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I just watched a makeup video on Instagram with a pre-teen girl with porcelain, pore-less, perfect skin applying 10 beauty products to achieve “flawless skin.” There was baking and contouring and lots of Shape Tape involved, and she also exclusively used premium products, namely MAC, Fenty, Laura Mercier and Tarte. Now, when I was that girl’s age, I had one Corn Silk Pressed Powder from Thrifty’s, and for me that was luxurious. My mom wouldn’t even let me wear mascara (“too mature”). The girl in the video looked to be about 12, and she was in full-beat glam with false...

According to the “no-hair theorem” of general relativity, static and isolated black holes can be fully characterized by just two numbers, the mass (M) and the angular momentum (J). Norman Gürlebeck has now shown that, under certain assumptions, the no-hair theorem is still valid when the black hole is not isolated but, for instance, surrounded by a matter disk.Via APS Physics: The Simplicity of Black Holes. [By the way, congrats for the new look they have changed for the better]Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 151102 (2015)

Girl, yes. So. Much. Yes. The funny thing is, or at least the cruelly ironic thing is, that it didn’t change much at all that I can remember when I was in my teens and 20s. I used to have much oilier skin then and got frequent breakouts all year round. That was the status quo for about the first half of my life. Sh*t got real in my mid-30s, and now I feel the seasons in my pores, LOL! I’m probably also hyper aware of my skin now, whereas I didn’t think about it much back in the day,...

Fordite (Detroit agate), sometimes beauty emerges from the most strange places: Old car factories had a harmful impact on the environment, releasing toxic chemicals into the air, land and water. But it wasn’t all ugly. Oddly enough, one of the by-products of car production was Fordite, also known as Detroit agate. The colorful layered objects take their name from agate stones for their visual resemblance. But instead of forming from microscopically crystallized silica over millions of years, Fordite was formed from layers of paint over several tens of years. Back in the day, old automobile paint would drip onto the...

A second bunch of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite has been released today and the archive is live now. Gaia creates richest star map of our Galaxy – and beyond A multitude of discoveries are on the horizon after this much awaited release, which is based on 22 months of charting the sky. The new data includes positions, distance indicators and motions of more than one billion stars, along with high-precision measurements of asteroids within our Solar System and stars beyond our own Milky Way Galaxy.Image caption: Gaia’s sky in colour.Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC.h-t Sean M. Carroll Facebook pageComparison between Gaia’s...