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This is Defector, a new sports blog and media company. We made this place together, we own it together, we run it together. Without access, without favor, without discretion, and without interference.

Defector


<p>charismatic megafauna (they/them)</p>


Sabrina Imbler

An ancient grave with a skeleton with both masculine and feminine signifiers.

Science

Can We Exhume Gender From The Long-Dead?

<p>Columnist. Author of many <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Drew-Magary/e/B001JS8R52/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1">fine works of literature</a>, including <em>Point B</em>. Handsomest man in the world.</p>


Drew Magary

A Lebanese couple look through windows of a building displaying a giant advertisement of a deodorant in Beirut 01 December 1999. Sexy and erotic advertisement have become common across Beirut the most liberal Arab capital.

Suddenly Every Deodorant Company Wants To Get In My Pants

Barry Petchesky

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured the sharpest infrared images to date of one of the most distinctive objects in our skies, the Horsehead Nebula. These observations show a part of the iconic nebula in a whole new light, capturing its complexity with unprecedented spatial resolution. Webb’s new images show part of the sky in the constellation Orion (The Hunter), in the western side of the Orion B molecular cloud. Rising from turbulent waves of dust and gas is the Horsehead Nebula, otherwise known as Barnard 33, which resides roughly 1300 light-years away.  The nebula formed from a collapsing interstellar cloud of material, and glows because it is illuminated by a nearby hot star. The gas clouds surrounding the Horsehead have already dissipated, but the jutting pillar is made of thick clumps of material that is harder to erode. Astronomers estimate that the Horsehead has about five million years left before it too disintegrates. Webb’s new view focuses on the illuminated edge of the top of the nebula’s distinctive dust and gas structure. The Horsehead Nebula is a well-known photon-dominated region, or PDR. In such a region ultraviolet light from young, massive stars creates a mostly neutral, warm area of gas and dust between the fully ionised gas surrounding the massive stars and the clouds in which they are born. This ultraviolet radiation strongly influences the gas chemistry of these regions and acts as the most important source of heat.  These regions occur where interstellar gas is dense enough to remain neutral, but not dense enough to prevent the penetration of far-ultraviolet light from massive stars. The light emitted from such PDRs provides a unique tool to study the physical and chemical processes that drive the evolution of interstellar matter in our galaxy, and throughout the Universe from the early era of vigorous star formation to the present day. Owing to its proximity and its nearly edge-on geometry, the Horsehead Nebula is an ideal target for astronomers to study the physical structures of PDRs and the evolution of the chemical characteristics of the gas and dust within their respective environments, and the transition regions between them. It is considered one of the best objects in the sky to study how radiation interacts with interstellar matter. This image was captured with Webb’s NIRCam (Near-InfraRed Camera) instrument. [Image description: At the bottom of the image a small portion of the Horsehead Nebula is seen close-in, as a curved wall of thick, smoky gas and dust. Above the nebula various distant stars and galaxies can be seen up to the top of the image. One star is very bright and large, with six long diffraction spikes that cross the image. The background fades from a dark red colour above the nebula to black.]

The Closer We Look The Smaller We Get

Honeybee drinking nectar from a flower in Markham, Ontario, Canada, on September 10, 2022. (Photo by Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto)

Sports Highlight Of The Day

The Sports Highlight Of The Day Is The First Honeybee Ever To Pull A String

Defector Staff

A panicked crowd on Broad Street, New York City, after the closing of the stock exchange doors during the Panic of 1873, 20th September 1873. The stock exchange stayed closed for ten days. (Photo by Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

This Is So Stupid

Defector Status Report: East Coast Earthquake

Ray Ratto

A first-quarter moon is seen through a telescope from L'Aquila, Italy, on February 16th, 2024. (Photo by Lorenzo Di Cola/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

What Time Will Football Start On The Moon?

<p>Staff Writer</p>
<p>Find me on Signal @DefectorChris.19</p>


Chris Thompson

Fusion Researchers Set New Record For Ignoring My Wish To Be Consumed By The Heat Of Seven Suns

<div>Paola Rosa-Aquino is a freelance journalist covering science, space and the environment. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her canine co-worker Cece.</div>
<div></div>


Paola Rosa-Aquino

&lt;&gt; on August 21, 2017 in Casper, Wyoming.

