Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalScience Astronomers are capturing video of a black hole for the first time
Contrary to science fiction, black holes are not portals to other dimensions or cosmic vacuum cleaners that swallow up everything around them.
“The media always paints black holes as these pits of despair, and everything falls in, but they're much more fun than that,” astrophysicist Sera Markoff told Quirks and Quarks host Bob McDonald.
Markoff is part of a global team working to capture the first-ever video of a black hole, a scientific leap that could reveal how these mysterious cosmic objects behave.
“There's just an enormous amount of questions that we'd like to be able to answer about black holes,” she said.
In 2019, scientists released the first image of a black hole — a supermassive one at the heart of Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, about 50 million light-years from Earth — using the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of eight radio telescopes that operates as a single virtual instrument, linking facilities from Antarctica to Spain and Chile.
Markoff, the Plumian professor of astronomy at the University of Cambridge, says the EHT is now being used to track the colossal black hole in M87 in motion — an advance that could reveal details that still images cannot. There are now 12 telescopes in total, but only eleven will take part, as the telescope in the South Pole cannot see M87.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/black-hole-video-astronomy-space-science-9.7117478
Stuff I only dreamed of in my youtn.
Marilyn Monroe Doc Shines Light on Her Hidden Health Battle
A new documentary is using Marilyn Monroe’s hidden health struggles to spotlight a disease that still leaves millions of women fighting for answers decades later.
End of the Cycle, a documentary about endometriosis, sheds new light on Marilyn Monroe’s private battle with the condition, which her biographer Anthony Summers said was so severe that it “destroyed her marriages, her wish for children, her career and ultimately her life.”
The documentary follows co-director Sammy Jaye, who also suffers from endometriosis, a disease estimated to affect more than 265 million women globally.
“The way she’s been portrayed all these years has not been accurate,” Jaye said during a screening of the documentary at New York City’s Whitby Hotel. “If anyone mentions Marilyn Monroe in a negative way, you can revert back to this and know what she was going through at a time when she couldn’t have said anything, and there wasn’t social media.”
Summers, who authored the 1985 biography Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, confirmed the actress’ diagnosis with the help of her physician while researching the book.
https://thelooker.thedailybeast.com/marilyn-monroe-doc-shines-light-on-her-hidden-endometriosis-battle/
I've had friends who suffered terribly with this condition, and I can only sympathize. I had fibroids, which are bad enough, but endometriosis is far worse. Poor Marilyn! I do plan to watch this doc.
House member's chief of staff charged with carrying gun into Capitol complex
The chief of staff for Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, is facing felony charges for allegedly bringing a firearm into the U.S. Capitol complex in Washington, DC.
According to court records obtained by USA TODAY, Sessions’ chief of staff, Luis Angel Vega, is facing charges of carrying a pistol outside his home without a license and unlawful conduct on Capitol grounds.
Court records say that the incident happened on the morning of Dec. 22, 2025, during which Capitol security officers found a black pistol and ammunition inside Vega’s bag as it was being scanned at a security checkpoint at the entrance of a House of Representatives office building.
According to the filings, Vega was instructed to lock up the firearm in his car and return to rescreen his bag, which officials say he did.
(snip)
A week after the incident, U.S. Capitol Police conducted a phone interview with Vega during which he told officers that he did not have a license to carry the pistol, court records state. In the same interview, Vega told officers that he usually enters the House office building with Sessions, who is referred to as “Witness-1” in court records.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/06/05/house-member-pete-sessions-chief-of-staff-charged-carrying-gun-into-capitol-complex/90428360007/?tbref=hp
And he says he "forgot" he had the gun with him. Yeah, right. Wanna bet he carries it in every day and as long as he comes in with the boss he doesn't get screened?
Social Security tried to assign fake death dates to 2.7M people: Whistleblower
A whistleblower has come forward to Congress, alleging the Social Security Administration tried to assign fake death dates to 2.7 million people living in the United States as a way to get immigrants to self-deport.
The former Social Security employee, Jeremiah Schofield, said the Department of Government Efficiency, then run by billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk, successfully pushed the agency to assign death dates to 6,000 people. He also alleges the Department of Homeland Security asked the agency to mark an additional 2.7 million people as dead.
