Parler: what you need to know about the ‘free speech’ Twitter alternative – The Conversation AU

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Amid claims of social media platforms stifling free speech, a new challenger called Parler is drawing attention for its anti-censorship stance.

Last week, Harpers Magazine published an open letter signed by 150 academics, writers and activists concerning perceived threats to the future of free speech.

The letter, signed by Noam Chomsky, Francis Fukuyama, Gloria Steinem and J.K. Rowling, among others, reads:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.

Debates surroundings free speech and censorship have taken centre stage in recent months. In May, Twitter started adding fact-check labels to tweets from Donald Trump.

More recently, Reddit permanently removed its largest community of Trump supporters.

In this climate, Parler presents itself as a non-biased, free speech driven alternative to Twitter. Heres what you should know about the US-based startup.

Read more: Is cancel culture silencing open debate? There are risks to shutting down opinions we disagree with

Parler reports more than 1.5 million users and is growing in popularity, especially as Twitter and other social media giants crackdown on misinformation and violent content.

Parler is very similar to Twitter in appearance and function, albeit clunkier. Like Twitter, Parler users can follow others and engage with public figures, news sources and other users.

Public posts are called parleys rather than tweets and can contain up to 1,000 characters.

Users can search for hashtags, make comments, echo posts (similar to a retweet) and vote (similar to a like) on posts. Theres also a direct private messaging feature, just like Twitter.

Given this likeness, what actually is unique about Parler?

Parlers main selling point is its claim it embraces freedom of speech and has minimal moderation. If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler, founder John Matze explains.

This branding effort capitalises on allegations competitors such as Twitter and Facebook unfairly censor content and discriminate against right-wing political speech.

While other platforms often employ fact checkers, or third-party editorial boards, Parler claims to moderate content based on American Federal Communications Commission guidelines and Supreme Court rulings.

So if someone shared demonstrably false information on Parler, Matze said it would be up to other users to fact-check them organically.

And although Parler is still dwarfed by Twitter (330 million users) and Facebook (2.6 billion users) the platforms anti-censorship stance continues to attract users turned off by the regulations of larger social media platforms.

When Twitter recently hid tweets from Trump for glorifying violence, this partly prompted the Trump campaign to consider moving to a platform such as Parler.

Matze also claims Parler protects users privacy by not tracking or sharing their data.

Companies such as Twitter and Facebook have denied they are silencing conservative voices, pointing to blanket policies against hate speech and content inciting violence.

Parlers free speech has resulted in various American Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz, promoting the platform.

Many conservative influencers such as Katie Hopkins, Lara Loomer and Alex Jones have sought refuge on Parler after being banned from other platforms.

Although it brands itself as a bipartisan safe space, Parler is mostly used by right-wing media, politicians and commentators.

Moreover, a closer look at its user agreement suggests it moderates content the same way as any platform, maybe even more.

The company states:

Parler may remove any content and terminate your access to the Services at any time and for any reason or no reason.

Parlers community guidelines prohibit a range of content including spam, terrorism, unsolicited ads, defamation, blackmail, bribery and criminal behaviour.

Although there are no explicit rules against hate speech, there are policies against fighting words and threats of harm. This includes a threat of or advocating for violation against an individual or group.

There are rules against content that is obscene, sexual or lacks serious literary, artistic, political and scientific value. For example, visuals of genitalia, female nipples, or faecal matter are barred from Parler.

Meanwhile, Twitter allows consensually produced adult content if its marked as sensitive. It also has no policy against the visual display of excrement.

As a private company, Parler can remove whatever content it wants. Some users have already been banned for breaking rules.

Whats more, in spite of claims it does not share user data, Parlers privacy policy states data collected can be used for advertising and marketing.

Read more: Friday essay: Twitter and the way of the hashtag

Given its limited user base, Parler has yet to become the open town square it aspires to be.

The platform is in its infancy and its user base is much less representative than larger social media platforms.

Despite Matze saying left-leaning users tied to the Black Lives Matter movement were joining Parler to challenge conservatives, Parler lacks the diverse audience needed for any real debate.

Matze also said he doesnt want Parler to be an echo chamber for conservative voices. In fact, he is offering a US$20,000 progressive bounty for an openly liberal pundit with 50,000 followers on Twitter or Facebook to join.

Clearly, the platform has a long way to go before it bursts its conservative bubble.

Read more: Don't (just) blame echo chambers. Conspiracy theorists actively seek out their online communities

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Parler: what you need to know about the 'free speech' Twitter alternative - The Conversation AU

Watch | Can states ban the display of the Confederate flag? in ‘Legally Speaking’ – WKYC.com

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3News Legal Analyst Stephanie Haney breaks down what the states can and can't do when it comes to restricting display of the Confederate flag

CLEVELAND Legal Analysis:Right now, people are calling for government officials and private organizations to ban the display of the Confederate flag because of its tie to slavery, but those two groups aren't created equal when it comes to who can make that happen.

People are asking these groups to prohibit the display and sale of the symbol in what we think of as public places, like county fairs.

Here in Ohio, there was even a bill proposed in the House of Representatives to do it. That bill didn't pass, but if it had, the results would have been questionable, because display of the Confederate flag is considered a form a speech.

Our freedom of speech is protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which reads in part:

"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

The start of that sentence is the important part, because the First Amendment protects our speech from Congress, also known as "the government" or "the state."

Legally speaking, our county fairs can do whatever they want when it comes to banning the Confederate flag, because theyre not run by the government.

The First Amendment only stops the government from restricting our speech, except for in certain cases.

Exceptions that are not protected include when someone says something thats meant to provoke someone to break the law (also referred to as speech that is intended and likely to lead to "imminent lawless action"), speech used to intimidate, or legitimately threaten someone else.

You may be surprised to know that both hate speech, and speech that promotes the idea of violence are protected from being restricted by the state.

The government can limit where and when speech is expressed, but it has to be across the board (or "content neutral"), because restricting only a specific point of view is unconstitutional.

The closing speech in the 1995 film, "The American President," sums it up well, delivered by the character of President Andrew Shepherd, played by Michael Douglas.

"You want free speech?" he asks of the crowd in the press briefing room and the fictional Americans watching at home.

"Lets see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, whos standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours."

Then the character brings up another controversial topic when it comes to free speech and flags.

"You want to claim this land as the land of the free?"he asks.

"Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free."

To sum it up, if only popular ideas were protected, we wouldnt need the first amendment.

Stephanie Haney is licensed to practice law in both Ohio and California.

The information in this article is provided for general informational purposes only. None of the information in this article is offered, nor should it be construed, as legal advice on any matter.

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Watch | Can states ban the display of the Confederate flag? in 'Legally Speaking' - WKYC.com

Freedom of speech is under threat like never before and we must fight back, LEO McKINSTRY – Express

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A sinister new cult of dogmatic intolerance casts its shadow across our land, silencing debate, imposing conformity, whipping up hysteria, and crushing dissent.

In the wholly un-British climate of intimidation, opinions are ruthlessly censored and careers destroyed.

On a terrifying scale, the ingredients of alien despotism are now creeping into our public life.

There is an echo of the Soviet eastern bloc in the demand for absolute submission to the ruling orthodoxy, while the vicious mood of 1950s McCarthyism is mirrored in endless character assassinations and witch-hunts.

Similarly, the kind of determination to root out heresy that once drove the Spanish Inquisition can now be found in corporate Britain, from workplaces to Whitehall.

All this is the very antithesis of a free society, which should value openness, compromise and pluralism.

That great patriot George Orwell famously wrote, If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Tragically, instead of being guided by those wise words, the cultural commissars seem to be inspired by Orwells most famous novel, 1984, which painted a dark picture of Britain under totalitarian rule, complete with thought crimes, hate sessions, group think and hectoring propaganda.

Orwell meant his book to be a warning, but the new ideologues see it as a blueprint.

The vanguard of this revolution hails from the authoritarian Left, which uses the bogus language of compassion to justify its oppression.

In their doctrinal obsessions and frenzied divisiveness, these bullies are utterly divorced from the mainstream British public, yet they are able to wield excessive power through their stranglehold on the internet and civic institutions.

In their brutish hands, social media is both an instrument of fear and an arena for show trials.

Nothing illustrates the nastiness of the online lynch mob more graphically thanthe transformation of the best-selling author JK Rowling from cherished icon into enemy of the people.

Her thought crime is her willingness to challenge the fashionable transgender ideology, which she sees as a threat both to womens rights and childhood innocence.

For her courage, she has been subjected to horrendous misogynistic abuse.

Staff at her publishing house have tried to boycott her work.

Authors have left the literary agency that represents her.

A sculptural tribute to her in Edinburgh, comprising the imprints of her hands, was daubed with blood-red paint.

Ms Rowling is such a global figure that she can withstand a battering from the advocates of the cancel culture, as it has become known because its impulse is to cancel out dissenters.

Others have been less lucky.

The Scottish childrens author Gillian Philip says she was fired from her post by her publishers after she tweeted: I stand with JK Rowling.

As Ms Philip commented, her professionalism counted for nothing in the face of an abusive mob of anonymous Twitter trolls. The same hardline trans lobby also recently hounded out Baroness Nicholson from her position as the patron of the Booker Literary prize for showing insufficientobeisance to the new creed, a fate thatalso happened to tax expert Maya Forstater who was dismissed from her job at an anti-poverty think tank after she tweeted that men cannot change into women.

Left-wingers used to campaign to protect jobs.

Now they campaign to get people removed from them, simply for having unacceptable opinions.

Typical is the case of Nick Buckley, who set up a highly successful charity for vulnerable young people in Manchester. But in the eyes of the new zealots he committed the sin of criticising the aims of the radical Black Lives Matter protest group.

We will do everything in our power to have you removed from your position, said one activist.The warning was prophetic, as Buckley was kicked out of the charity he established.

Disturbingly, this is just part of a wider trend.

