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‘One Of The Sickest Ever’: Rishi Sunak Slammed Over Latest Labour Attack Ad
Rishi Sunak has been slammed over the Tories’ latest controversial Labour attack ad.
The graphic, which the prime minister posted on X, shows a man, a woman and a child with their hands above their heads with the message: Don’t Surrender Your Family’s Future To Labour.
Sunak’s accompanying message said: “I will never stop fighting for this country.”
It follows on from other hard-hitting attack ads produced by the Conservatives as election day looms and the polls continue to show Labour well ahead.
A week ago, the party was criticised for a video appearing to show a red carpet being rolled out on a beach for migrants arriving by boat with the message: “Labour’s approach to illegal immigration.”
The latest attempt to scare voters into voting Tory was comprehensively taken apart by social media users.
Alicia Vikander Shares Her Take On Jude Law Stinking Up The Set Of Their New Movie
Jude Law’s rather, um, extreme measures to get into character on the set of his new film, Firebrand, didn’t sit well with his co-star, Alicia Vikander.
Firebrand, which hit cinemas last week, is a historical thriller that probes the relationship between England’s King Henry VIII (played by Law) and his sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr (Vikander).
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In order to portray Henry VIII in his final days, Law said he worked with a perfume specialist to come up with a “repulsive” fragrance that would reflect his character’s mental and physical state.
“You’ve got to step into these characters every day. And so sometimes if you can do something that just is, not really a shortcut, but it’s about really finding a place,” he told Business Insider in an interview published this week. “It’s a ritual, and it can just put you in a certain frame of mind or mood. It can help or it certainly helps me.”
But when Law suggested that Vikander “got used” to the stench, his co-star quickly interjected.
“I didn’t really, it was that bad!” she told Business Insider.
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The subject of Law’s aroma has come up numerous times during the rollout for Firebrand, which premiered at France’s Cannes Film Festival last year and was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York earlier this month.
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“I read that Henry, because of these agonising ulcers he had on his legs, really smelled like he was actually rotting,” Law told Yahoo! Entertainment last week. “So we came up with this disgusting odour that created a pungency and sickening scent around him.”
As to what such an odour would actually entail, the Sherlock Homes actor told Variety last year that the perfume specialist had concocted an “extraordinary variety of blood, fecael matter and sweat.”
Whether such levels of preparation on the “Firebrand” set ultimately paid off is questionable, however, as early reviews have so far been mixed.
Though The Hollywood Reporter praised the movie for “[rescuing] an inspiring woman from history’s footnotes,” Slant called it “often shapeless and rudderless.”
Oprah Names ‘One Of The Most Hurtful Things’ That’s Publicly Happened To Her
Oprah Winfrey is reflecting on how her weight has been the topic of national conversation for decades.
During a candid conversation on the first episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show shared on Tuesday, Winfrey spoke about how mocking her for her size was an “accepted” form of ridicule.
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“For 25 years, every single week in one form or another, there was some tabloid exploitation of my weight,” she said, adding that “making fun of my weight was national sport for 25 years.”
“Comedians did it, the best comedians did it, the highest comedians did it, people with their shows did it ― it was just accepted that you could make fun of me and my weight,” she said before listing off some of the things people had done that had stuck with her to this day.
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“One of the most hurtful things was In Living Colour had done a skit where the woman was doing something and she just kept eating and getting fatter and fatter and fatter,” Winfrey explained. “And the comedy bit was that eventually she just exploded, and you know, the whole audience fell out [laughing]. And the woman was me.”
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“And that was just accepted! That was just a thing that was accepted,” Winfrey said. “So I have borne this weight thing and carried it to the point where I just feel like, I’ve just recently turned 70 and I’m not carrying it into the next decade. I’m done with it.”
Many celebrities who have long been in the public eye are opening up about what it was like to be scrutinized during a more lawless time in media.
Victoria Beckham has shared how being judged for her postpartum weight left her not wanting to go outside, for fear of what tabloids would say.
“I remember after I had Brooklyn, my first outing was on the front page of the newspaper, with arrows pointing to where I needed to lose weight,” she shared in an interview with Grazia last month.
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The former Spice Girl said things didn’t get much better after she’d lost the weight she gained during pregnancy. During an appearance on the show Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush, host Chris Evans made Beckham do a particularly gross stunt on TV.
“I’d just had Brooklyn and lost a lot of weight after,” the singer told Vogue Australia in 2022. “It happened to my mum after her pregnancies. It doesn’t mean you have an eating disorder. And he made me stand on scales and be weighed. Can you imagine doing that nowadays?”
