. Last year it updated the DB12 with smart new face, plenty of power, and the sort of infotainment you'd hope for from a luxury GT. The Vantage, the firm's 'entry-level' car, has been given similar treatment in the hopes that it can peel a few more people away from Porsche dealerships.

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The End of the ‘Photoshop Fail’

In 2017, Rihanna posted a photo of herself on Instagram in which she appeared to have an extra thumb. It was, in retrospect, the thumb-shaped canary in the coal mine. Although far from the first celebrity “Photoshop fail,” it just so happened to predict the era of faux-finger drama we now live in: AI image generators are universally, horrifically bad at rendering human hands. Today, an extra finger is a telltale sign of digital manipulation.Flaws aside, faking it has never been easier. Advances in generative AI mean that anyone can spin up a faux picture of the pope wearing a chic white puffer, no design skills required. New AI image creators such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion use sophisticated technology to let users conjure entire worlds from just a few words. Instagram is rolling out AI-editing features; with a couple of taps, an everyday user can place their dog at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. We are living in the world Adobe Photoshop first teased 34 years ago—but it is no longer defined by the enterprise software.


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Did Something Happen to Our Necks?

It used to be that whenever someone on TV or in a movie fell off the roof or had a skiing mishap or got into any sort of auto accident, the odds were pretty good that they’d end up in a neck brace. You know what I mean: a circlet of beige foam, or else a rigid ring of plastic, spanning from an actor’s chin down to their sternum. Jack Lemmon wore a neck brace for a part. So did Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Roberts, and Bill Murray. For many decades, this was pop culture’s universal symbol for I’ve hurt myself.Now it’s not. People on TV and in the movies no longer seem to suffer like they used to, which is to say they no longer suffer cervically. Plastic braces do still crop up from time to time on-screen, but their use in sight gags is as good as dead. In the meantime, the soft-foam collar—which has always been the brace’s most recognizable form—has been retired. I don’t just mean that it’s been evicted from the props department; the collar has been set aside in clinics too. At some point in the past few decades, a device that once stood in for trauma and recovery was added to a list of bygone treatments, alongside leeches and the iron lung. Simply put, the collar vanished. Where’d it go?


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The Book You’re Reading Might Be Wrong

Most nonfiction isn’t fact-checked. The Kristi Noem saga could change that—but it probably won’t.This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.


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The Problem With America’s Protest Feedback Loop

The country is stuck in a protest feedback loop. In recent months, students opposed to the Israel-Gaza war have occupied lawns and buildings at college campuses across the country. Emulating climate activists who have stopped traffic on crucial roadways, pro-Palestine demonstrators have blocked access to major airports. For months, the protests intensified as university, U.S., and Israeli policies seemed unmoved. Frustrated by their inefficacy, the protesters redoubled their efforts and escalated their tactics.The lack of immediate outcomes from the Gaza protests is not at all unusual. In a new working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Amory Gethin of the Paris School of Economics and Vincent Pons of Harvard Business School analyzed the effect of 14 social movements in the United States from 2017 to 2022. They varied in size: About 12,000 people marched against a potential war with Iran in January 2020; 4.2 million turned out for the first Women’s March. Pons told me that these large social movements succeeded in raising the general public’s awareness of their issues, something that he and Gethin measured through Google Trends and data from X.


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Photos of the Week: Grim Reaper, Wicker Man, Met Gala

The ruins of a mountain monastery in Turkey, tornado damage in Oklahoma, a dress rehearsal for the Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden, devastating floods in southern Brazil, a drone expo in South Korea, ongoing Russian drone attacks in Ukraine, camel rides in a Chinese desert, fireflies on a forest trail in Taiwan, and much more A performer floats above supporters, attached to a cluster of helium balloons, above the Marques do Pombal square in Lisbon, on May 6, 2024, to celebrate the champions of the Portuguese football league. #


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Against Sunscreen Absolutism

Australia is a country of abundant sunshine, but the skin of most Australians is better adapted to gloomy England than the beaches of Brisbane. The country’s predominantly white population has by far the world’s highest rate of skin cancer, and for years the public-health establishment has warned residents about the dangers of ultraviolet light. A 1980s ad campaign advised Australians to “Slip, Slop, Slap”—if you had to go out in the sun, slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen, and slap on a hat. The only safe amount of sun was none at all.Then, in 2023, a consortium of Australian public-health groups did something surprising: It issued new advice that takes careful account, for the first time, of the sun’s positive contributions. The advice itself may not seem revolutionary—experts now say that people at the lowest risk of skin cancer should spend ample time outdoors—but the idea at its core marked a radical departure from decades of public-health messaging. “Completely avoiding sun exposure is not optimal for health,” read the groups’ position statement, which extensively cites a growing body of research. Yes, UV rays cause skin cancer, but for some, too much shade can be just as harmful as too much sun.


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