At Cambridge University, which has regularly made empty noises about its commitment to academic freedom, the philosopher Jordan Peterson had his offer of a visiting fellowship withdrawn after protests from the Students Union about the politically incorrect nature of his work.

In the same cowardly vein, Cambridge sacked sociologist Noah Carl over the unsubstantiated claims that he might use his position as a researcher to promote views that could incite racial or religious hatred. So pathetically supine was the university that it even apologised to its students for appointing him in the first place, an appointment that supposedly caused hurt, betrayal, anger and disbelief.

That is so characteristic of our enfeebled establishment.

Instead of standing up for essential liberties, officialdom now cowers before the mob and colludes with the agitators.

In another outrageous case, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Professor Sir Tim Hunt was forced out of his posts at University College London, the Royal Society and the European Research Council after he was accused of making a joke about female colleagues at an event in Seoulin 2015, even though he strongly deniedthe charge.

Sir Tim was crucified by ideological fanatics, said his fellow scientist Sir Andre Geim of the University of Manchester.

No one is safe from this destructive form of socialist puritanism.

Last year, disabled Asda worker Brian Leach was sacked for sharing an online clip of a Billy Connolly routine that mocked religion, though Leach was later reinstated after a public outcry. In yet another indicator of the authorities submission to the new doctrine, the police are estimated to have investigated no fewer than 120,000 non-crime hate incidents over the past five years, an incredible rate of 66 a day.

The Free Speech Union, recently founded by the energetic journalist Toby Young to uphold Britains tattered traditions, says that it now receives half a dozen requests for help every day.

The fact that such an organisation is required represents a severe indictment of the growing institutional disdain for freedom of expression.

The autocratic impulse has always existed on the Left, as shown by this passage written in 1999 by the broadcaster Andrew Marr, a key member of the metropolitan elite: I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain natural beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off.

That outlook has become even stronger over the subsequent two decades.

In progressive circles, free speech is seen, not as a pillar of democracy, but as a vehicle for spreading dangerously reactionary arguments. In the warped mentality of the witch-hunters, the problem with the cancel culture is that it is insufficiently expansive or effective.

This narrow attitude was perfectly captured last week by the singer Billy Bragg, who wrote that whenever he hears Orwells defence of liberty, he wants to cringe because the words are a defence of licence, allowing those in power to abuse and marginalise others.

When he was asked on social media if he supported the dismissal of people simply for an opinion, he declared, If their opinion amounts to delegitimising the rights of a minority, I believe that employers have the right to act in such circumstances.

In effect, Bragg appears to believe in the thought police and ideological purity tests, a shameful stance from a man who once pretended to be democrat.

But his outlook is a common one.

One of the performers on the deeply unfunny BBC satire The Mash Report even stated that free speech is basically a way adult people can say racist stuff without consequences.

Left-wingers love to trumpet the joys of diversity, yet they loathe diversity of thought.

All their apparatus of repression, such as safe spaces and wails about micro-aggressions, are geared towards the enforcement of their code.

Even when people are not directly threatened with losing their livelihoods, they become scared to express their views on any controversial topic.

The atmosphere of self-censorship is thereby strengthened. The absurdity of this approach is that free speech is the ally, not the enemy, of progress, enlightenment and human rights.

Without such a liberty, discussion and protest are impossible, while power becomes entrenched, as the Soviet Union proved.

An irrefutable case for free speech was made in 2009, when the BBC invited the BNP leader Nick Griffin to participate in an edition of the flagship show Question Time.

The BNP was riding high at that moment, having won almost one million votes in the European elections and secured two seats in the European Parliament.

There was tremendous outrage at the BBCs invitation, yet Griffins disastrous appearance turned out to be the worst thing that ever happened to the BNP.

Sweating, nervous and incoherent, he was exposed as a fantasising conspiracy theorist with some very unpleasant views, in the words of his fellow panelist, the distinguished Labour politician Jack Straw.

Even BNP activists were dismayed.

Maybe some coaching should have been done, said one.

Question Time triggered a chain of events that soon led to the collapse of the BNP, amid debts and plummeting popularity.

The cancel culture would have worked in Griffins favour.

As it was, he choked on the oxygen of publicity.

That is the lesson we have to learn today. Fortunately there are the glimmers of a fightback against the authoritarians. JK Rowling has stood firm.

Comedy star Ricky Gervais has stood up for free speech, denouncing its opponents as weird.

Only last week, a letter was sent to Harpers Magazine by 153 mainly liberal philosophers, writers and intellectuals among them giants su Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Noam Chomsky who denounced the intolerant climate of public discourse.

The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away, they wrote.

That is absolutely correct and has long been the British way.

For the sake of our future, the extremists must not be allowed to prevail.

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Freedom of speech is under threat like never before and we must fight back, LEO McKINSTRY - Express

Parler: is this the alternative to Twitters free speech? – Global Village space

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Audrey Courty |

Amid claims of social media platforms stifling free speech, a new challenger called Parler is drawing attention for its anti-censorship stance.

Last week, Harpers Magazine published an open letter signed by 150 academics, writers and activists concerning perceived threats to the future of free speech.

The letter, signed by Noam Chomsky, Francis Fukuyama, Gloria Steinem and J.K. Rowling, among others, reads:

Debates surroundings free speech and censorship have taken centre stage in recent months. In May, Twitter started adding fact-check labels to tweets from Donald Trump.

Read more: Trump labelled racist by Twitter users amid massive unrest

More recently, Reddit permanently removed its largest community of Trump supporters.

In this climate, Parler presents itself as a non-biased, free speech driven alternative to Twitter. Heres what you should know about the US-based startup.

Parler reports more than 1.5 million users and is growing in popularity, especially as Twitter and other social media giants crackdown on misinformation and violent content.

Parler is very similar to Twitter in appearance and function, albeit clunkier. Like Twitter, Parler users can follow others and engage with public figures, news sources and other users.

Public posts are called parleys rather than tweets and can contain up to 1,000 characters.

Users can search for hashtags, make comments, echo posts (similar to a retweet) and vote (similar to a like) on posts. Theres also a direct private messaging feature, just like Twitter.

Given this likeness, what actually is unique about Parler?

Parlers main selling point is its claim it embraces freedom of speech and has minimal moderation. If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler, founder John Matze explains.

This branding effort capitalises on allegations competitors such as Twitter and Facebook unfairly censor content and discriminate against right-wing political speech.

While other platforms often employ fact checkers, or third-party editorial boards, Parler claims to moderate content based on American Federal Communications Commission guidelines and Supreme Court rulings.

Read more: Trumps attack on Twitter: A closure of social media on the cards?

So if someone shared demonstrably false information on Parler, Matze said it would be up to other users to fact-check them organically.

And although Parler is still dwarfed by Twitter (330 million users) and Facebook (2.6 billion users) the platforms anti-censorship stance continues to attract users turned off by the regulations of larger social media platforms.

When Twitter recently hid tweets from Trump for glorifying violence, this partly prompted the Trump campaign to consider moving to a platform such as Parler.

Matze also claims Parler protects users privacy by not tracking or sharing their data.

Companies such as Twitter and Facebook have denied they are silencing conservative voices, pointing to blanket policies against hate speech and content inciting violence.

Parlers free speech has resulted in various American Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz, promoting the platform.

Many conservative influencers such as Katie Hopkins, Lara Loomer and Alex Jones have sought refuge on Parler after being banned from other platforms.

Although it brands itself as a bipartisan safe space, Parler is mostly used by right-wing media, politicians and commentators.

Moreover, a closer look at its user agreement suggests it moderates content the same way as any platform, maybe even more.

Read more: Freedom of speech and blasphemous caricatures Dr. Zeeshan Khan

The company states:

Parlers community guidelines prohibit a range of content including spam, terrorism, unsolicited ads, defamation, blackmail, bribery and criminal behaviour.

Although there are no explicit rules against hate speech, there are policies against fighting words and threats of harm. This includes a threat of or advocating for violation against an individual or group.

There are rules against content that is obscene, sexual or lacks serious literary, artistic, political and scientific value. For example, visuals of genitalia, female nipples, or faecal matter are barred from Parler.

Meanwhile, Twitter allows consensually produced adult content if its marked as sensitive. It also has no policy against the visual display of excrement.

As a private company, Parler can remove whatever content it wants. Some users have already been banned for breaking rules.

Whats more, in spite of claims it does not share user data, Parlers privacy policy states data collected can be used for advertising and marketing.

Given its limited user base, Parler has yet to become the open town square it aspires to be. The platform is in its infancy and its user base is much less representative than larger social media platforms.

Read more: In the post pandemic world, will Black Lives Matter?

Despite Matze saying left-leaning users tied to the Black Lives Matter movement were joining Parler to challenge conservatives, Parler lacks the diverse audience needed for any real debate.

Matze also said he doesnt want Parler to be an echo chamber for conservative voices. In fact, he is offering a US$20,000 progressive bounty for an openly liberal pundit with 50,000 followers on Twitter or Facebook to join.

Clearly, the platform has a long way to go before it bursts its conservative bubble.

Courtesy: The Conversation

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Parler: is this the alternative to Twitters free speech? - Global Village space

Astronomers want to get in on NASA’s push to the moon – Space.com

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NASA wants to go to the moon, and astrophysicists want their instruments to ride along, too.

The details are still in flux, as scientists are figuring out what makes the most sense given the scientific and logistical constraints of the moon. But they're confident that NASA's current priorities at the moon offer benefits that would support their goals. The agency's priorities are embodied by the Artemis program, which aims to land humans on the moon in 2024 in a sustainable, long-term way that offers a future for science as well as exploration.

"Heavy launch capability, astronauts, serviceability, in-space assembly all of those things are things that we care deeply about," Heidi Hammel, a planetary astronomer at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy said during the Lunar Surface Science Virtual Workshop held on May 28. "And they are a core part of the return to the moon initiative."

Related: NASA sees inspiration parallels between Apollo and Artemis moonshots

A few telescopes have already operated on the moon. NASA's Apollo 16 mission in 1972 carried an ultraviolet telescope that astronaut John Young used to image nebulas, stars and Earth's atmosphere. China's Chang'e-3 mission, which landed on the moon in 2013, also carried an ultraviolet telescope.

