Hubble's new images show the Crab Nebula still expanding 25 years on

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Hubble's new images show the Crab Nebula still expanding 25 years on

the gist

Nearly a thousand years ago, astronomers recorded a supernova so bright it could be seen in daylight for weeks. Its expanding remnant, the Crab Nebula, lies about 6,500 light-years away and is still growing outward. Edwin Hubble linked the nebula to those historical records, and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has since studied it in fine detail. The latest revisit tracks roughly 25 years of expansion, letting astronomers measure how quickly the gas is moving through space.

so what

Watching the nebula change over decades gives astronomers a direct measurement of how a supernova remnant evolves. It also links modern observations to a record of the sky kept by people almost a millennium ago.

fun fact

The Crab Nebula's supernova was recorded by Chinese and other East Asian astronomers in 1054.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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