All posts tagged: shaping

Coachella Favorite PinkPantheress Is Shaping a New British Wave

Coachella Favorite PinkPantheress Is Shaping a New British Wave

Published by Sam Flores

Alongside artists like RAYE, Olivia Dean, and Charli xcx, PinkPanthress is part of a new class of British musicians finding global traction by leaning further into their sound, instead of smoothing it out. “There’s definitely a raw spirit that the UK brings,” she says, calling ahead of a show in Vancouver. “I don’t really know how or why…but we tend to be more from the heart.” Vanity Fair: You’ve gone straight from a show in Mexico City into Weekend 1 of Coachella and back on tour. What’s that run been like so far? PinkPantheress: It’s been pretty hectic, but I’ve enjoyed every aspect of it. I really enjoy performing these days, so it’s been incredible being able to play like that. You’ve created a really immersive, almost cinematic show on tour, with characters like DJ Joe and backup dancers called Pinkettes. How do things change when you bring it to a festival like Coachella? When I got booked for Coachella, I realised there’d be fans there. But I’d guess maybe less than 50% of the …

Scientists reveal the hidden forces shaping how gravity works across the Universe

Scientists reveal the hidden forces shaping how gravity works across the Universe

Published by Jenni Sidey

Gravity behaves predictably in your daily life. Drop a ball, and it falls. Planets loop around stars. On paper, the same rules should also govern matter spread across the universe. But the farther astronomers look, the more that certainty gets tested. That question sits at the center of a new analysis of galaxy motions on enormous cosmic scales. The work used light from the cosmic microwave background, combined with a large galaxy survey, to ask something deceptively simple: does gravity still follow the familiar inverse-square law across vast stretches of space? For now, the standard picture appears to be holding up. Researchers like Patricio A. Gallardo from the University of Pennsylvania tested how galaxy groups and clusters move toward one another over distances of tens of millions of light-years. Their results lined up well with the expectations of the standard cosmological model, known as Lambda-CDM, which combines general relativity, dark matter, and dark energy. A competing idea, modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND, did not match the data nearly as well. Patricio Gallardo and his collaborators used …

How quantum science is shaping our future

How quantum science is shaping our future

Published by skeptic

Today, April 14, marks World Quantum Day – a global moment to step back and consider a branch of science that is both deeply counterintuitive and quietly essential to modern life. Across universities, labs, museums, and online platforms, people are coming together to explore quantum physics – not as an abstract curiosity, but as a field that already underpins the technologies we depend on and is set to reshape the decades ahead. Why April 14? The date itself is a nod to Planck’s constant – the number 4.14 reflecting its first digits (4.1356677×10⁻¹⁵ eV·s). This constant is foundational to quantum theory, defining the smallest units of energy and marking the point where classical physics gives way to something far stranger. It’s also surprisingly practical. Planck’s constant is now used to define the kilogram, tying our system of measurement directly to the laws of nature rather than physical artifacts. That shift captures the broader story of quantum science: once theoretical, now embedded in real-world systems. ©Shutterstock/RAJ0297 A global, open-ended celebration World Quantum Day is still relatively …

The hidden mantle flow shaping Yellowstone’s supervolcano

The hidden mantle flow shaping Yellowstone’s supervolcano

Published by Jenni Sidey

A sideways flow of hot mantle rock, not a deep plume rising from near Earth’s core, may be feeding one of the planet’s most closely watched supervolcanoes. That is the picture emerging from a new study of Yellowstone, where researchers built a three-dimensional model of western North America and traced how magma could form, move and collect beneath the region. Therefore, their conclusion points to a broad eastward “mantle wind” beneath the continent. This wind helps generate melt in the shallow mantle and helps shape the tilted underground system that supplies Yellowstone’s volcanism. The work, published in Science, comes from a team at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It tackles a long-running question at Yellowstone, where three caldera-forming eruptions have occurred in the past roughly 2 million years. These include the Huckleberry Ridge supereruption 2.1 million years ago and the Lava Creek supereruption 0.63 million years ago. Beneath Yellowstone For years, supervolcanoes were often pictured as holding large, long-lived magma chambers in the crust, pools of liquid melt …

Scientists reveal the hidden forces shaping the human microbiome

Scientists reveal the hidden forces shaping the human microbiome

Published by Jenni Sidey

The human gut is alive with activity. Millions of microorganisms compete, cooperate, and coexist in ways that can profoundly affect your health. Yet, for all the research on which bacteria live in our intestines, scientists have only begun to understand the invisible rules that govern their communities. A new study by Pyry Sipilä of the University of Helsinki, Finland, and colleagues sheds light on how these microbial neighborhoods organize themselves and hints at ways they might one day be guided to improve health. The research examined microbial communities not just as collections of species but as dynamic systems. Instead of cataloging who is present, the scientists focused on how these species interact. Their goal was to understand why certain community “types” emerge in some people and not others, even when diet and environment are similar. “Our findings suggest that the overall network structure is less important than the strength of interactions among key species,” they write. In other words, it’s not just which microbes exist in the gut, but which ones strongly influence the rest …