Being assigned a death date and moved to the Social Security death master file means immediately losing access to bank accounts, health insurance and credit cards. It can also mean mortgages are cancelled, legal immigration status is revoked and American citizens lose their right to vote.
(snip)
Details of the allegations were confirmed by Schofield's attorney. Schofield worked for the agency for 25 years and helped lead IT modernization efforts. He does not know if the 2.7 million people were ultimately marked as dead.
“Jeremiah witnessed Trump Administration officials admit that they were deliberately targeting people whom they had no reason to believe were in fact dead in order to remove them from the Social Security rolls and ultimately from the country,” said Debra S. Katz, one of the attorneys representing Schofield.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/06/05/social-security-fake-death-dates-doge-whistleblower/90421431007/?tbref=hp
More instances of crooked "bookkeeping" by Shitler and Eloon
Hegseth's Pentagon slashes the number of religious faiths it officially recognizes
To a degree without modern precedent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has used his powerful office to advance a Christian nationalist agenda. In recent months, Americans have seen him lead Christian prayer services in the Pentagon’s auditorium, invite radical Christian nationalist figures to speak at official prayer services, use social media to promote messages that suggest his faith should dominate other religious traditions and even argue during an official press briefing that Americans should take a knee and pray “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Since the war in Iran began, the former Fox News host has intensified these efforts. The New York Times reported in March, “More than any top American military leader in recent history, Mr. Hegseth has framed U.S. military operations in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America as bigger than politics or foreign policy. Often he has imbued these actions with a Christian moral underpinning that suggests they are divinely sanctioned.”
Soon after, Hegseth explicitly likened the rescue of a missing American airman shot down over Iran to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The week after that, the Pentagon chief started equating journalists he doesn’t like with “pharisees.”
This week, however, a related problem emerged, though in an unexpected way: Instead of seeing Hegseth’s Defense Department take steps to elevate one faith tradition, Americans are seeing the Pentagon demote other faith traditions. The Religion News Service reportedThe Department of Defense is substantially reducing the number of religions it officially recognizes, reportedly excluding atheists, pagans, humanists and New Age faiths, an independent military-focused news website reports.
The reduction of recognized faith groups represents the first time the military has revised the list since 2017, when it vastly expanded the list of recognized faith groups to about 211. The new list includes 31 recognized faiths, as first reported by Military.com on Thursday (June 4).
https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/hegseths-pentagon-slashes-the-number-of-religious-faiths-it-officially-recognizes
He certainly doesn't understand the meaning of the word "pharisee"!
Australian cockroach kingpin caught with 100,000 illegal insects in record bug bust
More than 100,000 live cockroaches illegal to keep in Australia were confiscated from a single breeder in the country’s largest-ever seizure of exotic invertebrates, officials said Friday.
The haul of Madagascar hissing cockroaches and dubia cockroaches, worth 200,000 Australian dollars ($142,000), was seized in May from a commercial breeder in the city of Bathurst in New South Wales state, according to Australia’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water.
The Madagascar hissing species is one of the world’s biggest cockroaches, measuring 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 centimeters) in length. Photos released by the department showed a shiny, brown invertebrate larger than a person’s finger.
It’s much bigger than the country’s common Australian cockroach, which measures between 0.9 and 1.4 inches (2.3 and 3.6 centimeters) long. Cockroaches flourish in Australia due to its sub-tropical climates and the country is home to hundreds of species.
https://apnews.com/article/illegal-cockroaches-seized-australia-madagascar-hissing-dubia-e35889bf7910169f6bd091e34b35e029
Probably being sold as reptile food, but geez, don't they have enough of their own bugs?
'We've got a crisis,' says lawmaker with one-third of Virginia's rural hospitals at risk of closing
Many rural hospitals in Virginia are at risk of closing and/or are facing significant financial distress, according to a new draft report from Virginia’s Joint Commission on Health Care presented to lawmakers on Thursday.
Using one metric, the commission found that 13 of Virginia’s 36 rural hospitals “are at either immediate risk of closure or at risk of closure.”
