A post shared on social media purports that a NFL referee ejected five players for kneeling during the National Anthem. Verdict: False The claim stems from a satirical website. Fact Check: Kansas City Chiefs Tight End Travis Kelce responded to the controversial statements made by teammate Harrison Butker during college commencement address at Benedictine College, NBC News reported. Kelce […]

'Reminded me of how I was scared'

'Not quite sure if we’ve hit the bottom yet'

'The discovery of Musankwa sanyatiensis is particularly significant'

News Welcome to Derry Bill Skarsgård Will Continue His Reign of Terror in the It Prequel Series We’ll all float back to Derry By Molly Templeton | Published on May 31, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share It is still coming. And by “it” I mean the It prequel series, which has the working title Welcome to Derry. Announced in 2022, the Max show was, at the time of announcement, “said to include the origin story of Pennywise the Clown.” It wasn’t clear at first whether Bill Skarsgård, who suited up as Pennywise for the movie, would be returning—but now his involvement is confirmed. Deadline reports that Skarsgård will star in and executive produce the series, joining previously announced stars Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, James Remar, and Chris Chalk. The series reportedly “stems from” a story by It director Andy Muschietti and producer Barbara Muschietti, based on Stephen King’s original novel It. Andy Muschietti is on board to direct four of the series’ nine episodes. Skarsgård is really having a moment, and one that doesn’t always involve clown makeup. He was just in John Wick 4 and the possibly even-more-blood-soaked Boy Kills World; his odd-looking turn in the reboot of The Crow hits screens later this summer; and he’s playing vampire Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu remake, which is—festively—due out for this year’s holiday season. There’s no word yet on when Welcome to Derry (or whatever it ends up being officially titled) premieres, but eventually, Pennywise will be waiting for you on Max. [end-mark] The post Bill Skarsgård Will Continue His Reign of Terror in the <i>It</i> Prequel Series appeared first on Reactor.

Don't Kid Yourself, They Are Antisemites

NY Magazine: Trump Prosecutors Contorted the Law

Iceland is famous for its volcanic activity, from the ash cloud produced by Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 that grounded flights, to countless news reports of recent eruptions.Footage from the latest eruption shows the lava spreading near the Reykjanes peninsula, the fifth eruption in that area since December. According to the BBC, the small fishing town of Grindavik was evacuated as well as the Blue Lagoon Spa, a popular tourist site fed by geothermal activity; workers at Svartsengi power plant were also evacuated.          Updates from the Icelandic Met Office report that the main part of the fissure is 2.4 kilometers long (1.5 miles). They also write that there has been “significantly reduced volcanic activity” since May 30. “Activity on the eruptive fissure at the Sundhnúkur crater row has decreased significantly. The activity in the eruption has remained similar during last night and this morning and the volcanic tremor has been stable since late last evening. No explosive activity has been seen since yesterday afternoon when steam explosions occurred due to lava flowing into fissures and came into contact with groundwater at Hagafell,” an update reads.Víðir Reynisson, the director of the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management, stressed that people should not block the movement of emergency personnel and should not stop to take pictures. “We are also always worried when we see people stopping on the Reykjanesbraut road and leaving their cars to take pictures, but the Civil Protection has put great emphasis on not stopping on the Reykjanesbraut road to watch the volcano,” Reynisson told the Iceland Monitor. In February, it was reported that the flow of magma in November 2023 had been so great that it broke the world speed record for the fastest lava ever recorded. 

Everyone knows about the stacked rocks of Stonehenge in South West England, but on the country's east coast, there’s another prehistoric monument that’s no less fascinating. Known as Seahenge, a researcher has re-investigated why the mysterious structure was built over 4,000 years ago. Seahenge, also known as Holme I, was only discovered in 1998 when shifting sands revealed the monument along a beach in the village of Holme-next-the-Sea, north Norfolk. It consisted of 55 half-split oak trunks set in an oval shape measuring 7 by 6 meters (23 by 20 feet). In the center, a larger upturned oak stump had been placed in a pit. Just 100 meters (328 feet) away, another similar structure was found, known as Holme II. The tree rings found at both structures suggest they were built at the same time around 2049 BCE – a few hundred years after the iconic sarsen stones were placed at Stonehenge around 250 kilometers (155 miles) away.It has previously been suggested that the dual structures were created to mark the death of a prominent individual, such as a warrior or a local chieftain, while others have speculated they were used for sky burials, where the bodies of the dead would be placed inside to be pecked and carried away by carrion-eating birds.In a new study, Dr David Nance from the University of Aberdeen puts forward another theory using a combination of climatic and environmental data, astronomic and biological evidence, and regional folklore.He argues that Holme I was constructed during a bitterly cold climatic period, perhaps for rituals intended to summon the return of warm weather.“Dating of the Seahenge timbers showed they were felled in the spring, and it was considered most probable that these timbers were aligned with sunrise on the summer solstice,” Dr Nance, a researcher at the University of Aberdeen’s Department of Geography and Environment, said in a statement. Holme I on display at the British Museum as part of their World of Stonehenge exhibition.Image credit: -JvL-/Flickr (CC BY 2.0 DEED)“We know that the period in which they were constructed 4,000 years ago was a prolonged period of decreased atmospheric temperatures and severe winters and late springs placing these early coastal societies under stress,” he added.While both monuments were built to ward off this existential threat, he believes they had slightly different roles. Holme I, he argues, was designed to resemble the bird "cage" described in folklore, intended to keep an unfledged cuckoo singing and thus prolong the summer.“Summer solstice was the date when according to folklore the cuckoo, symbolising fertility, traditionally stopped singing, returned to the Otherworld and the summer went with it,” Dr Nance added.“The monument’s form appears to imitate two supposed winter dwellings of the cuckoo remembered in folklore: a hollow tree or ‘the bowers of the Otherworld’ represented by the upturned oak-stump at its centre. This ritual is remembered in the ‘myth of the pent cuckoo’ where an unfledged cuckoo was placed into a thorn bush and the bird was ‘walled-in’ to extend the summer but it always flew away,” he explained.Meanwhile, Holmes II was created as a burial mound. Nance points to evidence that shows “sacred kings” of Iron Age Ireland and Britain were sacrificed if misfortune fell on the community in an attempt to appease the goddess of Venus. Against the backdrop of harsh winters and hard times, the local king offered himself to the god and was laid to rest here, Nance proposes. “Evidence suggests that they were ritually-sacrificed every eight years at Samhain (now Halloween) coincident with the eight-year cycle of Venus. The fixtures in Holme II that were thought to hold a coffin, are orientated towards sunrise on Samhain in 2049 when Venus was still visible,” he noted. The new study is published in GeoJournal.

