A NASA telescope orbiting our planet has spotted an intriguing super-Earth — a world some 30 to 70 percent bigger than Earth.
This rocky planet is in another solar system 137 light-years away, which in the vastness of space is considered relatively close (a light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles). The exoplanet, called TOI-715 b, is about 1.5 times the size of Earth. And, crucially, this world orbits inside the habitable, or "Goldilocks," zone.
"That’s the distance from the star that could give the planet the right temperature for liquid water to form on its surface," NASA explained on its website. "Several other factors would have to line up, of course, for surface water to be present, especially having a suitable atmosphere."
TOI-715 b orbits quite close to its star (each orbit lasts just 19 days) — but scientists don't think its a hellish, scorching world, like some other exoplanets. That's because its star is a "red dwarf," which is both cooler and smaller than our medium-sized star, the sun. READ MORE...
"But I have to," he groaned through the cracks of my iPhone 4. "It’s in the name of self-care." I was sitting on the edge of my bed, staring fixated at the black mould splattering the ceiling of my third-year university house share. I’d just returned from my then-boyfriend’s house, where we were celebrating his return to our university city after spending some time in his hometown.
Everything was fine in the time we spent together, but during the half-an-hour bus ride to reach my home, he had suddenly experienced an epiphany where he determined that the right thing to do was to immediately call time on our relationship — but it’s okay, he isn’t the bad guy, because it was all done in the name of "self-care."
Sure, he could’ve communicated his concerns earlier, but under this definition of self-care, you don’t "owe" people anything. Suddenly, every relationship in your life becomes transactional, as you hyperfocus on how the people in your life are serving you, and cutting them off or shutting them down the minute they seem to desire anything in return.
When did self-care become…something else?
Once upon a time, self-care was about striving to be the best version of yourself, because ultimately, how can you look after others if you aren’t looking after yourself? READ MORE...
Apparently, the pandemic-induced time distortion that defined 2020 didn't get the memo about the new calendar year. Looking back, the events of 2021 turned out to be just as mind-meltingly difficult to keep track of as last year's.
But we are once again here to jog your memory about the wrong timeline we continue to live through.
There's a reason why, in the beginning of the year, people were already doing retrospectives on what went down in the first week and first hundred days of 2021. It was kinda darkly funny at first, the impossibility of keeping up with the sheer amount of timeline-breaking, unprecedented shit happening. Then it just went on, and on, and on, and stopped being funny and started messing with our grasp on reality again.
Whether you spent 2021 still trying to process 2020 or simply did not have the capacity to clock it all in the memory bank, we've compiled a list of the good, the bad, the weird, and the forgettable from this year. While this isn't a list of all of the year's major moments (otherwise, we'd be here well into 2022), we're sure you'll find lots that make you want to launch into a rambling Matthew McConaughey monologue about time being a flat circle.
1. Bean Dad and Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical rang in the new year as the first viral memes of 2021.While their energies could not have been more different, you couldn't escape these viral characters if you were online in the first week of 2021. #BeanDad discourse — over the dad with a polarizing method for teaching his daughter how to open a can of beans — triggered Twitter into a spiral of their non-bean-related daddy issues. Meanwhile, the Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, which began as a somewhat sincere joke on the app, gave us hope for wholesome content by raising over a million dollars for struggling actors.2. Capitol insurrectionists made Jan. 6, 2021, a day America will never forget.
Yet even so, it's hard to wrap our brains around the fact that this horrifying event, where a Trump-supporting mob incited by the president stormed the Capitol, happened less than a year ago. Living through history really does funny things to time, doesn't it?3. President Donald Trump was impeached (again) on Jan. 13 then acquitted (again) on Feb. 13.
Trump was the first president in American history to be impeached twice, the first time for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and the second time for incitement of an insurrection. But we collectively forgot all about that in about five minutes. Guess we were preoccupied!Demonstrating just how broken our society is, though, online platforms like Twitter and Facebook (now Meta) actually banned his ass for inciting violence. I guess even an anemic amoeba like Mark Zuckerberg has more of a spine than our government leaders when it comes to threats against American democracy.4. Bernie Sanders' mittens and JLo's “Let's Get Loud” performance turned Biden's inauguration into a fever dream.Honestly, no 2021 inauguration was ever going to be "normal." But in the midst of all the fear and post-traumatic stress of the Capitol riot, the internet found two bizarre things to distract us. TO READ ABOUT THE OTHER 40 THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN 2021, CLICK HERE...