But the moon is generally new territory for telescopes, Hammel said, and the details of how astrophysicists might tap into the Artemis program remain to be determined. One important distinction may be between telescopes on the moon and telescopes at the moon. That's because even terrestrial dust is a problem for delicate astronomy equipment and lunar dust is a whole lot more aggravating than its Earthly counterpart.

That said, it's not impossible to picture telescopes thriving on the lunar surface, Hammel said. She pointed to a volcanic mountain at the heart of Hawaii Island, Maunakea. Today, it's known for the dozen astronomy facilities perched on the mountain's summit, where the atmosphere is still and observing conditions are favorable. But in the 1960s, it was a key training site for Apollo-era astronauts practicing moonwalks and geology.

"Maunakea was a proving ground for [the] lunar exploration program," Hammel said. "If we've learned nothing over the past 50 years we have learned how to build telescopes in that kind of an environment." Those lessons, she said, may be applicable for any instruments that do need to be placed on the lunar surface.

Besides, astronomers have learned a lot about launching telescopes into space since the days of that first lunar telescope. Ground-based and space-based telescopes alike have improved exponentially. Consider the power of the Hubble Space Telescope, which, as future lunar-orbiting telescopes could do, has relied on visits from astronauts to refresh its equipment as it aged.

And although a launch to the moon would require smaller instruments than astronomers on the surface of Earth can employ, the frequent visits to the moon that are meant to be the trademark of the Artemis program would suggest that scientists could send larger telescopes than they have to date.

So assuming that scientists can send more mass, keep instruments fresher with maintenance from astronauts, and sort out the dust challenges, what sort of instruments might they send?

Astronomers have plenty of ideas for what they could do with radio telescopes on the moon because such instruments face a major constraint on Earth. The constant barrage of radio signals we generate with our bevy of electronic equipment on the surface and in orbit wreaks havoc on radio observations made from Earth, and the far side of the moon is the only place in the solar system safe from those signals.

That interference means scientists have spent decades imagining the potential of radio observatories on the far side. Such instruments could see into the earliest days of the universe or listen for signals produced by a hypothetical extraterrestrial techno-civilization, for example.

But for other wavelengths, lunar possibilities are a bit less obvious, particularly with only the precedent of a couple ultraviolet instruments to work from, Hammel said. "One reason we have a lot of back and forth about putting telescopes to the moon [is that] the state of the art on the ground, on Earth, and in space has advanced so far during the last 50 years that it's difficult for us to imagine what we would put on the surface in the UV [ultraviolet] and optical and near infrared," Hammel said. "It's difficult to imagine what we would need to build there."

One compelling opportunity, she noted, would be to look back at Earth from the moon as practice for studying worlds beyond our solar system. Exoplanets are compelling scientific targets, but at such great distances scientists struggle to grasp the details of these worlds and interpret what they might look like up close.

"It won't matter that it's a small telescope, because exoplanets, we can't really resolve them anyway," Hammel said. "Being able to study the Earth in multiple phases, multiple wavelengths, over very long time durations, and short time durations, will give us really powerful information for understanding Earth-like exoplanets."

Hammel said ultraviolet observations in general are tantalizing, since such wavelengths can't be studied from Earth's surface. The same atmosphere that protects life on Earth from being fried by ultraviolet radiation also prevents ground-based telescopes from studying astronomical ultraviolet radiation. But there's no atmosphere to interfere on the moon.

Although astrophysicists are still piecing together the details of what lunar observatories could look like, the community is already on board the Artemis program. The first two robotic science freight loads that commercial companies will deliver to the lunar surface as part of the program, which will launch next year, include two astrophysics projects, including a radio astronomy experiment.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Astronomers want to get in on NASA's push to the moon - Space.com

Astronomers found a giant wall of galaxies hiding in plain sight – MIT Technology Review

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Astronomers have found one of the largest structures in the known universea wall of galaxies thats at least 1.4 billion light-years long. And given how close it is to us, its remarkable that we havent seen it before now.

What happened: An international team of scientists reported the discovery of the South Pole Wall in a paper published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal. The structure is basically a curtain that stretches across the southern border of the universe (from the perspective of Earth) and consists of thousands of galaxies, along with huge amounts of gas and dust.

What do you mean by wall? Galaxies arent just strewn randomly throughout the universe. Along huge strands of hydrogen, galaxies collect into larger groupings of massive filaments, separated by giant voids of nearly empty space. Each filament is basically a wall of galaxies, stretching for hundreds of millions of light-years. Theyre the biggest structures in the known universe. Other identified structures include the Great Wall, the Sloan Great Wall, the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, and the Bootes Void.

Put together, these walls make up what astronomers call the cosmic web. Piecing together the cosmic web is one of the major pursuits of cosmologyit would not only tell us about the structure of the universe and its interior but could also help us better understand how the universe was formed and how its evolved over time.

Why is this one special? Its so close! The South Pole Wall is just half a billion light-years away. In fact, this is part of the reason it was so hard to find until nowit is situated right behind the Milky Way galaxy, in a place called the Zone of Galactic Obscuration, where the galaxys brightness effectively kept the wall shrouded in plain sight.

So how was it found? Cosmological surveys are often done by measuring objects redshift: the speed at which those objects seem to be moving away from Earth thanks to the expansion of the universe. The faster an object is receding, the farther away it is.

The team behind the South Pole Wall discovery did redshift observations as part of their survey of the sky, but they also added measurements of the velocity of certain galaxies, which illustrates how they gravitationally interact with one another. This technique can alert astronomers to unseen masseswhile its normally used to investigate dark matter, it can also just highlight masses obscured by bright light. Using this data, the researchers were able to map out the South Pole Wall for the first time.

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Astronomers found a giant wall of galaxies hiding in plain sight - MIT Technology Review

Your best chance to see Jupiter this year – Astronomy Now Online

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Mighty Jupiter, the king of the planets, comes to opposition at 08:00 UT on 14 July, the moment when it lies opposite the Sun in sky at a distance of 619.4 million kilometres (384 million miles), or 4.139 astronomical units. This is the most favourable time to observe the so-called superior planets (those apart from Mercury and Venus, which are termed inferior planets).

Jupiter, by far the Solar Systems dominant planet and the one that offers the most to observers of all levels or experience, is at its 2020 best on the nights of 13/14 and 14/15 July, when its a brilliant magnitude 2.8 beacon rather low in the southern sky among the stars of Sagittarius as soon as what passes for darkness as this time of the year descends. The presence of Saturn, the gorgeous ringed planet which comes to opposition itself on 20 July, lying just six to seven degrees to the east of Jupiter, adds greatly to the spectacle.

As Jupiter doesnt achieve an altitude of 20 degrees at any time from our shores, observers living in towns and cities will have to find a good observing spot with a flat horizon from the south-east around to the south-west if they dont want to spend the night dodging buildings and peeking between trees.

Jupiter culminates (reaching its highest point on the southern meridian) at about 1am BST around opposition: from London, it culminates at around +16.5 degrees altitude at 1.04am BST (12:04 UT); from Manchester, it peaks at between 14 and 15 degrees at 1.16am BST (12:16 UT); and in Edinburgh it reaches just over 12 degrees altitude at 1.20am BST (12:20 UT).

Jupiter will richly reward observers who have gone the extra mile to locate it, offering a generous-sized disc to enjoy, large enough indeed for even a humble pair of binoculars to resolve and for a small telescope to reveal its major bright zones and dark belts in its turbulent and ever-changing clouds tops.

The gas giants most famous individual feature is the Great Red Spot (GRS), a long-lived anticyclonic storm that has been raging in the planets South Tropical Zone (STrZ) for possibly 350 years. A telescope in the 150mm (six-inch) class should show the GRS at the times when it rotates into view (Astronomy Now has monthly listings of the GRSs appearances on the Jovian disc), along with a host of other transient features, such as white and dark ovals and festoons, but have a go with a smaller-aperture telescope if thats whats to hand.

On the night of 13/14 July, the GRS transits Jupiters central meridian at about 10.35pm BST (21:35 UT), but its barely 10 degrees up in the south-east at this time. However, it will remain visible for a couple of hours, as Jupiter climbs towards culmination, before it rotates out of view (Jupiter completes one rotation in just under ten hours). On 14/15 July, the GRS rotates into view at about 2.30am to 3am BST.

Jupiters low altitude from mid-northern latitudes makes observing it more problematic than normal, owing to the prevalence of turbulent seeing so close to the horizon. Atmospheric dispersion leads to noticeable colour effects, such as red and blue fringing on planets, caused by our atmosphere essentially acting as a prism. A red filter (Wratten 23/25) will help reduce dispersion fringing (though the latter filter has only 15 per cent transmission, so might be better employed with a moderate- to large-aperture telescope). An Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector (ADC) is a great accessory too.

A blue or light-blue filter (Wratten 80A/82A) will enhance the contrast between the planets dusky belts and bright zones, while the visibility of dark markings is enhanced by a yellow or orange filter (such as Wratten 12/21). The latter filter is an especially good choice for observing the GRS.

Jupiter is unique in the Solar System for its family of four large and bright Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede (the largest satellite in the Solar System, with a diameter of 5,268 kilometres [3,273 miles]) and Callisto. All can be seen through 10 x 50 binoculars. Following their eternal dance around their parent is a rewarding aspect of observing the giant planet, as they, together with their jet-black shadow, pass in front of the planet and at other times disappear behind and reappear from behind Jupiter (occultation) or move in and out of its massive shadow (eclipse).

The satellites move from east to west across the face of the planet and west to east behind it. After conjunction and before opposition, Jupiters shadow is cast to the west and shadow transits precedes transits, while eclipses happen before occultations. After opposition, the order is reversed.

