David K Whiting

NASA releases audio of what a black hole 'sounds' like

At the west end of Westminster Abbey's Nave rests the grave of the Unknown Warrior. The body of this warrior was brought from France and buried here on November 11, 1920. The grave is adorned with soil from France and covered by a slab of black Belgian marble obtained from a quarry near Namur. The inscription on the slab reads as follows: "BENEATH THIS STONE RESTS THE BODY OF A BRITISH WARRIOR UNKNOWN BY NAME OR RANK. BROUGHT FROM FRANCE TO LIE AMONG THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS OF THE LAND AND BURIED HERE ON ARMISTICE DAY, 11 NOVEMBER 1920, IN THE PRESENCE OF HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE V, HIS MINISTERS OF STATE, THE CHIEFS OF HIS FORCES, AND A VAST CONCOURSE OF THE NATION. THUS ARE COMMEMORATED THE MANY MULTITUDES WHO DURING THE GREAT WAR OF 1914-1918 GAVE THE MOST THAT MAN CAN GIVE: LIFE." The inspiration for this idea came to Reverend David Railton, a chaplain at the Front, when he discovered a grave with a makeshift cross bearing the words "An Unknown British Soldier" penciled on it in a back garden at Armentières in 1916.

Pale Blue Dot is a photo of Earth that was taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990 from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) as it was leaving our solar system. This is what Carl Sagan said about the photo: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor, and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”