Hubble has revisited NGC 6240, a galaxy about 400 million light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. Its tangled shape, with wisps, loops and tails, is the result of two galaxies that drifted too close and merged. The collision set off bursts of new star formation, and many young stars exploded as supernovae, including one discovered in 2013. At the centre, the two galaxies' black holes have sunk towards each other and now sit only about 3,000 light-years apart. They are so close that they cannot escape each other and will eventually merge into one enormous black hole. The new image was made with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys.

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.