Back in the 1940s and '50s, Hollywood got a little dark—and I mean that literally. Enter the age of film noir, where every alley was suspicious, every cigarette was dramatic, and every romance was basically a death wish wrapped in a trench coat.
These gritty gems were pulled straight from hard-boiled fiction and shot in glorious black and white, because color would’ve just ruined the mood. The men? Tough as nails, perpetually squinting through cigarette smoke, and never seen without a fedora. The women? Oh, they were trouble—femme fatales with killer looks and even deadlier intentions. If you fell in love, you were probably doomed. But hey, at least it looked stylish.
Roger Ebert once called noir “the most American film genre,” and honestly, he wasn’t wrong. It’s got crime, cynicism, and a whole lot of sass.
There are 60 Free Film Noir Movies available at openculture.com Most of them are less well known - such as The Big Combo. Directed by Joseph Lewis, this film is today considered a noir classic. Critics like to focus on the cinematography of John Alton, a noir icon. (1955). Or try The Hitch-Hiker — The first noir film made by a woman noir director, Ida Lupino. (1953).
Are you ready to dive into the shadows? Don’t blame me if you start narrating your life in a gravelly voice and acting like Sam Spade or Marlowe.
That is not a headline I would think we would not want to see, but astronomers have detected the largest merger of two black holes to date via measuring gravitational waves. The collision produced a single black hole roughly 225 times the mass of the Sun.
A post at caltech.edu says that the signal, designated GW231123, was detected during the fourth observing run of the LVK network on November 23, 2023. I didn't feel a thing back then - or since.
These points in space, whose gravitational pull is so strong that nothing escapes (including light), form when very large stars run out of fuel in their cores. The object collapses in on itself, shrouding the core in an incredibly warped region of spacetime. That's why they are sometimes theorized to be a way to travel through time. At least, in science fiction tales, the idea of a wormhole works.
Being a time travel fan, I like this hypothetical structure that connects disparate points in spacetime. One way to visualize it is as a tunnel with two ends at separate points in spacetime (i.e., different locations, different points in time, or both).
A wormhole visualized as a two-dimensional surface. Route (a) is the shortest path through normal space between points 1 and 2. Route (b) is a shorter path through a wormhole. Image: MikeRun, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
Wormholes are based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations. It's not helpful to me but, more precisely, they are a transcendental bijection of the spacetime continuum, an asymptotic projection of the Calabi–Yau manifold manifesting itself in anti-de Sitter space.
The existence of black holes was first theorized by Einstein in 1916, predicted by his theory of general relativity. The theory posited that what we experience as gravity is actually the effect of mass curving space and time—in the case of black holes, it's curved to the point where light is effectively "stuck" inside.
The event horizon is the term for the boundary of a black hole beyond which light can't escape.
Black holes are probably fairly common on a universe level. Scientists estimate there are 40 quintillion (1 quintillion equals 1 billion billion) black holes in the universe, none of which can be seen directly. Instead, their effect on nearby objects reveals their presence, indicating properties like size and spin. The pull of black holes can cause nearby matter to superheat, emitting X-rays detected on Earth. This is how the presence of Cygnus X-1, the first confirmed black hole, was detected in 1964.
The first-ever "image" of a black hole was published in 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope, capturing the light bent around the object. The black hole is located 50 million light-years away in the M87 galaxy.
The website at https://historyfacts.com asked and answered the question "What Was Earth’s Population Through History?"
They talk about the idea that "while it took most of human history for the population to reach 1 billion, it took only a little more than 200 additional years to hit 8 billion."
But what interested me most was that when looking back at prehistoric times, historians believe that only around 55,000 early humans walked the Earth some 1.2 million years ago.
By the end of the last Ice Age, about 20,000 years ago, the population had risen to about 1 million members of Homo sapiens.
Over the next 15,000 years, as human societies improved, the population increased more rapidly. By 5000 BCE, the world population was at least 5 million, and some estimates go as high as 20 million. But even that much higher number is still less than the present-day populations of cities such as São Paulo, Shanghai, and Tokyo.
Where is a "dinosaur highway," and what does that mean?
The term "Dinosaur Highway" typically refers to a stretch of land or road where a large number of dinosaur footprints have been preserved and discovered, often in the beds of ancient river systems or floodplains. It's not a formal highway in the modern sense, but rather a nickname given to regions where dinosaur tracks are abundant and accessible.
The term "Dinosaur Highway" most commonly refers to U.S. Route 160 in western Colorado and eastern Utah, particularly the stretch that runs through or near Dinosaur National Monument and other areas rich in dinosaur fossils and footprints.
Want to drive this highway? A route from Vernal, Utah to Fruita, Colorado, which hits major dinosaur sites, is one possibilty.
There are other possible routes: Connecticut River Valley (Massachusetts and Connecticut) – famous for Early Jurassic dinosaur tracks; Glen Rose, Texas – known for Paluxy River dinosaur tracks; Dinosaur Valley State Park – sometimes called part of the “Texas Dinosaur Highway.”