The ‘Heat 2’ Cast Is Shaping Up. Here’s Everything We Know

The ‘Heat 2’ Cast Is Shaping Up. Here’s Everything We Know

Published by Jenni Sidey

The story also jumps forward in time to Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, where Shiherlis becomes enmeshed in a complex global black market supply-chain drama between two Taiwanese expat families competing for dominance of the illicit import/export trade. It sounds complicated, but not much more complicated than it would be if I tried to describe Michael Corleone’s foray down to Cuba with Hyman Roth in Godfather II with a one-sentence synopsis. The timelines eventually braid, and the story reaches a thrilling conclusion set in Los Angeles in the year 2000. The novel was a canny move by Mann, who can be seen as in the midst of a decade plus long box office cold streak. Blackhat reportedly made $20 million on a $70 million budget while Ferrari made $43.6 million on a budget of $95 million. There is a case to be made that this does not matter because Ferrari is pretty good and Blackhat rules—but that aside, if you’re trying to talk a studio into giving you $150 million for a set-piece-packed thriller with …

Young Latinos – and their commitment to social justice – are shaping the future of the Catholic Church

Young Latinos – and their commitment to social justice – are shaping the future of the Catholic Church

Published by Sam Flores

(The Conversation) — On Ash Wednesday, 2026, two Roman Catholic priests and a religious sister entered an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, to celebrate Mass with detainees inside. It might seem like a simple, routine event: a religious service to mark the start of Lent. But the Mass represented a legal win for the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership, based in Chicago. Among its founders are Michael N. Okińczyc-Cruz and Joanna Arellano-Gonzalez, a young married couple dedicated to advocacy for migrant rights. The coalition and other Catholic leaders sued the Trump administration after attempts to bring spiritual care to detainees in 2025 were blocked. On Feb. 18, 2026, a federal judge ordered authorities to allow clergy inside for Ash Wednesday. That same day, Catholics in Communion, a new coalition of ministry organizations, religious orders, academic leaders and parish partners, launched its Season of Faithful Witness campaign. Spearheaded by faith-based community organizers such as Joseph Tomás McKellar and Sergio Lopez, the initiative invites Catholics to practice solidarity by praying and advocating on …

How lessons from Iraq are shaping Starmer’s Iran response

How lessons from Iraq are shaping Starmer’s Iran response

Published by Sam Flores

When Keir Starmer briefed the House of Commons on the situation in Iran, the UK’s prime minister ended with a clear message: “We all remember the mistakes of Iraq, and we have learned those lessons.” Tony Blair’s decision to bring British forces into the Iraq war in March 2003 has long loomed over the Labour party and British foreign policy. In 2011, then prime minister David Cameron was keen to stress to parliament that any action in Libya would “not [be] another Iraq”. Two years later, the same reassurance was provided for intervention in Syria – only this time, the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, led the opposition to block military action. For the current prime minister, the lessons from the events of 2003 were to ensure the legality of any military intervention, and that a clear plan for the future was in place. It is unsurprising that he has picked up on the question of legalities, given his previous career. However, Starmer also specifically campaigned against action in Iraq. On the eve of the war, …

New simulations reveal the hidden forces shaping ‘snowman’ worlds beyond Neptune

New simulations reveal the hidden forces shaping ‘snowman’ worlds beyond Neptune

Published by Jenni Sidey

On a frigid orbit beyond Neptune, some of the solar system’s smallest worlds project a strange silhouette. Two rounded lobes, pressed together with a narrow “neck,” like a snowman that never melted. Those shapes are common enough to demand an explanation. In the Kuiper Belt, about 10 percent of planetesimals are “contact binaries,” two bodies that touch and stay touching. NASA’s New Horizons made the form famous in January 2019 when it flew past the Kuiper Belt object (486958) Arrokoth, a bilobate world with a smaller lobe called Wenu and a larger one called Weeyo. A new set of simulations led by Michigan State University graduate student Jackson Barnes argues that the snowman look can emerge from a basic process: gravitational collapse. The work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A common shape needs a common origin Scientists have floated plenty of ideas for how contact binaries form, including later-life events that push two once-separated partners together. Some proposals involve gas drag, Kozai–Lidov oscillations, or combinations of effects that change a …