You are sitting still, more or less, but the galaxy beneath you is not. The Milky Way and its neighbours are tearing through space at more than two million kilometres an hour, and that motion is not random. It is the result of a tug-of-war: distant concentrations of mass pulling us forward, and a vast, near-empty region of space effectively shoving us from behind.

The speed is real and measured. The direction tells a story about how matter is spread across the universe.

How we know we are moving

The yardstick is the cosmic microwave background, the faint afterglow of the early universe that fills the sky in every direction. If we were truly at rest, it would look the same temperature all around us. It does not. It reads very slightly hotter in one direction and cooler in the opposite one, a pattern called the dipole, and that asymmetry is a Doppler effect caused by our own movement into it, much as the pitch of a siren rises as it races toward you.

Read off that dipole, the Local Group of galaxies is moving at about 631 kilometres a second relative to the background, which works out to roughly 2.3 million kilometres an hour. We are not drifting. We are racing.

The pull ahead

Some of that motion has a long-known cause. In the direction we are heading lies the Great Attractor, a concentration of mass partly hidden behind the dust of our own galactic disc, which is why it took so long to make sense of. Beyond it sits something larger still, the Shapley Concentration, the densest collection of galaxy clusters in our part of the universe.

These overdense regions do what mass does. They pull, and the Local Group is being drawn toward them across hundreds of millions of light-years.

The push behind

The pull was only half the picture, and the other half is stranger. In 2017, a team led by Yehuda Hoffman mapped the local flow of galaxies and found that the motion is also being driven by a huge, sparsely populated region on the opposite side, which they named the Dipole Repeller.

A void cannot literally push anything. But gravity is a competition between directions, and a region with very little matter exerts very little pull. With density on one side and near-emptiness on the other, the net effect is that we drift away from the emptiness as surely as if it were pushing, falling toward the fuller side of the sky. The 2017 work found that this push and the pull ahead are of roughly equal importance.

What it actually means

None of this is the galaxy falling toward a single dramatic point. It is the Local Group riding the large-scale lumpiness of the cosmos, sliding down the gentle gradient from where matter is thin toward where it is thick.

The map is still being sharpened. The Great Attractor lies in the so-called Zone of Avoidance, the band of sky our own galaxy blocks from view, so it is awkward to study, and the Dipole Repeller is inferred from models of how thousands of galaxies are flowing rather than from a clear photograph of nothing. The broad conclusion, that we are caught between a distant abundance of mass and a distant absence of it, is well supported. The fine detail is still being filled in.

It is a strange thing to sit with. The ground feels still, the sky looks fixed, and all the while the entire galaxy is being carried across the universe at a speed no human machine has ever approached, pulled by what is out there and pushed by what is not.

The post Our galaxy and its neighbours are racing through space at more than two million kilometres an hour, caught in a tug-of-war between the gravity of distant superclusters ahead and a vast, near-empty void shoving us from behind appeared first on Space Daily.

Widow's Bay, the delightfully eccentric new comedic horror series from Apple TV, is easily one of the best new series of the year. There's a reason everyone from Guillero del Toro and Ben Stiller to Damon Lindelolf (Lost) is raving about the show. It's an eminently binge-able, addictive series that pays tribute to all the classic horror tropes while reinventing them in surprising ways. Think Stephen King meets Parks and Recreation, with a dash of Twin Peaks—except Widow's Bay is very much its own refreshingly original beast.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) is a widower and mayor of Widow's Bay, a quirky little seaside town that has a colorfully bizarre history marked by periodic tragedies. Tom is eager to elevate the town into a trendy summer tourist destination. But the arrival of New York Times travel writer Arthur Lloyd (Bashir Salahuddin), who has the clout to make Tom's aspirations for Widow's Bay come true, coincides with the onset of a mysterious fog. Local resident Wyck (Stephen Root) warns Tom that the fog is an omen that the island is "waking up," meaning more supernatural occurrences are bound to happen.

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How many times do you check your email on a normal workday? Be honest. Not the number you’d like to say, the real one, counting every quick glance at the phone and every tab you flick back to between actual tasks.

Some research suggests this little habit might have an effect on wellbeing and stress. 

A quick note before we go further: I’m a writer, not a psychologist or a clinician, and what follows is me reading and thinking about one study, not handing out advice. The research here is drawn from a particular group of people, so treat it as a useful clue about how attention and stress interact, not a rule about your life.

In 2014, Kostadin Kushlev, then a PhD candidate, and Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia ran a two-week field experiment to test something simple. Does checking email less often make you feel better? They published it the following year in Computers in Human Behavior as “Checking email less frequently reduces stress.”

