This is friggin' cool! Literally

This December, Sir Paul McCartney is set to electrify audiences in the UK with his ‘Got Back Tour.’ Having ignited Glastonbury in 2022 with a promise to return, the Beatles icon is now poised to deliver unforgettable evenings in London and Manchester as part of his tour that kicked off in 2022. Paul McCartney, at 81, still a powerhouse of musical history, will celebrate over six decades of his timeless tracks from his solo work, Wings, and the Beatles, promising a vibrant celebration woven from the soundtracks of our lives. “I’m thrilled to wrap up my year and the 2024 The post Paul McCartney Will End His ‘Got Back Tour In The UK In Dec 2024 appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

A startup has found a way to create high-quality plastic products like water tanks, boat frames, and more, all using the power of the sun, and has created a portable factory that can be transported anywhere in the world via shipping containers. The speed and flexibility of the factory system make it an incredible asset […] The post Sunbeam-Powered Portable Factory Manufactures Zero-Emission Plastic Goods Anywhere There’s Trouble appeared first on Good News Network.

News Circles Netflix’s Cult Horror Film Circle Is Getting a Sequel It’s not the Circle of life, I can tell you that much. By Molly Templeton | Published on June 17, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Almost 10 years ago, Netflix released a horror film called Circle, which does not have a “the” and is not to be confused with the Dave Eggers novel The Circle (or its adaptation) or the reality show The Circle. In this geometrically named film, 50 strangers find themselves in a very dangerous room under very terrible circumstances: The room keeps killing people. But it’s not really the room. It’s the people in it. Now, Michael Nardelli (who played Eric in and produced the first film) and producer Brent Stiefel are teaming up with writer (and actor) Devon Graye for a sequel—named, in classic horror movie naming convention, Circles. Notably, Variety’s piece about the sequel does not mention the writer-directors of the original film, Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione. We only get one sentence about the plot of Circles: “17 years after being pawns in a cruel game of psychological warfare, the survivors of an invasion face a new threat.” Presumably—spoiler alert for a decade-old film!—this means Circle survivor Eric meets up with other humans who were put through the same incredibly awful process by the aliens whose invasion was revealed at the end of the first film. One can only imagine what future horrors are in store for these maybe not-so-lucky survivors. No casting has been announced for Circles, but if you would like to experience the first movie in preparation, it is on Netflix. [end-mark] The post Netflix’s Cult Horror Film <i>Circle</i> Is Getting a Sequel appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV house of the dragon Blood, Cheese, Grief, and an Unspeakable Crime: Let’s Discuss the House of the Dragon Season 2 Premiere The Targaryen saga returns, filled with grief and fury, as a poorly planned act of revenge goes horribly, tragically awry… By Tyler Dean | Published on June 17, 2024 Credit: HBO Comment 1 Share New Share Credit: HBO After nearly two long years, House of the Dragon, HBO’s prequel to Game of Thrones, is finally back—and back with a vengeance. Vengeance is, of course, the theme of the second season’s inaugural episode (and the show itself), and it’s time to get into all the unsettling and tragic twists and turns of this bloody dynastic struggle. If you’re new to my coverage of HotD, these weekly articles are a little bit of everything—part review, part recap, and mostly an exploration of the ways in which the show adapts its source material: Fire & Blood, George R.R. Martin’s 2018 history of the Targaryen dynasty. (Note: There will be spoilers for the episode from this point on.) The Title Episode one is entitled “A Son for a Son.” This is obviously in reference to the Grand Guignol murder of young Prince Jaehaerys, the son and heir of Aegon Targaryen and his sister-wife Helaena, which we will talk about, in depth, below. It is also the name of the fourteenth chapter in Fire & Blood (and the second chapter in the section that Gyldayn names “The Dying of the Dragons,” his cacophemism for the Dance of the Dragons). That chapter covers the deaths of both Lucerys and Jaehaerys and, in that way, the finale of season 1 and the premiere of season 2 are of a piece, mirrors of one another—the two irrevocable inciting incidents that make war inevitable.  