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Solar technology: Innovative light-harvesting system works very efficiently
In order to convert sunlight into electricity or other forms of energy as efficiently as possible, the very first step is an efficient light-harvesting system. Ideally, this should be panchromatic, i.e. absorb the entire spectrum of visible light.
The light-collecting antennae of plants and bacteria are a model for this. They capture a broad spectrum of light for photosynthesis, but are very complex in structure and require many different dyes to transmit the energy of the absorbed light and focus it on a central point.
The light-harvesting systems developed by humans to date also have disadvantages:
Although inorganic semiconductors such as silicon are panchromatic, they only absorb light weakly. In order to absorb enough light energy, very thick layers of silicon in the micrometre range are therefore required — making solar cells relatively bulky and heavy.
Organic dyes that are suitable for solar cells are much thinner: their layer thickness is only around 100 nanometres. However, they are barely able to absorb a broad spectral range and are therefore not particularly efficient.
Thin Layer Absorbs a Lot of Light Energy
Researchers at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, in the journal Chem have now presented an innovative light-harvesting system that differs significantly from previous systems.
“Our system has a band structure similar to that of inorganic semiconductors. This means that it absorbs light panchromatically across the entire visible range. And it uses the high absorption coefficients of organic dyes. As a result, it can absorb a great deal of light energy in a relatively thin layer, similar to natural light-harvesting systems,” says JMU chemistry professor Frank Würthner. His team from the Institute of Organic Chemistry / Center for Nanosystems Chemistry designed the light-harvesting system at JMU and investigated it together with Professor Tobias Brixner’s group from the Institute of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry.
Four Dyes in an Ingenious Arrangement
Put simply, the innovative light-harvesting antenna from Würzburg consists of four different merocyanine dyes that are folded and thereby stacked closely together. The elaborate arrangement of the molecules enables ultra-fast and efficient energy transport within the antenna.
The researchers have given the prototype of the new light-harvesting system the name URPB. The letters stand for the light wavelengths that are absorbed by the four dye components of the antenna: U for ultraviolet, R for red, P for purple, B for blue.
Proven Performance Via Fluorescence
The researchers have demonstrated that their novel light-collecting system works so well by measuring the so-called fluorescence quantum yield. This involves measuring how much energy the system emits in the form of fluorescence. This allows conclusions to be drawn about the amount of light energy that it has previously collected.
The result: the system converts 38 per cent of the irradiated light energy over a broad spectral range into fluorescence — the four dyes on their own, on the other hand, manage less than one per cent to a maximum of three per cent. The right combination and skilful spatial arrangement of dye molecules in the stack therefore make a big difference.
Almonds, pottery, wood help date famed Kyrenia shipwreck
Historic shipwrecks often evoke dreams of sunken riches waiting on the bottom of the ocean to be reclaimed.
For the Cornell researchers trying to date the famous Hellenistic-era Kyrenia shipwreck, which was discovered and recovered off the north coast of Cyprus in the 1960s, the real treasure was not gold coins, but thousands of almonds found in jars among the cargo.
The almonds, combined with newly cleaned wood samples and the team’s modeling and radiocarbon-dating expertise, led the Cornell Tree-Ring Laboratory to identify the likeliest timeline of the Kyrenia’s sinking as between 296-271 BCE, with a strong probability it occurred between 286-272 BCE.
The team’s paper, “A Revised Radiocarbon Calibration Curve 350-250 BCE Impacts High-Precision Dating of the Kyrenia Ship,” will publish June 26 at 2 pm ET in PLoS ONE. The lead author is Sturt Manning, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Classical Archaeology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The Kyrenia has a storied legacy as the first major Greek Hellenistic-period ship to be found, in 1965, with a largely intact hull. From 1967-69, it was excavated along with its cargo, which included hundreds of ceramic vessels, then reassembled offsite and scientifically studied.
“Kyrenia was one of the first times it was realized this type of rich evidence from the classical world could be found largely intact more than 2,000 years later on the seabed, if you could find it,” said Sturt Manning. “It was a bit of a landmark moment, the idea that you actually could dive, excavate and bring up a classical-era ship and so discover this long-past world directly. Shipwrecks are unique time capsules, and you can get amazing preservation.”
For the last six decades, the Kyrenia has provided archeologists and historians with key insights into the development of ancient ship technology, construction practices and maritime trade. To date, no fewer than three Kyrenia replicas have been produced and launched, and these reconstructions have yielded considerable information on ancient ships and their sailing performance. However, the timeline of the Kyrenia’s provenance and the exact date of its sinking has always been vague at best. The initial efforts to date the ship were based on its recovered artifacts, such as the pottery on board and a small batch of coins, which initially led researchers to estimate the ship was built and sank in the later 300s BCE.