Perhaps the most interesting of all the Galilean phenomena is watching the black shadows of the moons move across Jupiters face, though its much tougher to spot the moons themselves against the planets bright disc. A fascinating consequence of opposition is that a moon and its shadow can lie very close together, with occasionally the moon occulting its own shadow. On the night of 15/16 July, shortly after 3am BST (02:00 UT), Io and its shadow, seen very close together, will have just started a transit (see the graphic here). A 150mm telescope should be sufficient aperture to glimpse Ios shadow in any fleeting moments of steadier seeing.

As soon as Jupiter is observable on the night of 13/14 July, a pair of binoculars will show only three Galilean moons; Io and Europa lie roughly equidistant from the planet, to the east and west (left and right, through binoculars), respectively, while Callisto lies some way west of Jupiter. Ganymede is hidden behind the giant planet, after disappearing into Jupiters shadow at 9.36pm BST (20.36 UT). Its a shame that this event is not observable from UK shores, but Jupiter is barely above the horizon, having not long risen.

At this close to opposition (which occurs about 12 hours later), Jupiters giant shadow falls almost directly behind the planet, leaving an extremely thin sliver of shadow hugging the planets western (preceding) limb, which Ganymede gradually disappears into. See the graphic here showing the positions of the moons when Ganymede reappears at Jupiters eastern limb at around 1am. Obviously, the majority of eclipse events throughout the year occur when Jupiter is some way from opposition, so a moon will be seen to disappear in eclipse when it lies well away from Jupiters limb. Jupiters shadow falls increasing further westwards (or eastwards after opposition) from the limb the further the planet is from opposition.

On the following night, 14/15 July, all the moons will be visible for the entire night. Theres no end to the observational fun that can be had following Jupiters Galilean satellites. Astronomy Now has monthly listings of those Galilean moon events that are visible from UK shores.

Despite Jupiters less-than-ideal observing circumstances at this years opposition, theres still so much that can be seen by a determined observer. However, Jupiter is still a beautiful sight if all you want to do is gaze at it out of your window.

Our July issue features a complete guide to whats up in the night sky this month including how to observe Jupiter.Get your copy in the shops or order online for home delivery in print or digital download.

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Popular UC San Diego astronomer Andy Friedman dies at 41 – The San Diego Union-Tribune

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Andy Friedman, a UC San Diego astronomer known for his insights about supernovas and the expansion of the universe and for explaining them to the public in places like Astronomy magazine and San Diego Comic-Con, died on July 10 in San Diego. He was 41.

Friedman, who spoke with the joy and zest of Carl Sagan, one of his childhood heroes, succumbed to a rare form of cancer, according to his wife, Kristen Keerma Friedman.

He became the third prominent figure from UCSD to die in recent weeks. The campus also is mourning the loss of mathematician Ron Graham, whose work has been indispensable to the evolution of computing, and Flossie Wong-Staal, the virologist who co-discovered the cause of AIDS.

Friedman had suffered health problems over the years. But news of his death stunned friends and colleagues, including UCSD physicist Brian Keating, who recruited him to La Jolla, and physicist-science fiction author David Brin of Olivenhain.

The trio made up The Three Physicists, an informal group that periodically met to give public talks on science and philosophy.

Andy had opportunities to work with luminaries at other places, like MIT and Harvard, but he came here and we were so glad to have him, Keating said Monday.

He had a relentless curiosity, unparalleled mathematic ability, and a humanitarian soul. He could communicate with people, and his passion was infectious when he talked about things like quasars and the cosmos.

Brin said, Ive never known anybody who enjoyed a wider variety of ways to be alive. He was a scientist whose other interests extended to sculpture and painting and music and dabbling in science fiction. He had an epic rock and fossil collection. His passions included poking away at God by exploring the universe.

It is a trait of so many great American Jewish scientists, like Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman.

Friedman was born on April 7, 1979, at Mercy Hospital in San Diego. He was the son of a cardiologist and a producer of Jewish musicals.

He was raised in a home that loved science fiction and documentaries and books, said his wife, Kristen Keerma Friedman.

Her husband earned a bachelors degree in physics and astronomy at UC Berkeley and a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics at Harvard. Friedman later went on to do research at MIT, working with renowned physicists David Kaiser and Alan Guth.

Friedman joined the UCSD research faculty in 2019, partly because of the opportunities in La Jolla and his desire to be close to his family.

His specialty was quantum mechanics, which is used to explain how the universe works at scales so small theyre hard to conceive, and supernova, an explosion known as the last hurrah of a star.

With Brin and Keating, he also dove into esoterica, tackling subjects such as the physics of free will.

Did you all come here today of your own free will or was your interest somehow programmed into the universe all the way back to the Big Bang? Friedman asked at the start of a talk in 2015.

I really do believe we have free will. So my approach is to ask, Do the laws of physics permit it? And if not, what ingredients might be missing?

His wife Kristen said Monday, He was never so happy as when he was speaking to the public. He thrived on it.

Friedman is survived by his wife, his parents, his wifes parents, as well as her sister.

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Popular UC San Diego astronomer Andy Friedman dies at 41 - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Astronomers Create Largest 3D Map of the Universe That Resolved a ‘Troublesome Gap’ About the Outer – Tech Times

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Scientists revealed on Monday, July 20 the largest-ever 3D map of the universe.

In an AFP report,published by Yahoo News, hundreds of scientists from around 30 institutions across the globe worked on creating the 3D map. The project was launched more than two decades ago and studied more than four million galaxies.

Will Percival of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada said the project created the "complete story of the expansion of the universe." Also, Percival said the scientists' work shows "the most accurate expansion history measurements" created on an extensive scale of time in space.

(Photo : Sloan Digital Sky Survey Team, NASA, NSF, DOE)Scientists revealed on July 20 the largest-ever 3D map of the universe.

It used the latest observations of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which include data gathered after more than six years using an optical telescope in New Mexico.

Various galaxies and distance measurement studies also led to a better understanding of the expansion of the universe throughout billions of years.

The SDSS' recent study called the "extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey" (eBOSS) played an important role in creating the 3D map. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) Jean-Paul Kneib who initiated eBOSS in 2012, said the project aims to produce "the most complete 3D map of the Universe" during its lifespan.

While astrophysicists have already known that the Universe is expanding, they were not able to precisely measure the rate of expansion. However, with the 3D, they can reveal that the universe's expansion has started to accelerate and continue doing so.

This is due to the presence of dark energy, which follows Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, although its origin is not yet completely known.

The eBOSS observations showed inconsistencies in the rate of expansion, as compared with past studies on the early universe.

The "Hubble constant," which is the currently accepted rate, is 10% slower than the value calculated from the distances between the neighboring galaxies.

(Photo : NASA Hubble Space Telescope)These Hubble Space Telescope images showcase 2 of the 19 galaxies analyzed in a project to improve the precision of the universe's expansion rate, a value known as the Hubble constant.

Meanwhile, the University of Utah scientists Kyle Dawson said the researchers have resolved a "troublesome gap" throughout 11 billion years after continuous observations for five years.

The 3D map reveals filaments of matter and voids that more precisely define the structure of the universe since it was only 380,000 years old. It is the first time researchers have illustrated space objects to show the distribution of matter in the universe.

Researchers observed the oldest and reddest galaxies to show the showing how the universe looks six billion years ago while they focused on the blue ones for more distant eras. Besides, they used quasars, which are galaxies with an extremely luminous supermassive black hole to illustrate the ancient universe.

In July 2019, the University of Hawaii's Institute of Astronomy unveiledCosmicflows, a set of 3D maps that illustrate the large structure of the universe. According toNBC News, Honolulu-based cosmologist Brent Truly revealed the fruit of his work for more than three decades.

The scale of Truly's work is so vast that shrink entire galaxies to dots, and blended the information like pixels on a computer screen. Tully said the master plan included four basic elements, including clusters, sheets, filaments, and voids."

Read also:NASA: Congratulations! You're Still a Gemini!

2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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A nova, briefly visible in southern skies – EarthSky

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A nova is a star that suddenly pops into view. Early stargazers thought they were new stars. Today, we know differently. Image via Ernesto Guido (@comets77 on Twitter).

Veteran comet hunter Robert McNaught from Coonabarabran, Australia, must have been perplexed and then surprised and then delighted when he noticed something peculiar on CCD images of the night sky, taken July 15, 2020. It was a faint, but visible star where none had appeared before. Such a star is called a nova, from a Latin word meaning new. This one is in front of the southern constellation Reticulum. Once confirmed by other astronomers, and reported in The Astronomers Telegram on July 16, the object was quickly announced to the worlds community of variable star observers as Nova Reticuli 2020 (N Ret 2020).

Its a rare find: a nova visible to the eye!

Astronomers have determined that this outburst is of the sort called a classical nova. That is, its created in a double-star system where one star is a white dwarf and the other is an ordinary main sequence star, not dissimilar from our sun. These two stars are close together in space, orbiting one another on a timescale of only hours. Because theyre close and because the white dwarf is a collapsed object with very powerful gravity (a teaspoon of white dwarf material would weigh several tons) hydrogen from the main sequence star is drawn into an accretion disk around the white dwarf. Eventually, this hydrogen piles onto the surface of the white dwarf. As explained on the website Cosmos from Swinburne University:

As more hydrogen (and helium) is accreted, the pressure and temperature at the bottom of this surface layer increase until sufficient to trigger nuclear fusion reactions [the same process that causes our sun and most other stars to shine]. These reactions rapidly convert the hydrogen into heavier elements creating a runaway thermonuclear reaction where the energy released by the hydrogen burning increases the temperature, which in turn drives up the rate of hydrogen burning.

The energy released through this process ejects the majority of the unburnt hydrogen from the surface of the star in a shell of material moving at speeds of up to 1,500 km/s. This produces a bright but short-lived burst of light the nova.

A classical nova outburst can occur again and again in a system of this kind.

Nova Reticulum 2020 is associated with a known object in the database of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, labeled MGAB-V207 and categorized as a cataclysmic variable star. These sorts of stars are known to undergo classical nova outbursts due to mass transfer between a main sequence star and a white dwarf.

