Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope found ultraviolet light from a galaxy that existed just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang. The galaxy contains tightly clustered young stars whose ionising light is strong enough to transform the dense neutral gas inside and around it. That clearing effect makes the galaxy visible to telescopes, which would otherwise be blocked by the opaque gas. The result suggests that early galaxies may have shaped their surroundings much as later ones do, and that the young universe was more transparent in places than expected. The observation shows how the earliest stars helped reionise the cosmos.

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.