Unraveling the New Opening Credits Credit: HBO I had hoped, after the somewhat uninspired choice to reuse Ramin Djawadi’s iconic theme from Game of Thrones, that HotD would give us a new theme song in season 2—possibly a rearrangement. Alas, we still have the original. But in brighter news, the second season has updated the first season’s excellent titles, implying that every season will have a unique, thematically appropriate opening.  The first season titles took their inspiration from Viserys Targaryen’s model of the doomed city of Old Valyria. As the camera moved through the model, blood flowed between game piece dials, giving us the history of the Targaryen bloodline. In similar fashion, these new titles show a Bayeux Tapestry-style series of banners being embroidered while being simultaneously stained with blood.  I’m fairly certain we see the following tableaux: A panel depicting Valyrian blood magic including a figure (with the silver-gold hair native to Valyria) kneeling in supplication before a human-headed dragon, fiery wings bursting from its back. It potentially depicts the creation of the dragons themselves. Septon Barth, one of the scholars often cited in Fire & Blood, theorizes that dragons were once mundane wyverns that had been bred and ensorceled to breathe fire through Valyrian intervention. We see a blood-letting knife (possibly Aegon’s fateful dagger) and a row of black candles which may represent the glass candles—obsidian artifacts, imported from Valyria and said to burn like candles under the care of sorcerers who used them to communicate across long distances.  A panel depicting a figure who might be Daenys the Dreamer cradling a dead or sleeping relative in her arms while on dragonback. Daenys is the prophetic Targaryen ancestor who moved the clan to Dragonstone, having foretold the Doom of Valyria a century before it occurred. Her visions are what ensured that the Targaryens were the only of the great Valyrian Dragonlords to survive the Doom. She is also the first of the Targaryens to have prophetic visions, or “dragon dreams” as they are often called. Viserys I believed he had them, as did Rhaegar and Daenerys. Given the importance of dragon dreams to HotD specifically, it makes sense that Daenys would be singled out as the original Targaryen ancestor of note.  A panel depicting the Doom of Valyria—Martin’s analog for the fall of Rome or the sinking of Atlantis. Here, it’s shown as a fiery apocalypse where all fourteen of the Valyrian peninsula’s active volcanoes erupted at once, turning Valyria into a cursed ruin inhabited by monsters and demons. The somewhat Mayan design of Valyria has remained consistent with Viserys I’s model. Panels depicting Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters flying from Dragonstone to the mainland of Westeros to conquer the Seven Kingdoms. The first Targaryen king and his queens are depicted riding their massive dragons, Balerion, Meraxes, and Vhagar (who is the only one of these original dragons that survives into the timeline of the series). We also get panels depicting important moments from the conquest—the burning of Harrenhal and the surrender of Torrhen Stark, referred to as “the King who Knelt.” Torrhen is referenced at the start of this episode and this is a season where Harrenhal will be of key importance, so this provides some solid foregrounding of two pertinent episodes from the older war.  A panel references the building of the Red Keep and the death of Maegor the Cruel, Aegon I’s son and the third Targaryen king of Westeros. Maegor built the Red Keep (and all its secrets), kidnapped noble women to be his wives, antagonized the church, had loyal subjects murdered, and finally died, impaled on the Iron Throne. Maegor is the enduring poster boy for all bad (read: congenitally insane) Targaryens. He is the model for Aerys II (the Mad King) and Joffrey. According to Archmaester Gyldayn (the in-world writer of Fire & Blood) Rhaenyra will come to be known by the cruel sobriquet “Maegor with Teats.” Even in Gyldayn’s account this feels somewhat undeserved and, of course, HotD is going out of its way to humanize and complicate all of its characters so I suspect that the title, if it is used at all, will serve to make a point about the biased cruelty of history.  