In a classical nova, a dense white dwarf pulls material from a companion star. The material piles up on the white dwarfs surface until thermonuclear processes begin, creating an outburst. Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech.

Can you see Nova Reticuli 2020? Possibly, if it hasnt faded yet, and if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, where the constellation Reticulum can be seen. On July 17, writing at Astronomy.com, Alison Klesman said Nova Reticuli 2020 was shining at around magnitude 5.

That is, its visible to the eye, but only barely.

If its still visible to the eye, you will need a very dark to see the nova. If you have that and a constellation chart to show you how to find Reticulum look first for the bright stars Alpha and Gamma Doradus, shown on the chart below (apologies for the blurriness of the chart; be sure to view it larger).

Good luck!

View larger. | If you live in the Southern Hemipshere, you can see the constellation Reticulum and the nova. You can pinpoint Nova Reticuli 2020 by looking roughly 5 degrees west of magnitude 3.3 Alpha Doradus and 4.25 degrees southwest of magnitude 4.3 Gamma Doradus. Notice that these 2 stars make a triangle with the nova. If the nova has gotten fainter, try using binoculars to bring it into view. Image via Alison Klesman/ Astronomy.com.

Congratulations to comet hunter Robert McNaught, who was the first to spot Nova Reticuli 2020! Image via Abc.net.au.

Bottom line: Astronomers have spotted a classical nova outburst in a type of variable star that involves a white dwarf orbiting a main sequence star. Nova Reticulum 2020 has been briefly visible from the Southern Hemisphere. At this writing, we do not know if it is still visible.

Via The Astronomers Telegram

Via the American Association of Variable Star Observers

Via Astronomy.com

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Enjoy the Stars in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Shortlist – My Modern Met

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Statue of Liberty Nebula by Martin Pugh (Australia). Shortlist, Stars & Nebulae.Photographed using narrowband filters to accentuate the energy levels occurring in each emission line, sulfur was mapped to red, hydrogen to green and oxygen to blue. An additional 4 hours per RGB channel were acquired and substituted into the image, particularly for the stars. While aptly titled the Statue of Liberty Nebula (NGC 3576), the irony is that this is a southern hemisphere object. At lower left in the image is NGC 3603 containing the Starburst Cluster. NGC 3576 is located in the Carina arm of the Milky Way at approximately 20,000 light-years distant.

Moved by the beauty of the stars, astrophotographers from around the world submitted their best work to the annual Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest. Run by Royal Observatory Greenwich each year, the competition is the place to view the artistry found in our sky. Thousands of photographs were submitted across 11 categories and, now, the 2020 shortlist has been revealed.

Now in its 12th year, the contest attracted photographers from 70 different countries who collectively entered over 5,200 images. The high quality of the shortlist means that the judges will have their hands full this year. From vibrant photos of the Northern Lights to faraway nebulae to incredible photos of our Sun, the list shows the wide spectrum of astrophotography.

Astronomy is one of the most accessible sciences and everyone has looked up at the night sky at one time or another and wondered what is out there in the cosmos, says competition judge and Royal ObservatoryGreenwich Astronomer, Dr. Emily Drabek-Maunder. Astrophotography bridges the gap between art and science, highlighting the natural beauty of our Universe. The goal of the Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition is to use these powerful photographs of space to engage the public with the big questions science is trying to answer, from the inner workings of a galaxy to how our Solar System came to be.

This years contest also features two special awards. The Annie Maunder Prize for Image Innovation celebrates photos created using publicly available images. Entrants have been asked to process and manipulate the raw data to create something of their own. The other new award is the Sir Patrick Moore Prize for Best Newcomer. This prize goes to people who have just started their journey into astrophotography during the last year and consider it a hobby. And to prove that one doesnt need to have fancy equipment to take a good photo, special consideration will be given to those who use an inexpensive starter kit.

The winners of the Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest will be announced on September 10, 2020. The overall winner will receive 10,000 (about $12,529) and category winners will take home 1,500 (approx. $1,880). All winners and shortlisted entries will be featured in a special exhibition at the National Maritime Museum starting in October 2020.

M16 by Alexios Theodorov (Russia). Shortlist, Annie Maunder Prize for Image Innovation.This entry tries to catch the feel of stargazing through basic optical instrumenta kind of Galileos telescope. Special processing of the image includes converting to Lab, channel mixing, increasing contrast, and applying filters, with the aim of illustrating that images with limited color range may be as stunning as full-color ones.

Northern Dragons Eye by Elena Pakhalyuk (Ukraine). Shortlist, Aurorae.The photographer loves to travel, especially exploring the north and chasing the Northern Lights. Trying to capture how ordinary things can take magical forms under the lights, the photographer selected and lit this rocky outcrop and waited for the aurora to work its magic.

Eruption. by Elena Pakhalyuk (Ukraine). Shortlist, Our Sun.The photographer was inspired to imagine what the Crimean peninsula would look like in the distant past, when thousands of volcanoes erupted on Earth. She used lighting and long exposure to illustrate this. The resulting image sees everything combined into one large panorama image and processed in a photo editor.

Solar System Through my Telescope by Vinicius Martins (Brazil). Shortlist, Best Newcomer.This image is a composition that the photographer made using their best images of the solar system. The individual images were taken between July 2019 and February 2020. All images were obtained using the same planetary imaging method and combined.

The Red Lake of Stars by Bryony Richards (USA). Shortlist, Skyscapes.Years ago, before over-fishing, Little Redfish Lake was called as such due to the vast numbers of salmon turning the lake a red color. The red coloration is no longer seen because of salmon, but the color of sunsets and airglow during the night still turn the waters a vibrant red. It is these beautiful warm echoes of red, combined with the mirror-like reflections of the Sawtooth Mountains in the distance and the alignment of the Milky Way with the mountains that make Little Redfish Lake one of the most spectacular places the photographer has ever shot at night. The photographer recalls that we were fortunate enough that night to have the lakeshore to ourselves, just three of us, and a rather excited dog who tried his best not to run into our tripods! We spent the sunset here, waiting for the stars to come out and the Milky Way core to rise, marveling at the red color of the water.'

M33: The Triangulum Galaxy by Rui Liao (China). Shortlist, Galaxies.This sharp image shows off M33s blue star clusters and pinkish star forming regions along the galaxys loosely wound spiral arms. In order to depict these star-forming regions, the photographer has taken a total of 26.5 hours of exposure time. For the photographer, the enjoyment comes in gazing at the red flowers in the image, mingled in blue star clusters, and the satisfaction that his efforts paid off.

Kynance Cove under the Milky Way by Louise Jones (UK). Shortlist, Best Newcomer.This image is only the photographers second attempt at shooting the Milky Way. It shows our galaxy over Kynance Cove in Cornwall, a beautiful spot with dark skis. It was taken on a cold, but fabulous night under the stars. As it was July, the sky was very blue, with full darkness only for about an hour. The foreground was taken at dusk and the sky is a stack of 4 images of 25 seconds taken later when the Milky Way appeared, the sky and foreground blended together in post-processing.

Stokksnes Aurora by Ben Bush (UK). Shortlist, Aurorae.This image captures the stunning Stokksnes looking to the Vestrahorn and the most powerful and beautiful night of aurora the photographer had ever seen. He traveled 1250 miles to try and capture his dream. In order to get the shot, the photographer ended up knee-deep in the North Atlantic in -6 degrees Celsius. The challenge was to capture the reflections in the water, on the black sand beach, and also not to over-expose the aurora. The photographer describes this as a truly awe-inspiring experience and one he feels blessed to have witnessed and captured on camera.

39% Crescent Moon by Richard Addis (UK). Shortlist, Our Moon.This image of the Moon at 39% illumination was captured through eleven videos of different areas, which were stacked and then stitched together. The saturation process revealed the mineral compositions in the Lunar Basalts on the surface. These vivid browns and blues are due to high concentrations of titanium and iron. The photographer loves the contrast along the terminator and the close-up detail and clarity of this image.

Beautiful Persian Gulf Nights by Mohammad Sadegh Hayati (Iran). Shortlist, People & Space.On one of the many hiking trails along the coastline, the photographer discovered this incredible lookout. The scale of the vista encouraged the photographer to capture a 360-degree panoramic image of the entire sky using 60 15-second exposures. The movement of the clouds meant that the photographer had a short time to capture the Milky Way. The photographer is pictured, enjoying the wonderland he stumbled across.

The Bat Nebula by Josep Drudis (USA). Shortlist, Stars & Nebulae.When a massive star explodes as a supernova it expels enormous amounts of materials, leaving behind one of the most beautiful examples of nebulae. This is the origin of the Veil Nebula, a large gas cloud in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. This image shows just a small fragment of this nebula. The beauty and fine detail of the interlaced wisps of oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, here mapped to their natural colors, is awe-inspiring. In this image, we can admire one of the life-building processes in the Universe.

Stargazing Giant by Dai Jianfeng (China). Shortlist, People & Space.This image is the view of the Milky Way rising above the Moai at Ahu Akivi. Ahu Akivi is a particularly sacred place in Easter Island in the Valparaso Region of Chile, looking out towards the South Pacific Ocean. The site has seven moai, all of equal shape and size, and is also known as a celestial observatory that was set up around the 16th century. The shot highlights the central bulge of the Milky Way, the constellation Scorpio, as well as the planets Jupiter and Saturn.

Total Solar Eclipse, Venus and the Red Giant Betelgeuse by Sebastian Voltmer (Germany). Shortlist, Our Sun.The 50th Anniversary of ESOs La Silla Observatory culminated with a breath-taking and very clear Total Solar Eclipse. In a very long process, the photographer calibrated, aligned, and stacked 96 frames together, revealing the streamers and the faint corona. Stars also became visible, especially the red giant Betelgeuse (left) which started dimming in the months after. For the different star brightnesses of the tiny star dots the photographer used his action set RealStars; so he was able to show the brightness of Betelgeuse in comparison to Bellatrix and the other stars during daytime.

