fausta boscacci

Professor, Brazilian-American, grandma of eight and Zumba fanatic. #totheouterspacethenonbiodegradablegarbage

[IISS News @IISS_org]

An increasingly tense security environment is pushing regional players in the Indo-Pacific to bolster their military capabilities, with particular interest in uninhabited air systems.

The latest IISS Strategic Dossier considers how Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India and Pakistan are approaching the development, acquisition and use of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) for ISR, developing requirements for collaborative com bat aircraft (CCA), and integrating these into their broader posture, doc trine and strategy.

Read the latest IISS Strategic Dossier ahead of the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue 2026 | #IISS_SLD26:

➡️ https://t.co/q0JGVpTuxH

[Cosmos Archive @cosmosarcive]

You are never truly standing still. Even when everything feels motionless, you are carried by Earth’s rotation, swept along as it orbits the Sun, and pulled through the Milky Way along with billions of other stars. From a cosmic perspective, stillness is an illusion created by our limited human scale of perception, too small to notice the vast layers of motion we are part of.

Taken together, these motions place us in constant transit through space at speeds far beyond anything we can feel. Yet there is no wind, no vibration, and no sense of rushing. We do not experience this journey because everything around us shares it, locked into the same immense and silent choreography of the universe.

Credit: physicsj

[Drew Crawford @drewcrawford_]

Brazil is much more than just one country.

Brazil contains multiple economies stacked on top of each other, and most investors do not realize this.

São Paulo state alone has a GDP of roughly $686 billion dollars.

If São Paulo were a country, it would rank as the 16th largest economy in the world.

That puts it ahead of Argentina, Norway, and Sweden.

São Paulo state generates 31.5% of all Brazilian GDP by itself.

Rio de Janeiro state has a GDP of roughly $233 billion dollars.

That ranks it 65th globally and roughly the size of Greece or New Zealand.

Minas Gerais has a GDP of roughly $194 billion dollars.

It ranks 80th globally and is larger than Ukraine.

Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, and Santa Catarina each generate between $102 and $133 billion dollars.

Each of those three southern states alone exceeds Slovenia, Croatia, and Bulgaria.

When U.S. allocators say "Brazil," they think of one country.

The reality is that Brazil contains six different state economies that each rival mid-sized European nations.

Brazil functions as a federation of mid-sized economies that together form the 10th largest economy on Earth by nominal GDP, and the 8th largest by purchasing power parity.

The smartest capital allocates Brazil at the state level, not the country level.

That is how the largest sovereign wealth funds and the most sophisticated U.S. macro investors are already positioning.

The Brazilian opportunity is not a single trade, and the allocators who understand that are already moving.

[Manisha Mishra @manishamishra24]

A man spends 50 years teaching at MIT.

He knows his time is running out.

So he records one last lecture — everything he knows, distilled into a single hour.

He died 5 months later.

This is that lecture.

The most important hour you'll watch this week. 👇Bookmark it for later

[The Figen @TheFigen_]

Incredible creativity from a little artist.

[Foreign Affairs @ForeignAffairs]

From the archive: Read Stephen Weissman’s 2014 essay on the history of U.S. covert action in Congo—and the lasting consequences of the CIA’s interventions.
https://t.co/9dzBbRcaSc

[Omni™ @smokelessworld]

"The tax became so oppressive...we got prohibition style issues."

@HonTonyAbbott on Australia's illicit tobacco trade.

$10 billion lost and organised crime thriving - join Kingsley and Tony as they spell out the danger on The @SmokelessWord.

[Wonder of Science @wonderofscience]

Germ vs Soap: Fascinating microscope footage of soap dissolving the membrane of a ciliate.

📽: Nomadic Nostoc

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

Everyone has their own way of solving problems

[Mark Mazzetti @MarkMazzettiNYT]

Design was brilliant. Location, not so much

[fausta boscacci @faustab]

https://t.co/PHH4joBfCN

[fausta boscacci @faustab]

https://t.co/mYxdQOvxzX

[The Sigma Mindset @thesigmamindset]

If you're an overthinker, you need to understand this ‼️‼️

[Science Magazine @ScienceExpand]

Engineering students test if their designs can survive an earthquake

[Critics Choice Awards @CriticsChoice]

Congratulations to "The Secret Agent," winner of the Critics Choice Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

#criticschoice #criticschoiceawards #TheSecretAgent

[The Figen @TheFigen_]

The cat made the window cleaner's day.

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

Trump’s billionaire allies now control X, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Truth and Twitch.

They own Fox News, CBS, WaPo, WSJ and NY Post — plus 185+ local tv stations and news in 100 markets.

They control the AI you're asking for answers, the algorithms feeding you content, your personal data you've given up for access, and the devices you rely on.

The news and your privacy are now what Trump and his billionaire pals say it is.

This is all by design.

[Black Hole @konstructivizm]

Astronomers have identified a candidate supermassive black hole roaming through intergalactic space, leaving behind a spectacular trail of newborn stars stretching nearly 200,000 light-years—twice the diameter of the Milky Way itself.Rather than destroying its surroundings, the invisible black hole (estimated at 10–20 million solar masses) plows supersonically through diffuse intergalactic gas, creating a bow shock that compresses and cools the material, triggering intense star formation along its wake. This produces a thin, linear chain of hot, young blue stars visible in Hubble images.Researchers led by Pieter van Dokkum (Yale University) believe this object, now designated RBH-1, was violently ejected from its host galaxy following a complex three-body gravitational interaction during sequential galaxy mergers—likely involving three supermassive black holes.Initially discovered serendipitously in archival Hubble Space Telescope data and announced in 2023, the feature was confirmed in December 2025 through James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) NIRSpec observations, which revealed a sharp ~600 km/s velocity gradient across the leading shock, unambiguously pointing to a runaway supermassive black hole moving at approximately 954 km/s (about 0.32% the speed of light).While earlier alternative explanations (such as an edge-on galaxy disk) were proposed in 2023–2024 studies, the 2025 JWST spectroscopy has solidified the runaway black hole interpretation, marking this as the first confirmed example of such an extreme event.This discovery highlights rare outcomes of galactic mergers and gravitational-wave recoil, suggesting runaway supermassive black holes—and their star-forming wakes—may be more common than thought, with upcoming surveys like Nancy Grace Roman and Euclid poised to find more.Source / Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI — Hubble (2023) & JWST confirmation (2025)

[Night Sky Now @NightSkyNow]

Capturing the Sun at the same time every day for a year ☀ ∞

[Marmite @borthygirl]

@smokelessworld @nikeorbrink @SmokelessWord They will never hit alcohol the same way they hit smoking and alcohol kills more people and destroys more families.
When was the last time someone was beaten because the attacker smoked ten cigarettes.or someone was killed by a driver after they smoked 10 cigarettes..