Below the image of Maegor is a section of tapestry depicting the ascendant King Jaehaerys I and his sister-wife, Good Queen Alysanne. History remembers them as inverse of Maegor: wise and benevolent Targaryens whose Valyrian blood (and the incestuous practices they employed to keep that blood in sufficient concentration) makes them exceptional rather than freakish. Jaehaerys and Alysanne’s famous trip to the Wall and their support of the Night’s Watch are also mentioned in the opening of this episode. Gyldayn’s account complicates the narrative of Jaehaerys, pointing out that, while his reign may have been peaceful, he was a terrible father and he left no heir as a result of his bad stewardship of his children. This brings us to a panel depicting the Great Council of 101 AC, where the elderly Jaehaerys I names his grandnephew Viserys as his heir, spurning his grandniece Rhaenys, who has the better claim. This served as the opening scene of season 1, and the inciting incident of the succession crisis that looms over the entire show. The last three panels all depict moments from the show itself, and I would expect these to update as we move through the season, much as the first season updated its bloodline as new characters were born. The events include Rhaenyra’s wedding to Laenor Velaryon which, in the show, replaces Viserys’ wedding anniversary dinner as the moment when the Black and Green factions are born. Note that, in the tapestry, there is already false memory at play: Rhaenyra’s wedding dress, in the show, is largely white but the moment captured in the tapestry shows her wearing a black dress. Much like Fire & Blood’s central conceit of being an unreliable history compiled from various biased sources, the show itself is rewriting the moment to suit later factions, with black and green dresses already in place. The titles also include an unfinished panel that shows images of Aegon II and Rhaenyra at their separate coronations. They end on the death of Lucerys Velaryon, the tragic finale of last season where Rhaenyra’s second son and his dragon, Arrax, are killed—accidentally, it turns out—by her nephew Aemond Targaryen and his dragon, Vhagar.  This whole tapestry motif, in addition to referencing the importance of tapestries as a record of Westerosi history, is likely a reference to Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban) who, in her Cassandra-esque prophecies last year was obsessed with spiders and weaving. With these new titles in place, it’s probably no coincidence that this first episode features her so heavily. The Stark Conspiracy Credit: HBO We have an interesting opening right off the bat. HotD knows how to pull some of the most effective nostalgia strings on TV, and opening with the Stark theme was an awesome choice. We’re given our first look at Cregan Stark (Tom Taylor), the young lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North in this era, as well as getting some information on the levies that House Stark pays to the Night’s Watch.  It’s also a depiction where the show either risks disappointing fans of the books or possibly sets up for something later in the season. In the books, much is made of Jacaerys Velaryon’s trip North, including rumors of a relationship/secret marriage with Cregan’s bastard sister, Sara Snow, and a secret stash of dragon’s eggs left at Winterfell. The possibility is much theorized about, in part because it lends credence to theories about the Song of Ice and Fire-era Winterfell containing the unhatched eggs. Even if the eggs and Sara Snow are the fabrication of Mushroom—the court fool who serves as Fire & Blood’s most licentious primary source—the books also give us “the Pact of Ice and Fire” wherein a Stark and Targaryen descendent will marry. Seeing as this does not come to pass officially, many book-readers theorize that the pact was fulfilled in secret by Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, resulting in the still-unrevealed-in-the-books circumstances of Jon Snow’s birth.  The show seems to have eschewed all of this as there isn’t much time this season for Jace (Harry Collett) to make a second journey. We do get an invocation of the White Walkers, specifically with regards to the momentous visit of King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne. Alysanne, especially, is an important figure in the North, having expanded the lands governed by the Night’s Watch and paid for the refurbishment of Snowgate (thereafter named Queensgate), one of the castles along the wall. This is another important link between the Targaryens and Starks long theorized to be pertinent to the books. In addition to establishing a Targaryen interest in keeping the Wall well defended (potentially because of their knowledge of Aegon’s dream and the Song of Ice and Fire), it also clues readers into the fact that dragons are loath to fly beyond the Wall, reminding us of the elemental opposition of dragons and White Walkers.  