They recruited 124 adults, about two-thirds of them students, the rest a mix of financial analysts, medical professionals and others. Over two weeks, each person spent one week checking email as often as they liked, and another week limited to three times a day. Which week came first was decided at random. So everyone was their own comparison, living both ways.

You might expect the finding to be about getting more done. Fewer interruptions, more output, that sort of thing. That isn’t what they measured, and it isn’t what jumped out.

What they found was that people felt calmer during the limited week. Participants reported significantly lower daily stress when they were checking less, and lower stress in turn predicted higher well-being across a range of measures. Kushlev put it as plainly as it can be put. “Our findings showed that people felt less stressed when they checked their email less often.”

It’s one two-week study of 124 mostly young people, so it’s a clue rather than a verdict, but the mechanism it points to has shown up in other workplace research too.

The stress relief didn’t come from clearing the inbox faster or replying the moment something landed. It came from checking less often, full stop. The authors point at attention fragmentation, the cost of constantly breaking off what you’re doing to glance at something else, not the speed of your replies.

I know that cost intimately, because I lose to it most days. A Slack message comes in while I’m writing. I tell myself I’ll just glance. I glance, I answer, I come back to the document, and then I sit there for a while staring at the half-finished sentence, trying to remember where I was going with it. The message took ten seconds. Getting back into the writing takes a lot longer.

I’ve built a small fortress against this, with mixed success. The phone goes in another room. I close every tab before I start. No social media open while I work. None of it makes me disciplined. The systems leak, I break my own rules, and some mornings the fortress is more of a fence. But the principle holds: the cost is the interruption itself, not whether the email was urgent.

There’s a wrinkle that makes the study more honest, not less. The people in the limited week mostly couldn’t actually hit three times a day. They checked a mean of about 4.7 times, well above the target, against a baseline of about 15 checks on a normal workday. Kushlev was upfront about it: “Most participants in our study found it quite difficult to check their email only a few times a day.”

So the lower stress showed up in people who tried and largely fell short. That’s encouraging, because most of us are going to fall short too. You don’t have to be a monk about it. Cutting from fifteen-odd checks toward five seems to do something, even if three stays out of reach. As Kushlev framed it, drawing on his own study, “people find it difficult to resist the temptation of checking email, and yet resisting this temptation reduces their stress.”

Kushlev says he changed his own habit after the study. He now checks email in chunks several times a day, rather than constantly responding to messages as they arrive. That’s the one lever from all of this I’ve actually pulled, and the one I plan on keeping — not three times a day, just in chunks, with the inbox shut in between, getting back to whatever I was supposed to be doing before the next glance.

If the low hum of being always-on has tipped into something heavier than email annoyance, a chat with a qualified therapist is worth far more than anything I can offer here.

The post Researchers had 124 adults cut their email checking to three times a day — what dropped wasn’t their workload, it was their daily stress appeared first on Space Daily.

The notebooks Marie Curie filled with her research are still dangerous to touch. More than a century after she wrote in them, the pages remain radioactively contaminated, mostly with radium-226, and the original volumes are kept under strict radiation controls. To read them at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, where they are stored in lead-lined boxes, you sign a liability waiver and put on protective clothing first.

This is not a curiosity of preservation. It is a direct consequence of the physics Curie helped uncover.

Why a notebook stays dangerous

The contamination is dominated by radium-226, and the key number is its half-life: about 1,600 years. A half-life is the time it takes for half of a radioactive substance to decay away. After a hundred years, radium-226 has barely begun, only a few per cent of it is gone, which is why a century has done almost nothing to make these pages safer. It also decays into a chain of further radioactive products, including radon gas, so the contamination is not one substance sitting quietly but a small, self-renewing source.

On that timescale, estimates suggest the notebooks will stay hazardous to handle freely until around the year 3500. The ink and paper are ordinary. What soaked into them is not.

How a notebook gets contaminated

Curie worked with radium and polonium by hand, every day, at a time when no one understood what that exposure did. She and her husband Pierre had isolated the two elements in 1898, and she coined the term radioactivity itself, but the harm in what they were handling was simply not yet known. She stirred glowing solutions, carried test tubes of radioactive material in her pockets, and is said to have kept a sample by her bed because she liked its glow.

In a laboratory like that, radioactive dust gets onto everything: the bench, the door handles, the pages of the notebook open beside the work. It was not just her papers. Her furniture, her cookbook, and her clothing carry the same contamination, and her old laboratory in Paris was not fully decontaminated until 1991, nearly sixty years after her death.

The controls around them

So the library treats them as what they are, low-level radioactive objects of immense historical value. They sit in boxes lined with lead, because radium-226 and its decay products emit gamma radiation that ordinary materials do not stop. A researcher who wants to consult an original signs an acknowledgement of the risk and works under protection. The notebooks form part of a wider Curie collection the library holds, available to scholars only on those terms.