Using a different metric, the commission found that a dozen rural hospitals in the state “are at either highest risk or mid-highest risk of experiencing financial distress.”
“We’ve got a crisis,” said Delegate Rodney Willett (D-Henrico).
(snip)
The report cites several reasons for rural hospitals’ struggles, including higher costs, fewer revenue opportunities and insufficient reimbursement amounts, to name a few.
https://www.wric.com/news/politics/capitol-connection/weve-got-a-crisis-says-lawmaker-with-one-third-of-virginias-rural-hospitals-at-risk-of-closing/
If this country would do two things, we would not have this problem: 1) Stop running hospitals on the corporate model, and 2) have single payer healthcare
Anyone else attended a "Happy Together" concert this summer?
We went last night in Alexandria at the Birchmere. It advertises itself as a "reunification tour" of 70s groups, but in reality it's a reunification tour of late 60s pop groups, whic is also fine. That was a lot of the background noise of my younger years! It featured, among others, the Cowsills, the Vogues, the Fortune, the Association, Gary Puckett, and lead Singers from Chicago and the Turtles. It was pretty great, except for a couple of things. I don't know what happened to the mics for the Association, who I'd looked forward to the most, but they had a lot of feedback and they sounded pretty bad. 
And as for Gary Puckett, although for some reason he seemed to have a lot of fans there, IMNSHO he should just hang it up. For one thing, his songs (some of which to my mind are of a questionable nature) haven't really worn well in this age of awareness, but more importantly, the guy has NO voice left. NONE. Not that he ever had much. The rest of it, however, was quite enjoyable, and provoked a discussion between me and my husband on the way home of concerts we had been to and the circumstances surrounding them, some of which were pretty crazy.
What happened when a tiny school district refused to 'bend the knee' to Trump and ICE
On an April morning at Winooski high school, the day started with a writing prompt: Do you feel safe in school? Why or why not?
The students – whose families hail from across the globe and speak Arabic, Nepali, Spanish, Somali and more – wrote their responses before reading them aloud.
“I feel safe in school because I saw the school doors are locked every time,” one student said.
“ICE can’t come in,” said another.
The sense of security students feel in this multilingual learner class at the Vermont high school is hard-won. Since the start of the second Trump administration, the federal government has investigated schools for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, rescinded a policy protecting students on school grounds from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and threatened school districts with the loss of federal funding. Administration officials have also encouraged states to challenge a decades-old supreme court decision guaranteeing undocumented students’ right to public schooling.
While many districts have chosen to go quiet or self-censor, the Winooski school system and its superintendent, Wilmer Chavarria, have taken the opposite approach.
Last year, this small district of about 800 students was the first in Vermont to pass a sanctuary policy aimed at protecting students from immigration enforcement while at school. Chavarria also refused to sign a document from the Trump administration saying it was complying with the federal ban on DEI efforts in schools.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/03/vermont-school-district-trump-ice
Let's hear it for Winooski!
Three Lebanese hospitals hit by Israeli forces in under a week
Three hospitals in southern Lebanon have been attacked by Israel in under a week, wounding more than 150 people and killing nine, according to Lebanon’s ministry of health.
Israel carried out an attack in the immediate vicinity of the public hospital in Tebnine on Wednesday, just days after strikes next to the Hiram and Jabal Amel hospitals in Tyre. The attack next to Jabal Amel on Monday killed four people and injured 127 – most of whom were medical staff.
“It was an ordinary day at the hospital and then suddenly for no reason, they targeted the hospital. It was a catastrophe,” said Wael Mroueh, the director of Jabal Amel. The strike hit the building directly in front of the hospital, levelling it.
The force of the blast knocked out the hospital’s electricity, destroyed much of the first floor and forced medical staff to evacuate patients who were hooked up to machines in the intensive care unit, which was also damaged.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/03/lebanese-hospitals-hit-by-israeli-forces
And Bibi's f*cking no-count point is? Stuff like this makes me, a retired RN, more anti-Israel than ever---and I used to be a Zionist!
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Gender: Do not displayHome country: USA currently
Current location: Virginia
Member since: Wed Jun 1, 2011, 07:34 PM
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