Blood and Cheese Watching folks adapt A Song of Ice and Fire is always a fascinating process. The original show famously added more sex and on-screen sexual assault into the narrative to the understandable dismay of most viewers. It cut down on some of the more fantastical elements and often softened the violence of the novels—Tyrion keeping his nose on the show may have been about makeup time and budgeting concerns but it also somewhat blunted Martin’s perpetual interest in the ongoing horrors of war and the true permanent scars, both physical and mental, that it leaves. There are also some things that you simply can’t show on television. This is why it is so fascinating to see how the show has altered the death of Prince Jaehaerys.  Archmaester Gyldayn reports that the murderous Gold Cloak (in the book he is a disgraced former member of the City Watch) and the ratcatcher have names unknown to history (as is the case with many peasants in Gyldayn’s account), so they are referred to as “Blood” (Sam C. Wilson) and “Cheese” (Mark Stobbart). As described in Fire & Blood, Blood and Cheese sneak into the Red Keep (as they do in the show) but in the book version, they hold both Helaena and Alicent hostage. In F&B, while Helaena does have fraternal twins—Jaehaerys and Jaehaera—the incident in question centers on the boys: Jaehaerys, and Helaena’s youngest son, Maelor. Rather than being confused about which sleeping child is the son and heir—in the show, the hired killers can’t tell the twins apart and demand that the young queen identify the boy—they force Helaena to choose which of her sons she wants to live. She chooses her eldest, Jaehaerys, only to have Blood kill him out of spite; afterwards the killer informs Maelor, her youngest, that her mother preferred him dead. In the original scene, both Helaena and Alicent are forced to watch the murder and beheading. Comparatively, the show gives us a sanitized (if still deeply unsettling) version. Martin roots a lot of his fictional atrocities in historical events and adaptations thereof. The Blood and Cheese incident is clearly borrowed from Macbeth, specifically Act IV, scene 2 wherein Lady MacDuff witnesses the murder of her son. The show complicates Martin’s scene by bringing in an element from another Shakespearean work, the somewhat conflicted murderers from Richard III. In mining both plays, the show turns Martin’s exercise in sadism into an exploration of the chaotic horror of vile deeds rushed to messily horrific completion. From Daemon’s rushed and incomplete instructions to “Cheese’s” inexperience with murder to the terrifying proximity that both murderers have to the King and his family—the whole sequence is filmed with an unwieldy, uneasy tension. It’s always the sign of a great suspenseful sequence when the writers can fake out non-book readers (by having the original target be explicitly named as Aemond Targaryen, who cannot be found, thus leading the killers to Helaena and the twins) and book readers (by raising the specter of Blood not believing Helaena about which of her children is Jaehaerys).  And when that climactic moment does arrive, it gives us the odd, emotional core of the scene. “Cheese,” inexperienced in murder, widens his eyes in the slightest pang of fear or, perhaps, sorrow when he realizes the gravity of what’s about to happen. It’s the great advantage of the show adapting Gyldayn’s bird’s-eye perspective on these events. They can slow down and show us something impossible for the Archmaester to have described—the tiny moment when a ludicrous and hapless child murderer, whose name isn’t destined to be remembered, falters for just a moment before brutally changing the course of history forever. Facing Off Credit: HBO I have been a bit annoyed by the (presumably effective) advertising for this season, encouraging viewers to pick sides: #teamblack or #teamgreen. Obviously, the point of the series is that there aren’t any clean hands in this tale and that tragedy is the inevitable result of Westeros’ systems of governance, so choosing sides isn’t really a relevant issue. That said, after this first episode, I think I’d probably have to declare for Team Green. Don’t get me wrong, the Greens are a pretty wretched group—they embody Westeros’ patriarchal horror, to highlight just one aspect of the rot—and I have a pretty bad track record when it comes to picking sides in fandoms (I was Team Jacob for far too long, and solidly Team Servilia circa 2005, for those of you who watched Rome)… but I can’t turn my back on Alicent Hightower.  