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Betelgeuse in 2015, before recent dimming. Distance from Earth to the sun Betelgeuse in 2015, before recent dimming. Distance from Earth to the sun Betelgeuse in 2015, before recent dimming. Distance from Earth to the sun Betelgeuse in 2015, before recent dimming. Distance from Earth to the sun A Fading Giant Around 700 years ago, the red star Betelgeuse began to fade. The light from that unusual dimming is only now reaching Earth, some 700 light-years away. Betelgeuse is normally one of the 10 brightest stars in the sky, but is now fainter than ever recorded. Magnitude 0 Betelgeuse now ▶ Magnitude 0 Betelgeuse now ▶ Magnitude 0 Betelgeuse now ▶ Magnitude 0 Betelgeuse now ▶ Betelgeuse typically fades and brightens in short cycles of 14 months and longer cycles o...

ROME – Perhaps because Westerners tend not to take religion terribly seriously, seeing it as a private affair on par with other hobbies such as quilting or canasta, religious persecution tends to register in the Western mind only in its most spectacular form. If a bomb goes off in a church on Easter Sunday, for instance, causing hundreds of fatalities, it becomes a news story. If a lone churchgoer is harassed after a regular Sunday service, it passes largely unnoticed. To take a specific case, Christians in the Middle East had been subject to second class citizenship since the era of the Islamic conquest, and had been the object of increasingly violent harassment since the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1978 and the global radicalization of Islam that ensued. However, it took the anti-Chris...

Socialists everywhere furrowed their brows. This looked bad for the cause. It looked bad for the future. In the English election three weeks ago, the Tories thrashed Labour. The country chose the conservatives over the socialists, and by a lot. Now the world’s socialists must try to figure out what went wrong. It’s worth listening in. It’s a bit like standing in the back of the Patriots’ locker room after they lost to the Titans. You’d learn a lot from hearing Bill Belichick talk about losing. Worse for Labour The Tories won so big, they can do what they want for the next five years. Labour can only protest. Worse for Labour, the party lost a lot of seats from its famous “red wall,” working class districts in the industrial north of England that had been solidly Labour for decades. Imagine...

The Royal Family got a rude – but welcome – surprise on Wednesday. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex want out of royal life. They dropped this particular bombshell consulting neither the Queen nor the Prince of Wales, which seems rude. On the other hand, they weren’t able to discuss it over Christmas when the family gathers at Sandringham; Harry and Meghan and lil’ Archie skipped family Christmas for a trip to Canada instead. Buckingham Palace, having read the news of the de facto ducal abdication along with everyone else, responded with a masterly English understatement: “It’s complicated.” The Sussexes will withdraw from royal life and become celebrities doing good works. They will gallantly pay for this on their own dime. It will not be cheap, as they intend to live a climate-offending lif...

By Tom Hoopes, January 9, 2020 The Christmas season is officially over this Sunday, the feast of the Baptism of the Lord (Year A). In our house, that means the decorations come down. The house goes from glistening with beauty and mystery to an ordinary-looking home again. The good news is that Christmas, with its the grace and wonder, won’t go away; it will just move deeper inside — down in the basement of the house, into the hearts of the family. That is because if Christmas is about Jesus coming to the world, the Baptism of the Lord is about him coming to each of us. The Baptism of the Lord Is a nice contrast with the Christmas season. Christmas is about light shining in darkness, with the darkness unable to overcome it. The Baptism is about Jesus in overwhelming light, and us unabl...

A century ago, Albert Einstein became famous. Sure, he was already well-known among physicists. But the world at large learned his name only after November 1919, when news broke that his theory of gravity had been confirmed — to the dismay of many fans of Isaac Newton. “Lights All Askew in the Heavens” shouted the headline in the New York Times. “Einstein Theory Triumphs,” a subhead added. As the article recounted, an observation of stars near the sun during a solar eclipse found their apparent position shifted just as Einstein had predicted. Newton’s law of gravity, considered inviolable for over two centuries, had been repealed. The first major test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity came in 1919 from an eclipse, shown here in an image from the scientific paper reporting that lig...

When Tyge O’Donnell found out he would have the opportunity to meet Pope Francis, he knew he had to present him with a gift he’d remember. Then the Las Vegas resident remembered that the pope, known to be a lover of team sports, had been given a Vegas Golden Knights jersey with his name on it last season by the team’s investor and legal consultant Tim Busch. So O’Donnell went out and bought two bobbleheads — one of Golden Knights forward William Karlsson and one of the pope. With a bit of careful prying and gluing, he managed to swap their heads and created a custom bobblehead of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church wearing a “zucchetto” — the conical clerical cap he favors — but clad in a Golden Knights jersey, holding a hockey stick in his hands and standing on a puck. Then, with the ...

The aim of this project is to map tourists’ perceptions of different urban areas through data retrieved from vacation rental platform Airbnb. After their stay, Airbnb guests score their feeling about the neighbourhood using a star-based rating system. The aggregated rating of each Airbnb listing is publicly accessible, and given the widespread expansion of this platform, a large amount of data is available for the most visited cities. When overlaid on a map of the city, the data reveals interesting geographic patterns and exposes subjective perceptions on safety, upkeep or convenience. This project has been featured in Inverse, Lifehack, Next City, Geoawesomeness, Maps Mania, newspapers El País and Tages Anzeiger, and articles by Peter Murray and Florence Broderick...

The aim of this project is to map tourists’ perceptions of different urban areas through data retrieved from vacation rental platform Airbnb. After their stay, Airbnb guests score their feeling about the neighbourhood using a star-based rating system. The aggregated rating of each Airbnb listing is publicly accessible, and given the widespread expansion of this platform, a large amount of data is available for the most visited cities. When overlaid on a map of the city, the data reveals interesting geographic patterns and exposes subjective perceptions on safety, upkeep or convenience. This project has been featured in Inverse, Lifehack, Next City, Geoawesomeness, Maps Mania, newspapers El País and Tages Anzeiger, and articles by Peter Murray and Florence Broderick...

Barely reported outside China, in late October the country’s ruling Communist Party published a 10,000-character document on social mores or, more simply put, morality. It was the latest shot to be fired in leader Xi Jinping’s war against religion that has seen repression, especially against Christianity and Islam, amped up to levels not seen since the dark days of Mao Zedong which culminated in the bloody, murderous and disastrous Cultural Revolution from 1966 until the dictator’s 1976 death. But the new paper, as we will discover, is also a long overdue de-facto recognition of the spiritual vacuum that has been wrought by the officially atheist Chinese Communist Party (CCP), whose legitimacy now rests precariously, not on its original aims of creating an equal society but on the continua...

Barely reported outside China, in late October the country’s ruling Communist Party published a 10,000-character document on social mores or, more simply put, morality. It was the latest shot to be fired in leader Xi Jinping’s war against religion that has seen repression, especially against Christianity and Islam, amped up to levels not seen since the dark days of Mao Zedong which culminated in the bloody, murderous and disastrous Cultural Revolution from 1966 until the dictator’s 1976 death. But the new paper, as we will discover, is also a long overdue de-facto recognition of the spiritual vacuum that has been wrought by the officially atheist Chinese Communist Party (CCP), whose legitimacy now rests precariously, not on its original aims of creating an equal society but on the continua...