Something Old, Something New by Jay Evans (Austraila). Shortlist, Skyscape.The incredible site of the old Lithgow Blast Furnace has been restored as a heritage icon in the area reflecting on the past history of the beginnings of the iron and steel industries in Australia. With some prior planning, visiting at night provides the mesmerizing opportunity to capture the Galactic Core in the Milky Way as it passes overhead. The photographer took this opportunity to try out the first Astro shots captured using a new high megapixel camera, yet to be released.

The Moon and the Shard by Mathew Browne (UK). Shortlist, Our Moon.After three failed attempts, the photographer finally got to shoot an image of Londons iconic Shard skyscraper with a full moon behind it. The moon races through frame meaning the photographer only had a few minutes to capture the shot.

NGC 2442 in Volans by Martin Pugh (Australia). Shortlist, Galaxies.The photographer was particularly excited to capture this image, having relocated his CDK17 to Chile in May 2019. He found that the acquired data was of spectacular quality and given the seemingly endless clear nights at that location, he was able to accumulate a great deal in a relatively short period of time. The photographer captured 3 hours of hydrogen and it was enough to accentuate the star birth regions occurring in the galaxy.

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Enjoy the Stars in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Shortlist - My Modern Met

MTM On The Road: Veteran’s Freedom Ride to Honor Veterans, Active Military – 9&10 News

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The Veterans Freedom Ride is taking place in Harrison on July 25.

Its a great way to honor veterans, current members of the U.S. military, first responders, and essential workers.

While you can register at the event, organizers are encouraging everyone to do so by July 19.

The 60-mile ride begins at Trails End Restaurant and Pizzeria and will take riders through the countryside to ride through Lake George, Farwell, Clare, and finish off at Trails End Pub in Leota.

When the ride is finished, there will be an afterglow party with games and a raffle.Organizers are hoping to have a good turnout to show the community support.

You can register here and order a t-shirt.All sales from apparel will benefit the Freedom Park Statue Project.

Our On The Road Crew, Gabriella and Stephanie, tell us everything we need to know about this years event.

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MTM On The Road: Veteran's Freedom Ride to Honor Veterans, Active Military - 9&10 News

My View: From the hamster wheel to the chipmunk’s freedom – Buffalo News

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And the outside world parks and historic cemeteries opened up to me. Instead of driving by, with my mind on where I was going, I was walking, noticing changes in trees, flowers, landscapes. Although much of life was still locked down, lived with masks, the parks offered a gripping mini-series, my first fully experienced spring. I taught myself how to look and, with my camera, to see.

My inquisitive chipmunk outlook was perfectly matched to the Science Museum Camera Clubs scavenger hunt for its members, which began last month. Ready, set, go: We have six weeks to take photographs of 20 items/ideas. First, I accomplished the easy ones. Flower was no problem; the lily pond in the Reinstein Woods offered me astonishing choices. To find reflection, an early morning visit showed me a Reinstein tree becoming its own Narcissus: It looked into its reflections in the water, got lost in its own beauty. My visits to Forest Lawn cemetery gave me unique solutions for circle, water, a place to worship, and statue. All required repeat visits light wasnt right, sky was boring.

For tree, I chose the one planted in 1879 on the lawn of the Richardson Olmsted Campus. I had been looking at it for years. Now, I salute it as an ancient, living through its second pandemic. It was like having an amazing insight about a friend of decades.

The hunt included disappointment (allium, chosen for the color purple in the flower garden in downtown Corfu, was over the hill), discovery (on the drive home from Corfu, a barn with holes in its roof under amazing clouds gave me an image for abandoned) and excitement (twice, I dashed out of my house at night, because exceptional sunsets might illuminate railroad tracks or city hall). I had become a scavenger hunter on the prowl. Id extricated myself from my hamster monotony, substituting chipmunk curiosity, a way to live with Covid, even after the scavenger hunt.

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‘We believe in the freedom to choose’: Anti-mask group to hold demonstrations in Alberta – CTV News

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EDMONTON -- A group against mandating the use of face masks is holding marches across Alberta on Sunday.

Organizers behind March to Unmask: Edmonton wrote the goal is "to let our provincial and municipal officials know that we believe in the freedom to choose whether or not to wear a mask."

Supporters will gather at the Alberta legislature at 1 p.m. and march towards city hall.

Similar marches are being held in Red Deer and Calgary.

According to the group's Facebook page, marches are being held across the country.

Masks are not currently required in Alberta but there have been calls to make them mandatory in public spaces.

Alberta's Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw recommends wearing a mask when it is not possible to keep a two-metre distance from others, especially indoors.

The province has committed to giving away 40 million non-medical masks, most through select restaurant drive-thrus.

The Calgary City Council will debate a municipal rule on Monday. Edmonton's mayor believes the issue of mandatory masks should be decided by the province.

Quebec's mandatory mask rule went into effect on July 18. Anyone age 12 and over must wear a mask in indoor public spaces.

Nova Scotia will require public transit drivers and passengers to wear a mask beginning on July 24.

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What is freedom, after all? | News, Sports, Jobs – Lock Haven Express

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KAREN ELIAS

Lock Haven

An Open letter to 76th state Rep. Stephanie Borowicz:

Dear Rep. Borowicz, Ive been thinking about Harriet Tubman. Devoutly religious and guided by revelations from God, she escaped from slavery and then returned to the south 13 times, braving the most dangerous conditions to help family members and friends escape to freedom.

I know you know about her because I heard you say, in a recent talk, that the movie Harriet was an inspiration to you someone who sees herself, like Harriet Tubman, leading her people to freedom, guided by divine inspiration.

But with all due respect, these are false equivalences, and ones whose repercussions are being felt right now in dangerous ways in our Pennsylvania communities.

The idea of freedom is being shamelessly bandied about by you and some of your fellow Republicans to characterize the Covid mandates issued by Governor Wolf as an unconstitutional overreach from which we must liberate! ourselves. In making this argument, you appear able to brush aside (seemingly without concern for those affected) the facts in front of us: That Covid cases are growing alarmingly across the country as states open up too soon, before having the virus safely under control.

As of this writing, the United States has over 3 million confirmed cases, with more new cases being reported every day in 41 of our 50 states. At least 24 states have paused or rolled back their reopening plans as deaths from the virus increase once again.

This, in itself, would be cause for concern as some folks in our community respond with venomous fury to the latest guidelines from our governor, making the case under your direction that their personal freedom is at stake and that nothing and no one will make them wear a mask.

Couching mask-wearing as a battle for freedom is a cynical attempt on the part of those on the right to formulate a life-and-death public health issue as a battle between true-blooded Americans and some imagined threat from the far left, in order to posit Republicans as innocent victims of a supposed power-grab.

But what else is concerning is that this battle is going on while African Americans and their allies are flooding the streets of our country to protest systems of racist policing that along with an entire litany, an entire catalogue, of oppressions have worked to keep Blacks decidedly unfree for hundreds of years.

Your own calls for freedom ring hollow in light of these realities.

Is your battle to cancel a temporary mandate to wear a mask the same as having to wage a civil war to rid the country of slavery?

Is your rage over the supposed curtailment of individual liberties the same as the terror evoked by years of lynching, racial cleansing, fire hoses, attack dogs, fire bombings, and cross burnings?

Is your frustration over not being able to walk bare-faced down the Main Street of your town the same as the despair Blacks must feel after centuries of having their mobility curtailed, their dreams deferred, their movements policed?

What is freedom, after all? I believe Harriet Tubman, one of Americas true freedom fighters, would agree that the fight for so-called liberation that you are waging is, in fact, a travesty.

If you should choose to join the battle for equal justice and opportunity for all, you would be most welcome. This fight is far from over, and it will take the good will of our elected representatives to enact much needed change.

In the meantime, Representative Borowicz, there is no knee on your neck.

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What is freedom, after all? | News, Sports, Jobs - Lock Haven Express

Thai Says War Crime Indictments Are Efforts against Kosovo’s Freedom – Exit – Explain Albania

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War crime indictments against him and other former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighters are part of 21-year-long efforts to undermine KLAs legacy and Kosovo peoples fight for freedom and statehood, President Thai has stated upon returning from his interview with prosecutors in The Hague.

In a statement on Saturday, Thai stressed three points:

The history of KLAs war and Kosovos independence and statehood cannot be rewritten; at the end of the process they will become clearer for all.

The expected trials are a continuation of 21 years of accusations, slander and fabrications against the KLA and Kosovo peoples efforts for freedom and a state. The process will once and for all seal the historic role of the KLA for the independent and democratic state of Kosovo.

Thai is more determined to take his personal efforts and sacrifice further in defending his country.

Last week, President Thai was interviewed for 4 days by prosecutors of the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutors Office in The Hague regarding a war crime indictment against him.

Fjal kye: Hashim Thai, indictment, KLA, Kosovo, Kosovo Specialist Chambers (KSC), Specialist Prosecutors Office (SPO)

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Thai Says War Crime Indictments Are Efforts against Kosovo's Freedom - Exit - Explain Albania

PCOO urges Duterte to certify Freedom of Information bill as urgent – Manila Bulletin

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The Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) said it requested that the Freedom of Information (FOI) bill to be part of President Dutertes urgent legislative agenda in his upcoming fifth State of the Nation Address (SONA) next week.

In a network briefing on Thursday, Communications Assistant Secretary Kris Ablan said the PCOO was seeking the issuance of certification for the FOI Bill as an urgent legislative measure of the Duterte administration.

We have requested the issuance of a certification of the FOI as an urgent legislative measure by the Office of the President or the inclusion of FOI as part of the Presidents legislative agenda for this year 2020, he said.

PCOO has been leading the expansion of the reach of FOI by fortifying efforts on implementing access to information at the local level.

According to Ablan, the PCOO had already drafted an admin version of the FOI bill that was presented to its FOI networks in the Senate and in the House of Representatives.