The most up-to-date version of the periodic table contains 118 elements. It’s easy to imagine you can find the heaviest by scanning to the last element on the table, but that only gives one of several answers.What Do We Mean By Heaviest?You’ve probably heard the old trick question; “Which is heavier, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?” It’s based on the fact that people confuse weight with density. The answer of course is that since “pound” (or kilogram for most of the world) is a measure of weight, the two are equally heavy. If you doubled the quantity of feathers, they’d be heavier than the lead.Consequently, any element can be the heaviest if you have enough of it. Hydrogen is the lightest element per atom, but as the most common element in the universe, if you brought it all together it would be heavier than anything else. Which Element Has The Heaviest Atoms?Not many people are probably looking for the answer above, and if they were they’d ask it another way. We’re guessing most of those seeking the heaviest element mean: which element has the heaviest atom?In that case, the answer is pretty much a draw. Oganesson, that element at the bottom right of the periodic table, has 118 protons. The only isotope of it we have managed to make has 176 neutrons, for a combination of 294 nucleons, the main determinant of an atom’s mass.However, the next atom to the left of it on the periodic table is tennessine, and we’ve made two isotopes of that. One of those is lighter, but the other also has 294 nucleons – one less proton and one more neutron. When not ionized, it will also have one less electron.Neutrons are 0.14 percent heavier than protons, so on that count tennessine might seem to win, if only by a hair. Even adding the extra electron to the equation doesn’t fully bridge that tiny gap. However, nuclei also have binding energy which can add to their mass. We haven’t been able to find any estimates of the binding mass of the two nuclei, to see whether that makes any difference, so all we can really say is that oganesson and the heavier isotope of tennessine are in a photo-finish for this prize. What If Short-Lived Atoms Don’t Count?Neither oganesson nor tennessine stick around long enough to have practical applications – they both have half-lives measured in milliseconds. Many people might not consider that to count, since you wouldn’t even notice them before they are gone.The heaviest stable isotope (that is one that does not radioactively decay at all) is lead-208. However, there are also some much heavier isotopes that easily last long enough to study. We only discovered fairly recently that bismuth-209 is faintly radioactive – with a half-life a billion times longer than the age of the universe these things are hard to notice. You can set arbitrary limits on how long an atom needs to stick around in order to count. Depending on whether the half-life needs to be more than a minute, more than a day or more than a year you will get different answers.But What About The Densest?Getting back to the trick question referred to at the start, sometimes when people say heaviest they’re using (incorrect) shorthand for density not weight/mass.You might think that the answer to the densest element question would be the same. In general, materials made from atoms with heavy nuclei also tend to be denser at a particular temperature than those with light nuclei. However, the correlation is a long way from perfect. The density of oganesson and tennessine, while high by the standards of the materials we encounter most often, are thought to be a long way off the maximum. That’s because their outer electrons are probably relatively dispersed compared to some other heavy elements, keeping the nuclei further apart. We don’t know this for certain, because of that annoying millisecond half-life thing, but there is plenty of reason to expect it, based on elements with longer half-lives.It is thought hassium and meitnerium are each about four times as dense as oganesson and tennessine, but again we have no reliable measurements, and in particular can’t tell which of these two is denser,The two densest elements that have ever been measured are iridium and osmium. We know these have a density of 22.6 g/cm2, but there are conflicting reports of which of the two is slightly heavier. If anyone really wants to know the answer, they are welcome to send a substantial stock of each to IFLScience and we promise to measure the weight and volume of each precisely. It would need to be quite a large stock though, for accuracy, and at a price of thousands of dollars an ounce for iridium we don’t guarantee to send it back.All “explainer” articles are confirmed by fact checkers to be correct at time of publishing. Text, images, and links may be edited, removed, or added to at a later date to keep information current.