Watch the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope—the most powerful space telescope ever made. This mission launched at 7:20 a.m. EST (12:20 UTC), Dec. 25, 2021, aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. Follow the telescope’s status at: https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/web…
With revolutionary technology, Webb will observe a part of space and time never seen before, providing a wealth of amazing views into an era when the very first stars and galaxies formed––over 13.5 billion years ago.
It can explore our own solar system’s residents with exquisite new detail and study the atmospheres of distant worlds. From new forming stars to devouring black holes, Webb will reveal all this and more! It’s the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope ever built.
Webb is an international collaboration between NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), and CSA (Canadian Space Agency). Thousands of engineers and hundreds of scientists worked to make Webb a reality, along with over 300 universities, organizations, and companies from 29 U.S. states and 14 countries!
Ready to #UnfoldTheUniverse? The greatest origin story of all unfurls soon. Learn more at https://nasa.gov/jwst
Space missions need to have a defensive component or economic benefit. With economic returns often uncertain, space programmes have tended to be led by governments, because only they can invest in programmes that have a long-term pay-off, whether economic or geopolitical. When it comes to saving humanity from an asteroid impact, Tyson stressed that rather than establishing colonies in space, we would be better to try to deflect the asteroid.
تحدث نيل ديغراس تايسون، عالم الفيزياء الفلكية، أن البعثات الفضائية تُطلق عادةً إما لأغراض دفاعية أو اقتصادية لتبرير غايتها. وفي غياب ضمانات العائد الاقتصادي بالنسبة إلى القطاع الخاص، تتولى الحكومات إدارة جميع برامج الفضاء لما تملكه من قدره على الاستثمار في برامج ذات عائد طويل الأجل، سواء كان لهذا العائد بُعد اقتصادي أو جيوسياسي. أما بالنسبة إلى الدعوة لبناء مستعمرات على سطح الكواكب الأخرى تحسبًا لأي دمار قد يحلّ بكوكب الأرض نتيجة تعرضه لاصطدام نيزك، قال تايسون إن تحويل مسار النيزك يظل هو الحل الأمثل في هذه
Days before the anniversary of the MAGA insurrection at the Capitol, former Trump aide Peter Navarro admitted to the plot to overturn the election on The Beat. His combative interview has made headlines around the globe, and even Trump ally Steve Bannon has weighed in, saying he and Navarro “are unreasonable” men. MSNBC’s Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber discusses the significance of Navarro’s admission with former SDNY prosecutor John Flannery. (This segment is from MSNBC’s “The Beat with Ari Melber,” a news show covering politics, law, and culture airing nightly at 6pm ET on MSNBC bit.ly/thebeatwithari).
Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson joins Andrea Mitchell to discuss extremist threats as the U.S. remains deeply divided one year after the January 6 insurrection. “I’m afraid that what we saw on January 6 a year ago was the tip of an iceberg,” says Johnson. “This type of extremist thinking and behavior could manifest itself again at other similar events and so we’ve got to keep our eye on all of it.”
The launch of a major new work on the origins of human society, and all that has followed.
Recent advances in science have allowed us to discover more about early human societies than ever before. From egalitarian early cities in Mexico and Mesopotamia to part-time kings and queens in Ice Age Europe, this ambitious new world history brings together the latest scholarship and archaeological evidence to tell a new story about the last 30,000 years.
An intellectual collaboration between the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything challenges our assumptions about the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy and slavery and, in doing this, overturns everything we thought we knew about human behaviour. It also offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom and new ways of organising society.
At this event, David Wengrow talks to Emma Dabiri, as well as special guests, Ayça Çubukçu and Ahdaf Soueif, about the ideas behind the book.
David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts helped to make Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on 2 September 2020.
David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and has been a visiting professor at New York University. He is the author of three books, including What Makes Civilization? Wengrow conducts archaeological fieldwork in various parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Emma Dabiri (chair) is a teaching fellow in the African department at SOAS, a Visual Sociology PhD researcher at Goldsmiths and the author of Don’t Touch My Hair and What White People can do Next: From Allyship to Coalition, a Sunday Times and Irish Times bestseller. She has presented several television and radio programmes including BBC Radio 4’s critically-acclaimed documentaries ‘Journeys into Afro-futurism’ and ‘Britain’s Lost Masterpieces’.
Ahdaf Soueif is an Egyptian short story writer, novelist and political and cultural commentator, whose many books include novel The Map of Love (1999) shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012).
Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: the World Tribunal on Iraq (2018) and of numerous articles in social, legal, and political theory.
Image of David Wengrow by Antonio Olmos. Image of Emma Dabiri by Stuart Simpson for Penguin Books.
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The world’s largest free trade zone is opening for business on January 1st, 2022. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) covers 15 countries across the Asia-Pacific region, and promises to improve business for 2.2 billion people. The US is not part of the agreement, and India pulled out at the last minute. China says the pact will help the region recover from the pandemic. So who will benefit? Presenter: Mohammed Jamjoom
RAND senior policy researcher Benjamin Preston describes areas where climate change and equity intersect, which communities are affected most by a changing climate, and the importance of considering issues of equity when developing climate change interventions.
ike many of the virus’s hardest hit victims, the United States went into the COVID-19 pandemic wracked by preexisting conditions. A fraying public health infrastructure, inadequate medical supplies, an employer-based health insurance system perversely unsuited to the moment—these and other afflictions are surely contributing to the death toll. But in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic—and its cruelly uneven impact—the elephant in the room is extreme income inequality.
How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades.
This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation. According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.
Thursday marks one year since a violent mob of thousands of far-right and white supremacist Trump supporters descended on the U.S. Capitol, disrupting Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election and resulting in five deaths and hundreds of injuries. We look at where these movements are one year later, with the updated investigative documentary “American Insurrection” by Frontline in collaboration with ProPublica and Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program. Director Rick Rowley explains how the far-right social movements have grown since the insurrection and says “the locus of the organizing has shifted really from a national platform to a local one, which makes it more difficult to track and increases the potential for local or regional violence.” Rowley and Frontline correspondent A.C. Thompson interviewed January 6 select committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson about what makes this a moment for “far-right mobilization” and discussed the significance of the widespread contradictory beliefs by many on the far right that antifa and Black Lives Matter dressed up as Trump supporters and carried out the January 6 riot, but that those who tried to overturn the election are patriots.
Welcome to Transition Studies. To prosper for very much longer on the changing Earth humankind will need to move beyond its current fossil-fueled civilization toward one that is sustained on recycled materials and renewable energy. This is not a trivial shift. It will require a major transition in all aspects of our lives.
This weblog explores the transition to a sustainable future on our finite planet. It provides links to current news, key documents from government sources and non-governmental organizations, as well as video documentaries about climate change, environmental ethics and environmental justice concerns.
The links are listed here to be used in whatever manner they may be helpful in public information campaigns, course preparation, teaching, letter-writing, lectures, class presentations, policy discussions, article writing, civic or Congressional hearings and citizen action campaigns, etc. For further information on this blog see: About this weblog. and How to use this weblog.
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