PCOO is committed to institutionalizing the FOI across all branches of government by Congress passing legislation on access to information which will mandate the disclosure of government information in the interim, he said.

Congress has yet to pass a measure that would harmonize and operationalize the peoples right to access information. It has been 30 years since the first Freedom of Information bill was filed by late Senator Raul Roco.

In December 2019, Quezon City Congressman Alfred Vargas filed House Bill No. 05776 also known as the FOI Act of 2019 which has adopted the feature proposed by the PCOO.

According to Ablan, it was important to immediately pass an FOI law in order to empower the public to keep the government in check by requesting information and to make the countrys bureaucracy even more open.

President Duterte signed Executive Order No. 2, or the Freedom of Information (FOI) Program, on July 23, 2016. The executive order covers all government offices under the Executive Branch. Ablan said the PCOO aims to expand the coverage of the existing order.

Salient features of the PCOOs draft bill include crafting a mechanism that will refer and transfer requests to appropriate agencies that should address the said request and creation of a records management system.

An oversight body or the FOI Commission will also be established, along with the creation of a central appeals and review committee (CARC) for all FOI compliant agencies in the three major branches of the governmentExecutive, Legislative, and Judiciary.

The Office of the Ombudsman will also have the power to review the decisions of the CARC.

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PCOO urges Duterte to certify Freedom of Information bill as urgent - Manila Bulletin

NASA and the ESA release the closest images ever taken of the sun – KXXV News Channel 25

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NASA and the European Space Agency on Thursday released the closest pictures ever taken of the sun that were snapped just a mere 48 million miles away from earth's nearest star.

The images were shot by the Solar Orbiter, a spacecraft that is the result of an international mission between the two agencies that completed its first close pass of the sun last month.

"These amazing images will help scientists piece together the suns atmospheric layers, which is important for understanding how it drives space weather near the Earth and throughout the solar system," Holly Gilbert, a NASA project scientist for the mission, said in a statement.

The Solar Orbiter snapped the pictures with six different imaging instruments.

"We didnt expect such great results so early," said Daniel Mller, a project scientist with the ESA, who added that the images confirm the Solar Orbiter is "off to an excellent start."

The feat required an immense amount of collaboration and ingenuity, especially amid the novel coronavirus pandemic which forced mission control at the European Space Operations Center in in Darmstadt, Germany, to shut down completely for over a week. The Solar Orbiter launched in February.

Moreover, during the period when each instrument on the Solar Orbiter was tested by scientists, the ESOC staff was forced to complete this work with just a "skeleton crew," the agencies said.

"The pandemic required us to perform critical operations remotely -- the first time we have ever done that," Russell Howard, the principal investigator for one of Solar Orbiter's imagers, said in a statement.

In addition to the stunning images of the sun, the mission also revealed some initial results with its in situ instruments that measured the space environment surrounding the spacecraft as it neared the sun.

ESA researchers say the new images revealed a new phenomenon on the sun that they dub "campfires."

"The campfires are little relatives of the solar flares that we can observe from Earth, million or billion times smaller," David Berghmans of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, the principal investigator of the EUI instrument, said in a statement.

"The sun might look quiet at the first glance, but when we look in detail, we can see those miniature flares everywhere we look," he added.

The next data set coming from the Solar Orbiter will reveal the temperatures and more data about these "campfires" and the sun's surface.

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NASA and the ESA release the closest images ever taken of the sun - KXXV News Channel 25

Despite a Skyward Mission, NASA Shaped the Study of Life on Earth – Undark Magazine

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In 1970, the biologist Lynn Margulis applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation. Three years prior, a small scientific journal had published Margulis paper in which she outlined a provocative theory about the evolution of life. She had hoped to continue that work with funding from one of the major federal agencies to support science and engineering research.

In a 1998 interview, she recalled what an NSF grant officer had told her: There are some very important molecular biologists who think your work is shit. According to Margulis, the officer also said her work appealed to small minds in biology. His message was clear: Your application is rejected, and dont bother applying again.

At first, Margulis didnt know where to turn for support, but there was a major new organization in science that offered promise: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA for short, had been founded just 12 years earlier, mere months after the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, the worlds first artificial satellite. Eager to do work on the origin of life, a NASA scientist approached Margulis in 1971 and agreed to provide seed funding for her research.

This was a key moment in modern biology, said Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science in an interview this year.

Up until then, many scientists embraced neo-Darwinism, a view of evolution in which change happens slowly and is driven by small, random genetic mutations that benefit an individual organism be it a finch, a giant tortoise, an orchid, or a barnacle. Over time, these changes may lead to the creation of new forms of life. Its a process that can be viewed in the fossil record. For example, just two years after Charles Darwin published his classic text, On the Origin of Species, a now-famous fossil was discovered of a creature with teeth, a long bony tail, and wings. Known as an Archaeopteryx, it is believed to represent a transitional form between dinosaur and bird.

But with NASAs support, according to James Strick (co-author of The Living Universe), and others, scientists began to study life from a completely different perspective. Rather than only using fossils hidden in rock layers to study evolution, some scientists turned to the wide variety of living bacteria. What they produced in the ensuing decades was a new, microbial view of the evolution of life one that today, according to Jan Sapp, a professor of biology and history at York University in Toronto, forms the foundation for evolutionary biology as it is routinely taught in classrooms across the world. It is a line of inquiry that has been buoyed by the emergence of advanced genetic sequencing tools that have allowed biologists to reconstruct, in increasingly exquisite detail, the steps taken over millennia of evolutionary change.

And all of that leaves NASA an agency associated largely with feats of technology and engineering, nominally devoted to interstellar exploration, and born of a bitter, militaristic, geopolitical space race as the unlikely catalyst for a revolution in, of all things, biology.

On a Friday afternoon, October 4, 1957, a satellite went up and by evening, the news had travelled around the world. The success of Sputnik seemed to herald a kind of technological Pearl Harbor, wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, echoing an observation from physicist Edward Teller. Suddenly, it seemed as if America were undergoing a national crisis of confidence, Halberstam wrote in his 1993 book The Fifties. It was the Cold War, with Russia and the U.S. competing to lead the world into the future. Sputnik declared at a stroke that the Russians were winning the race. A book called Why Johnny Cant Read and What You Can Do About It suddenly became a smash bestseller. Life magazine printed an article called Arguing the Case for Being Panicky. And in government, the White House and Congress shifted gears. Science was suddenly front and center.

Within 11 months of Sputniks launch, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had created the job of presidential science adviser, Congress had increased federal education funds by more than a billion dollars, and NASA was founded with a $100 million annual budget. The work NASA was founded to do was to put American astronauts into space. But scientists, led by Nobel Prize winner Joshua Lederberg, saw additional opportunities. In the weeks after Sputnik, Lederberg wrote memos to senior scientists around the country. A few months later he formalized those memos into an article for Science magazine.

In a 1998 interview, Margulis recalled what a grant officer had told her: There are some very important molecular biologists who think your work is shit.

Lederberg had seen Sputnik in the sky while on an academic trip in Australia. He was both exhilarated and frightened by what it portended for biology. Space had been breached. Much more would follow. Knowing a bit of history, he realized that humans had thoughtlessly contaminated every place they had visited on Earth. Now humans would soon be travelling to moons and planets. Since the sending of rockets to crash on the moons surface is within the grasp of present technique, while the retrieval of samples is not, we are in the awkward situation of being able to spoil certain possibilities for scientific investigation for a considerable interval before we can constructively realize them, he wrote in Science.

As Lederberg and other scientists saw it, this was humanitys first chance to look for life, or even for pre-life chemistry, beyond Earth. That meant, first, that spacecraft had to be sterilized in order not to be sampling their own waste. And second, it meant trying to figure out what to look for. Water, carbon, other basic chemicals? What would life look like if it were just getting started? What would it look like where there were few resources?

NASA had been created with distinctly political and military ambitions. But scientists like Lederberg worked hard to insert science in particular origin of life research into the agencys mission and to make the program civilian. Ultimately, NASA appointed a 40-year-old biologist, Richard S. Young, to lead a program devoted to exobiology, a term coined by Lederberg to refer to scientific work on extraterrestrial life.

It was clear to Young that exobiology did not fit comfortably inside the traditional biology of the great institutions of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and so Young recruited the first generation of exobiologists from people of mixed backgrounds, including Lederberg, Margulis, and a University of Illinois professor, Carl Woese.

When Margulis arrived in graduate school, the University of Wisconsin had just built a huge electron microscope, among the most powerful in the world. Through it, she could see things that had previously been invisible. Most notably, she observed tiny structures called mitochondria. There are hundreds, on average, inside each cell in a complex organism, and their function is to convert food into energy.

Looking into the microscope, Margulis seized on an idea that had been floated much earlier but had never gained much currency: that these mitochondria found in the cells of complex organisms from humans, to horses, to honeybees are remnants of once free-living bacteria. Even more important, the origin of eukaryotic cells of all the higher organisms came with the merging somewhere back in evolutionary history, of two simpler single-celled organisms. This symbiosis had become a new, more complex creature altogether. Margulis was soon on the path to showing how central that merger was, not just to individuals, but to evolution as a whole. After all, in this scenario, evolution occurred not gradually, but through a big, sudden change.

Many biologists found the notion of symbiosis hard to accept. The writer David Quammen asked a scientist whether Margulis was perceived back then as being radical or flakey?

Uh-huh, the scientist said, Right from the beginning I think.

But her ideas were proved right by the methods of another odd man out in science who was also funded by NASA: Carl Woese. A biophysicist and microbiologist, Woese felt himself an outsider in biological science, unappreciated and on the sidelines. Francis Crick, James Watson, and a few others were the stars in the field. I differed from the whole lot of them, Woese wrote. While others obsessed about the grand molecule that carries the information of life, DNA, Woese instead fell in love with the skinny, single-stranded ribosomal RNA that took the rich information stored in DNA and made it into working molecules the proteins of the living cell.