Alicent Hightower is the character most thoroughly rewritten in Ryan Condal’s adaptation. In Martin’s original, she is another exploration of the author’s interest in the ways that strong mothers participate in Westerosi power structures through their sons. She’s cast in the same mold as Cersei Lannister, Catelyn Stark, and Olenna Tyrell. It’s not an uninteresting idea, but it is ground we have already thoroughly covered elsewhere. In Condal’s hands, Alicent is the show’s most tragic character. Her religious conviction manifests as an extreme attachment to duty—duty to her father, to her late husband, to her children, to the realm. In this first episode, we see her chafing at the edges of it, finally seeing the ways in which the disappointing men in her life have kept her restrained. Olivia Cooke’s performance is remarkable. She imbues Alicent with such a desperate and profound anhedonia—even in the middle of an amorous liaison with her latest disappointing man, Ser Criston Cole (Fabian Frankel)—that every shot of her has a sort of magnetic grief. She turns a command to her servants to leave her to bathe in peace into a barely restrained outburst, the smallest venting of immense frustration and growing agita. The show even makes her the center of Lucerys’ lonely funeral where we cut to Alicent, miserable, trepidatious, lighting a candle for her slain step-grandson, her face bearing all the quiet sorrow of a woman who is powerless to stop the events her words set in motion. She is the best thing about a completely captivating show.  Odds and Ends I like that Jefferson Hall, who plays the Green Master of Coin, Tyland Lannister, gives his character the slightest bit of a Peter Dinklage cadence and tenor. Reverse engineering a highborn Westerland accent is one of many fun touches that make this show so delightful for book readers.  As I described in my final article for season 1, Martin-as-Gyldayn offers a number of possibilities for what became of Lucerys, including that he might have survived and lived out the rest of his days as an amnesiac fisherman. The show does a great job of threading the needle of uncertainty here, having Arrax’s severed wing and Lucerys’ doublet wash ashore while his body remains undiscovered. It’s just enough closure while still remaining horrifyingly uncertain. It is the most minor of details and it shouldn’t bother me but Dorne doesn’t officially become a part of the Seven Kingdoms until 187 AC, fifty-eight years after the current in-show date. I am willing to believe that either the Crownlands (or, less likely, the Riverlands) are considered the current seventh kingdom, but when heralds introduce Aegon and Rhaenyra, they call them the rulers of “the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men.” They aren’t the rulers of the Rhoynar until Dorne is brought into the Seven Kingdoms, dagnabbit! Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) is really fantastic. I love that the show has doubled down on the idea that huge amounts of his weakness as king come from a desperate desire to be liked. He faces constant (and fully justified) disapproval from his family and is eager to be loved by the smallfolk whose problems he thinks he can solve with money. It doesn’t hurt that his droll line delivery injects some much-needed levity into the show. “The Queen is an enduring mystery, is she not?” got a genuine laugh out of me.  In Summary The season is off to a fantastic start. The Blood and Cheese incident is one of the darkest events in the whole of this dark chapter of Westerosi history, and it’s a bold move to begin the season with such a disturbing event. Behind the scenes, the show managed to court controversy, even during its hiatus, for using a loophole to film during the WGA and SAG strikes; it also lost one of its showrunners, GoT veteran director Miguel Sapochnik. There are huge shake-ups and changes looming in the weeks to come, but Ryan Condal and his team of writers and directors seem poised to handle the twists and turns admirably. Above all, heading into the second season, this show still has to work to live up to both audiences’ fond memories of Game of Thrones and their mostly justified skepticism over how that series ended. I fully believe that, given what this season has shown so far, House of the Dragon might end up being the better show.  What are your thoughts on this season premiere, and what moments and performances stood out to you? If you’re familiar with the source material, what did you think of the changes to the original story? Let us know in the comments, and welcome back![end-mark] The post Blood, Cheese, Grief, and an Unspeakable Crime: Let’s Discuss the <i>House of the Dragon</i> Season 2 Premiere appeared first on Reactor.