The hazard is real but modest if handled correctly, which is the point of the controls. The waiver is less about a single dangerous afternoon than about making sure no one treats a radioactive artefact as if it were just an old book.

A record of what was not yet known

There is something fitting, and sad, in all of this. The notebooks are the working record of the woman who gave us the word radioactivity, and they are radioactive because she did the work before anyone, including her, grasped the cost.

Curie died in 1934 of a blood disorder widely linked to her years of exposure. Her pages will go on quietly emitting radiation for another fifteen centuries, long after the science they describe became common knowledge, a physical reminder of how new and how dangerous that knowledge once was. By the time the pages can finally be handled bare-handed, they will have outlasted her by the better part of two thousand years.

The post The notebooks Marie Curie used in her research remain radioactively contaminated more than a hundred years later. Some Curie papers have been found contaminated with radium-226, an isotope with a half-life of about 1,600 years, and original volumes are kept under strict radiation-protection controls before anyone can handle them. appeared first on Space Daily.

Spend long enough in orbit and your own body starts to change shape. With gravity no longer pulling on it in the usual way, an astronaut’s heart can grow slightly more spherical, and their spine can stretch enough that they return to Earth measurably taller than when they left. Both changes are real, both are temporary, and both come down to the same thing: a body built for gravity, briefly relieved of it.

Neither is dramatic on its own. Together they are a useful illustration of how much of our shape is simply the body bracing against a force we never notice.

The rounder heart

On Earth, the heart is a slightly elongated organ, its shape maintained in part by the constant work of pumping blood against gravity. Take that load away and it relaxes toward a rounder form.

A study presented at the American College of Cardiology in 2014, based on ultrasound images from 12 astronauts, found that the heart became more spherical by about 9.4 per cent during long spells in microgravity. The reading worth keeping is what that rounding signals rather than the shape itself. A heart that does less work tends to lose muscle, and the change is one visible sign of the cardiac deconditioning that comes with weightlessness.

It is a small study, and a preliminary one, and the effect reverses once an astronaut is back under gravity. What it points to is a longer question: what sustained low effort does to the heart over the length of a mission to somewhere like Mars.

The taller astronaut

The height change is more straightforward and, for a while, more noticeable. Astronauts can gain up to around three per cent in height in orbit, which for a tall person can mean a couple of extra centimetres.

This is not bone growth. The spine is a stack of vertebrae cushioned by soft discs, and on Earth gravity keeps those discs gently compressed all day, which is why people are fractionally taller in the morning than at night. In orbit there is nothing pressing down at all, so the discs expand and rehydrate and the whole column lengthens. The astronaut does measure taller, just not permanently.

The stretch comes at a price. Lengthened spines are linked to back pain in flight and to a raised risk of herniated discs after landing, as the spine recompresses. Height returns to normal over the weeks and months that follow.

A body unloaded

The two changes share a cause. Almost everything about the human body, from the thickness of bones to the tone of muscles to the set of the spine, is shaped by a lifetime of resisting gravity. Remove that resistance and tissues drift toward shapes and lengths the constant downward pull normally prevents.

The heart and the spine are only the most easily pictured examples. Weightlessness also sends fluid toward the head, thins the bones, and wastes the muscles, which is why astronauts on the International Space Station spend hours a day exercising to hold the worst of it off.

Why it is worth tracking

These effects are reversible on the timescales of current missions, but they stop being a curiosity the moment journeys get longer. A crew bound for Mars would spend months in this state on the way out, arrive with deconditioned hearts and altered spines, and then have to function on landing.

Understanding exactly how the body reshapes itself without gravity, and how to counter it, is part of the unglamorous groundwork of going anywhere far. It also runs the other way: the spherical-heart finding drew interest precisely because the shape resembles changes seen in certain heart conditions on Earth, which makes the orbiting body a strange but useful place to study the one down here.

The post In the weightlessness of orbit, an astronaut’s heart can become more spherical as it no longer works against gravity in the usual way, while their spine stretches enough to make them measurably taller before they return to Earth. appeared first on Space Daily.

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Allies of Sir Keir Starmer believe he is preparing to step down as he realises the "game is up" after facing an evaporation of support over the weekend.

The post Starmer is Ready to Resign, Say Allies appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Looking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column.  June 20: Libra’s Ghost Cluster The summer solstice occurs at 4:25 A.M. EDT. This is the time the Sun reaches its northernmost point in the Northern Hemisphere sky, which also means our star takes its longest path across this hemisphere’s sky onContinue reading "The Sky Today on Sunday, June 21: A summertime lineup"

The post The Sky Today on Sunday, June 21: A summertime lineup appeared first on Astronomy Magazine.