This molecule is the most conserved of all those in biology, meaning it can be found in every living thing and is likely to have existed for all the four billion years of life on Earth. If you were going to compare creatures to determine which came before and which were most similar, this would be the part to compare. For big animals, comparing necks and limbs and other features worked pretty well, but for the rest of living things which are microscopic and basically round or oblong that approach was useless. So, Woese and his team began to extract RNA from living organisms. They strung it out in bits on a sheet of wet plastic so that they could eventually compare the genetic sequences of microbes.

As Lederberg and other scientists saw it, space exploration was humanitys first chance to look for life, or even for pre-life chemistry, beyond Earth.

Woese thus pressed forward a new kind of fossil record one that marked similarities and differences between certain key molecules. In diving into this record, he discovered an entirely new form of life, with genetic sequences unlike bacteria and unlike the eukaryotes that made up bigger creatures in biology. He eventually called the unknown creatures Archaea.

Margulis had worked, not with molecular fragments of creatures, as Woese had, but up to her elbows in the slimy creatures themselves. Margulis and Woese were something of opposite characters. She was warm and social. Woese was somewhat reclusive and shy; he studied medicine for two years, then quit after the first two days of his rotation in pediatrics. He could party with a few very close friends, but rarely. The two each had a bit of disdain for the others specialty. Margulis thought of molecular biology as sterile and divorced from real life. Woese thought of the creatures of biology as messy and confusing, not at the intellectual center of things.

But when it came to proving Margulis hypothesis that the mitochondria in humans and all other animals and plants were bacterial, it was Woeses methods that gave the initial proof.

W. Ford Doolittle, a NASA-funded biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, was intrigued by Margulis work. Her ideas didnt seem all that flakey to me because there was some work already out there, even though it had come along decades before we had been born, he said. With advances in gene sequencing technology, he spotted an opportunity to answer the open question of whether mitochondria evolved from free-living bacteria. All a scientist needed to do was pinpoint the genetic sequence of mitochondrial RNA and then compare it with the sequences of bacterial RNA and of nuclear RNA. Which was it more like?

In the early 1970s, one of Woeses lab members arrived in Halifax and joined Doolittles group. Linda Bonen was an expert in the new sequencing techniques and in the ensuing years, her skills, along with help from another researcher, Michael Gray, would make such genetic comparisons possible. The work resulted in a number of papers, including one published in 1977 showing that the RNA in wheat mitochondria doesnt resemble the RNA inside wheats nucleus. Instead, it resembles the RNA of bacteria. Essentially, years of doubt and debate ended at once. Margulis hypothesis was demonstrated correct. In 1983 she won membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the single badge that in America says you are a top-ranking scientist. She later won the highest honor in American science, the National Medal of Science.

It all came in a string of work by outside-the-mainstream scientists working with fresh NASA money made possible by Sputnik. They remade the central theme of biology.

Years of doubt and debate ended at once. Margulis hypothesis was demonstrated correct.

There is a new biology, said Doolittle, in a telephone interview from Nova Scotia. Its microbially-oriented, rather than just animal- and plant-oriented. As a student, Doolittle learned about animals and plants. We thought of bacteria as an afterword, he said. Now its clear that the world is microbial, and this shift, says Doolittle, is due to the pioneering work of scientists like Margulis and Woese.

All of this has put new opportunities before students. Biology students now range all over the world, many to extreme environments, to seek out new bacteria and learn how they survive. One of the biggest projects in all of biology, the Deep Carbon Observatory, has completed its first 10 years exploring relations between bacteria and the planet, with more than 1,200 scientists in 55 nations.

The wider public has caught on, too. Margaret McFall-Ngai, an animal physiologist and biochemist at the University of Hawaii, illustrates it this way: If, getting on a plane, I make the mistake of saying I work on microbiology and human health, she says, her seatmate will inevitably ask about the human microbiome. The subfield devoted to the bacteria that live on and inside of us is one of many with roots in the new biology. And McFall-Ngai can predict how the conversation will go: Ill be in for two hours of questions.

Philip J. Hilts is a journalist and author, and formerly the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT.

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Despite a Skyward Mission, NASA Shaped the Study of Life on Earth - Undark Magazine

Food Triggers for Psoriasis: What to Eat and What to Avoid

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When you have psoriasis, reducing triggers is an important part of managing your condition and avoiding flare-ups. Psoriasis flare-ups can be caused by a variety of triggers. These triggers may include bad weather, excess stress, and certain foods.

Lets take a look at the foods that are most likely to trigger a psoriasis flare-up. There are some foods that are helpful to incorporate and certain diets to consider when creating a treatment plan for your psoriasis.

The foods listed below have been reported to trigger flare-ups, but they may not affect all those affected by psoriasis.

With psoriasis, its important to avoid foods that can trigger inflammation. Inflammation and the immune system response can lead to a flare-up.

Both red meat and dairy, especially eggs, contain a polyunsaturated fatty acid called arachidonic acid. Past research has shown that by-products of arachidonic acid may play a role in creating psoriatic lesions.

Foods to avoid include:

Celiac disease is a health condition characterized by an autoimmune response to the protein gluten. People with psoriasis have been found to have increased markers for gluten sensitivity. If you have psoriasis and a gluten sensitivity, its important to cut out gluten-containing foods.

Foods to avoid include:

Eating too many processed, high-calorie foods can lead to obesity, metabolic syndrome, and a variety of chronic health conditions. Certain conditions such as these cause chronic inflammation in the body, which may be linked to psoriasis flare-ups.

Foods to avoid include:

One of the most commonly reported triggers for psoriasis flare-ups is the consumption of nightshades. Nightshade plants contain solanine, which has been known to affect digestion in humans and may be a cause of inflammation.

Foods to avoid include:

Autoimmune flare-ups are linked to the health of the immune system. Alcohol is believed to be a psoriasis trigger due to its disruptive effects on the various pathways of the immune system. If you have psoriasis, it may be best to drink alcohol very sparingly.

With psoriasis, a diet high in anti-inflammatory foods can help to reduce the severity of a flare-up.

Almost all anti-inflammatory diets include fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables are high in antioxidants, which are compounds that decrease oxidative stress and inflammation. A diet high in fruits and vegetables is recommended for inflammatory conditions such as psoriasis.

Foods to eat include:

A diet high in fatty fish can provide the body with anti-inflammatory omega-3s. The intake of omega-3s has been linked to a decrease of inflammatory substances and overall inflammation.

Fish to eat include:

It should be noted that there is still more research that needs to be done on the link between omega-3s and psoriasis.

Like fatty fish, certain vegetable oils also contain anti-inflammatory fatty acids. Its important to focus on oils that have a higher ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids.

Oils to eat include:

A 2013 review of research literature showed that nutritional supplements may help reduce inflammation in psoriasis. Fish oil, vitamin D, vitamin B-12, and selenium have all been researched for psoriasis.

Benefits of supplementation with these nutrients may include a decrease in the frequency and severity of flare-ups.

Not all diets are good for psoriasis. Here are some options you may want to consider when choosing the best diet for your condition.

Dr. Pagano was well known within the health and wellness community for his approach to healing psoriasis through diet. In his book, Healing Psoriasis: The Natural Alternative, he describes how a healthy diet and lifestyle can improve psoriasis naturally.

Dr. Paganos dietary approach includes:

A 2017 survey of more than 1,200 people with psoriasis indicated that the Pagano diet is one of the most successful diets for improving psoriasis outcomes.

In people who have both psoriasis and gluten sensitivities, a gluten-free diet may provide some improvement. One small 2018 study found that even people with mild gluten sensitivities can benefit from following a gluten-free diet.

Of the 13 participants who were placed on a gluten-free diet, all observed an improvement in their psoriatic lesions. The biggest benefit was observed for those participants with the strongest sensitivity.

A vegan diet may also benefit people with psoriasis. This diet is naturally low in inflammatory foods such as red meat and dairy. Its high in anti-inflammatory foods such as fruits, vegetables, and healthy oils.

Like the Dr. Pagano diet, the vegan diet also showed favorable results in study participants with psoriasis.

Speak with your doctor about following a vegan diet, as you need to be careful to get all the nutrients you need.

The Mediterranean Diet is well known for its numerous health benefits, including a reduced risk of certain chronic diseases. This diet focuses on foods that are high in antioxidants and healthy fats. It limits foods that are often considered to be pro-inflammatory.

In a 2015 study, researchers found that people with psoriasis are less likely to be consuming a Mediterranean-type diet than their healthy counterparts. They also found that those who did adhere to elements of the Mediterranean diet had a lower disease severity.

The paleo diet places an emphasis on eating whole foods and avoiding processed foods. Since many whole foods contain anti-inflammatory compounds, this diet may prove to be beneficial for people with psoriasis.

Unlike Dr. Paganos diet, it involves eating plenty of meat and fish. However, the 2017 research suggests that the paleo diet is the third most effective diet in people with psoriasis.

The autoimmune protocol diet (AIP) focuses on eliminating foods that might cause inflammation. This diet is incredibly restrictive and primarily includes vegetables and meat, with certain oils and herbs mixed in.

It might not be appropriate for people with psoriasis, as too much meat is considered a trigger for flare-ups. In addition, its not intended to be a long-term dietary intervention.

This popular low-carb diet has many touted health benefits, such as weight loss and improved nutrient markers. Its true that reducing carbohydrates can help reduce processed food intake.

However, reducing carbohydrates also means reducing many anti-inflammatory fruits and vegetables. It also necessitates increasing protein from meat. Because certain keto foods can be triggers in people with psoriasis, this diet may not be recommended.

Many autoimmune conditions such as psoriasis can benefit from dietary changes. If you have psoriasis, you may find it beneficial to include plenty of anti-inflammatory foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and healthy oils.

You may also want to avoid pro-inflammatory foods, such as meat, dairy, and processed foods. These dietary changes may help to reduce the frequency and severity of your flare-ups.

Its always best to reach out to a physician or nutritionist for more information on how your diet can help control your condition.

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Food Triggers for Psoriasis: What to Eat and What to Avoid