News The Three-Body Problem The Three-Body Problem Is Getting Another Adaptation Another version is coming from the director of Hero. By Molly Templeton | Published on June 17, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share There cannot be only one. The Three-Body Problem, the first book in Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past series, is set for another adaptation—and this time it’s headed to the big screen as a Chinese-language film directed by none other than Zhang Yimou, who The Hollywood Reporter aptly describes as “arguably China’s most revered living filmmaker.” Zhang’s impressive body of work includes House of Flying Daggers and three films nominated for Best International Feature Film Oscars: Raise the Red Lantern, the Jet Li-starring Hero, and Ju Dou. He’s won a long list of festival awards and is also known for directing the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics and the 2022 Winter Olympics, both of which were in Beijing. A previous attempt at adapting the book into film in China never came to fruition, but there was a 30-episode Chinese television adaptation, which was praised for its faithfulness to the original text. The novel has also been adapted in English, somewhat less faithfully, as David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s 3 Body Problem on Netflix. That series has been renewed for two more seasons, which should allow it to cover all three books in the trilogy. No casting or release date has been announced for Zhang’s film.[end-mark] The post <i>The Three-Body Problem</i> Is Getting Another Adaptation appeared first on Reactor.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Rumble, a growing key player in the video-sharing and cloud services sector, announced today that PublicSquare will be migrating its Marketplace segment to the Rumble Cloud platform. This strategic partnership of freedom-focused companies marks a step in enhancing the digital infrastructure for commerce and payment ecosystems that prioritize freedom. PublicSquare is an American digital marketplace that aims to connect consumers with businesses that align with specific values, particularly those that champion freedom. Launched as a platform to support “freedom-loving businesses,” PublicSquare offers a network where users can shop from companies that share their values, with all verified businesses. Chris Pavlovski, Chairman and CEO of Rumble, shared his enthusiasm for the partnership, stating, “I am excited that PublicSquare has decided to join Rumble on its mission to break the shackles of Big Tech and migrate its burgeoning Marketplace segment to Rumble Cloud. I am confident that our solution will be a great fit, and we look forward to a fruitful future together.” Pavlovski emphasized that Rumble Cloud was developed to empower content creators and businesses with the necessary tools to thrive. Echoing the positive sentiments, Michael Seifert, Chairman and CEO of PublicSquare, remarked, “I am pleased to share that we intend to migrate the PublicSquare Marketplace to the Rumble Cloud Platform.” He highlighted the importance of building an “uncancellable ecosystem” in the pursuit of a robust parallel economy. “By partnering with values-aligned businesses like Rumble, we are taking an important step to protect our Marketplace,” Seifert added, expressing optimism about the future growth and implications of this partnership. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Freedom Powers Unite in Tech: PublicSquare Joins Rumble Cloud appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Now It's Obama Leading Joe Away When he Freezes

Last month, NASA announced development progress of the Pulsed Plasma Rocket, a new type of thruster that could help enable one of the coolest astronomy projects ever dreamt up.First proposed by Einstein (somewhat reluctantly), the idea is actually fairly simple, and based on a concept we use fairly frequently in astronomy these days known as "gravitational lensing". As implied by Einstein's general theory of relativity, giant objects in the universe bend space-time, altering the path of light. Astronomers use this handy feature of the universe to see light beyond stars and black holes, but we are limited by where these massive objects are placed. However, we do have a (relatively) nearby object that can produce this effect in our old, reliable Sun."The gravitational field of the sun acts as a spherical lens to magnify the intensity of radiation from a distant source along a semi-infinite focal line," Von Russel Eshleman, who first expounded on this idea, wrote in a 1979 paper. "A spacecraft anywhere on that line in principle could observe, eavesdrop, and communicate over interstellar distances, using equipment comparable in size and power with what is now used for interplanetary distances. If one neglects coronal effects, the maximum magnification factor for coherent radiation is inversely proportional to the wavelength, being 100 million at 1 millimeter."How gravitational lensing works.Image credit: NASA,ESA, and Goddard Space Flight Center/K. JacksonThis is a pretty cool concept, and one not entirely out of the realm of achievable space projects in the not-too-distant future. But a similar concept might be even more achievable, requiring us only to travel around 85 percent of the distance to the Moon, rather than the 550 astronomical units (AU) required by the Sun telescope idea (with one AU being the distance between the Earth and the Sun).This is the "terrascope", proposed by David Kipping, assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia University. In