“Classical texts and finds at port sites already told us this era was significant for widespread maritime trade and connections all around the Mediterranean — an early period of globalization,” Manning said. “But the discovery of the Kyrenia ship, just under 15 meters long, likely with a crew of four, dramatically made this all very immediate and real. It yielded key insights into the practicalities of the earlier part of a millennium of intense maritime activity in the Mediterranean, from Greek through Late Antique times.”
The first volume of the final publication of the Kyrenia ship project, released last year, argued the wrecking date was a little later, closer to 294-290 BCE, but the primary piece of evidence — a poorly preserved, nearly illegible coin — was not watertight.
Manning’s team, which included co-authors Madeleine Wenger ’24 and Brita Lorentzen, ’06, Ph.D. ’15, sought to secure a date.
The perils of polyethylene glycol
The biggest hurdle for accurately dating the Kyrenia has been another artifact, one from the 20th century: polyethylene glycol (PEG). Excavators and preservationists often applied the petroleum-based compound to waterlogged wood to prevent it from decomposing after it was lifted out of the ocean’s oxygen-free environment.
“PEG was a standard treatment for decades. The trouble is it’s a petroleum product,” Manning said, “which means that if you’ve got PEG in the wood, you have this contamination from ancient fossil carbon that makes radiocarbon dating impossible.”
Manning’s team worked with researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands to develop a new method to clean PEG out of wood, and they demonstrated it on PEG-treated Roman-era samples from Colchester, England, that already had established dendrochronological (tree-ring sequence) dates.
“We removed the PEG from the wood, we radiocarbon dated it and we showed that in each case, we got a radiocarbon age consistent with the real (known) age,” Manning said. “We basically got 99.9% of the PEG removed.”
They used that technique to remove PEG from a Kyrenia sample that Manning and collaborators had tried, and failed, to accurately date 10 years ago. The team also now dated a tiny, twisted piece of wood that was salvaged from the Kyrenia in the late 1960s but was too small to be included in the reconstruction, thus avoiding PEG-treatment. It subsequently sat in a jar of water in a museum for 50-odd years.
The dates showed that the most recent preserved tree-rings from these timbers grew in the mid-later 4th century BCE. Because the samples did not include bark, the researchers couldn’t determine the exact date the original trees were felled, but could say the date was likely after approximately 355-291 BCE.
Organic evidence
Working with the Kyrenia’s original excavation team, the researchers examined its various artifacts, including the pottery and coins, with a focus on organic materials, including an astragalus (a sheep or goat ankle bone once used for games and divining rituals in several ancient cultures) and thousands of fresh green almonds found in some of the large amphorae, i.e., ceramic jars. These “short-lived” sample materials helped define the date of the ship’s last voyage.
The team applied combined statistical modeling with the dendrochronology of the wood samples to get a level of dating that was much more precise than previous efforts. The modeling identified the most likely range of dates for the final voyage to be between 305-271 BCE (95.4% probability) and 286-272 BCE (68.3% probability) — several years more recent than current estimations.
But there was one big hiccup along the way. The new dates didn’t align with the international radiocarbon calibration curve, which is based on known-age tree-rings and is used to convert radiocarbon measurements into calendar dates for the northern hemisphere.
Manning took a closer look at data behind the calibration curve, which has been assembled over many decades by dozens of labs and hundreds of scientists. He discovered that the period between 350 and 250 BCE had no modern accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon data behind it. Instead, the calibration curve in this period relied on only a few measurements conducted in the 1980s and 1990s using an older type of radiocarbon-dating technology. With collaborators in the U.S. and the Netherlands, the team measured known-age single-year sequoia and oak samples to re-calibrate the curve for the period 433-250 BCE. That not only helped clarify a big spike in radiocarbon production caused by a minimum of solar activity centered around 360 BCE, but also led to important revisions to the curve in the period around 300 BCE — improvements that were critical to dating the Kyrenia.
Manning anticipates the new findings will not only clarify the timeline of the Kyrenia and its cargo but will also help researchers using the calibration curve for very different projects.
“This revised curve 400-250 BCE now has relevance to other problems that researchers are working on whether in Europe or China or somewhere else in the northern hemisphere,” he said. “Half of the people who cite the paper in the future will be citing the fact that we’ve revised the radiocarbon calibration curve in this period, and only half will be saying the Kyrenia shipwreck is really important and has a much better date.”
Co-authors include researchers from the Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratory, the University of Groningen and the University of California, Irvine.