a 2019 paper, Kipping – known for his YouTube channel Cool Worlds – proposed that we could use refraction of light by the Earth's atmosphere to achieve a similar effect.Though you might not be aware of this refraction, you see evidence of it on a clear day. When the Sun has just dipped below the horizon, or just before it comes up in the morning, you can see it seemingly appear above the horizon due to the refraction of light."Imagine a distant star setting on the horizon. Light from that star enters the Earth's atmosphere and deflects by half a degree it skims the surface and makes its way back out of the atmosphere giving another half a degree of bend, so one degree in total," Kipping explains in a Cool Worlds video."Light from that same star will also shine upon the opposite hemisphere and the two rays will converge together at a distance given by the radius of the earth divided by one degree, so that's a distance just interior to the orbit of the moon. This is a focus point."Kipping continues: "If the ray were any closer to the Earth, it would strike the surface and thus be lost. If the ray were a bit higher in altitude, then it would bend a little bit less, since the atmosphere is thinner as altitude increases. So this means that not only do you get a focus for surface skimming rays, you will also get a focus at every point more distant than that too. In other words, you have a focal line."Place a telescope along this line, and you should be able to see a lot further than you could with regular telescopes, as you are essentially using a natural telescope the size of the planet.            To account for the effects of clouds, you could use light that passes higher up in the atmosphere, though this would require traveling further out than the Moon. Using such a system, Kipping suggests that it could be possible to achieve around 10-40,000 amplifications, equivalent to having a 150-meter (492-foot) space telescope, far larger than the 6.5-meter (21.3-foot) JWST mirror.Though a neat concept, and a great potential test run for using the Sun as a telescope, there are plenty of problems to overcome, such as airglow, thermal emission and scattering from Earth, and interference from the Sun's light. It could be possible that we can overcome these problems, but for now, it remains a fun idea, rather than an achievable project.The study is published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

On June 20, 2024, the summer solstice will occur at its earliest point in 228 years – but this is just the start. Over the next 72 years, the annual event will get progressively earlier every four years. So what’s going on?The summer solstice tends to occur on June 21 every year. This is the point when the Earth’s north pole has its maximum tilt towards the Sun, which also leads to that day having the most hours of sunlight and the shortest night. This event is caused by the Earth’s axis, which is tilted to 23.5 degrees with respect to its orbit around the Sun. In contrast, as the Northern Hemisphere experiences its longest day, the Southern Hemisphere has its shortest day – its winter solstice. This year, however, something interesting is happening. The summer solstice will occur earlier than usual, on the 20 June at 8:50 pm UTC (4:50 pm EDT/1:50 pm PDT). This will be the earliest summer solstice since 1796. Or, to put it another way, the last time the solstice occurred this early was at a time when George Washington was president, and the French Revolution was still in full force. Essentially, the variation happens because of the Gregorian calendar and how we mark the transition of time. To be clear, the Gregorian calendar is pretty good, especially when compared to its predecessor, the Julian calendar. The Earth’s journey around the Sun each year is not exactly 365 days. Instead, it is more like 365.242189 days. To account for this, the Gregorian calendar spaces leap years to make the average year 365.2425 days long. In every normal year – non-leap year – we experience 365 days, which means that the solstices (and equinoxes) fall a little later each year than they did on the previous ones. Then, every four years, we have a leap year which is 366 days long – the extra day appearing on February 29. This means the dates of the solstices and the equinox are 18 hours, 11 minutes, and 14.87 seconds earlier in the year than the year before.      So far so good, but then there is another complication when it comes to how the Gregorian calendar accounts for leap years. To make it work, the system was set up so that every leap year is one that is divisible by four. But if the year ends in “00”, as in the turn-of-the-century year (1800, 1900, 2000), then it can only be a leap year if it is divisible by 400. The year 2000 was one such year. It was divisible by both 4 and 400, but 1900, 1800 and 1700 were not. By not including leap years for these centuries – which amounts to dropping three leap years every 400 years – we are able to correct for the actual speed of the planet hurtling through space. What this means is that every four years in a century that does not start with a leap year, we cumulatively count 365.25 days per year for four years and not 365.242189 days per year. This results in us keeping time “too fast” by around 45 minutes. As such, the summer solstice this year is about 45 minutes earlier than the one in 2020. It also means that this trend will continue through the century until 2096 when the solstice will occur at 06:32 am UTC on June 20. After this, the solstice will flip back to being later in the year as the cycle resets.[H/T: Big Think]