Solar Eclipses: No Longer Scary, Still Astonishingly Cool

a silhouette of a semi truck in front of a starry sky

Vibrations From “Interstellar Meteor” Actually From Local Truck; Or, Fact-Checking The Celebrity Scientist

I Think I Found The Problem Here: The Rocket Blew Up

Landing On The Moon Isn’t Getting Any Easier

I Bonked My Head On The Moon

The Little Mars Helicopter That Could

VALLES MARINERIS, MARS - Mars' own Grand Canyon, Valles Marineris, is shown on the surface of the planet in this composite image made aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft. The image was taken from a video featuring high-resolution images from Arizona State University's Thermal Emission Imaging System multi-band camera on board the spacecraft. The mosaic was then colored to approximate how Mars would look to the human eye. Valles Marineris is 10 times longer, five times deeper and 20 times wider than Earth's Grand Canyon. (Photo by NASA/Arizona State University via Getty Images)

There’s So Much Ice On Mars, You Guys

Low angle view of moon against clear sky at night

Is There A Better Way To Honor Your Dog Than Littering The Moon?

Neptune’s A Pale Blue Fraud!

The graceful winding arms of the grand-design spiral galaxy M51 stretch across this image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Unlike the menagerie of weird and wonderful spiral galaxies with ragged or disrupted spiral arms, grand-design spiral galaxies boast prominent, well-developed spiral arms like the ones showcased in this image. This galactic portrait was captured by Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). In this image the reprocessed stellar light by dust grains and molecules in the medium of the galaxy illuminate a dramatic filamentary medium. Empty cavities and bright filaments alternate and give the impression of ripples propagating from the spiral arms. The yellow compact regions indicate the newly formed star clusters in the galaxy. M51 — also known as NGC 5194 — lies about 27 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici, and is trapped in a tumultuous relationship with its near neighbour, the dwarf galaxy NGC 5195. The interaction between these two galaxies has made these galactic neighbours one of the better-studied galaxy pairs in the night sky. The gravitational influence of M51’s smaller companion is thought to be partially responsible for the stately nature of the galaxy’s prominent and distinct spiral arms. If you would like to learn more about this squabbling pair of galactic neighbours, you can explore earlier observations of M51 by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope here.  This Webb observation of M51 is one of a series of observations collectively titled Feedback in Emerging extrAgalactic Star clusTers, or FEAST. The FEAST observations were designed to shed light on the interplay between stellar feedback and star formation in environments outside of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Stellar feedback is the term used to describe the outpouring of energy from stars into the environments which form them, and is a crucial process in determining the rates at which stars form. Understanding stellar feedback is vital to building accurate universal models of star formation. The aim of the FEAST observations is to discover and study stellar nurseries in galaxies beyond our own Milky Way. Before Webb became operative, other observatories such as the Atacama Large Millimetre Array in the Chilean desert and Hubble have given us a glimpse of star formation either at the onset (tracing the dense gas and dust clouds where stars will form) or after the stars have destroyed with their energy their natal gas and dust clouds. Webb is opening a new window into the early stages of star formation and stellar light, as well as the energy reprocessing of gas and dust. Scientists are seeing star clusters emerging from their natal cloud in galaxies beyond our local group for the first time. They will also be able to measure how long it takes for these stars to pollute with newly formed metals and to clean out the gas (these time scales are different from galaxy to galaxy). By studying these processes, we will better understand how the star formation cycle and metal enrichment are regulated within galaxies as well as what are the time scales for planets and brown dwarfs to form. Once dust and gas is removed from the newly formed stars, there is no material left to form planets. [Image Description: A large spiral galaxy takes up the entirety of the image. The core is mostly bright white, but there are also swirling, detailed structures that resemble water circling a drain. There is white and pale blue light that emanates from stars and dust at the core’s centre, but it is tightly limited to the core. The detailed rings feature bands of deep orange and cloudy grey, which are interspersed by darker empty regions throughout.]

Fall Into The Whirlpool Galaxy

A flattened scroll of lead with words etched on it: “sathanas taleke belzebuk hinrik berith”

This Month In Curse Tablets

Patrick Redford

A crowd of Icelanders stands in awe of the volcanic cloud

The Icelandic Eruption Is Finally Here

Here’s A Cool Picture Of Uranus

at the Extinction: Not the End of the World exhibition at The Natural History Museum on February 5, 2013 in London, England. More than 99 percent of species that once roamed the planet are now extinct. Organisers of the exhibition hope to show that a diverse range of plants and animals survived. 80 Museum specimens are on display from February 8-8, September 2013.

What Kind Of Future Does De-Extinction Promise?

The Popular Science Logo on a black background

Journalismism

Popular Science Ends And Science Journalism Keeps Shrinking

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND - JULY 16: Mount Fagradalsfjall volcano spews lava after an eruption in Reykjavik, Iceland, on July 16, 2023. (Photo by Emin Yogurtcuoglu/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Iceland, As Always, Is Being Ripped Apart

Illustration of the giant impact hypothesis, with the hypothetical planet Theia colliding with Earth 4.5 billion years ago, created on July 19, 2015. This impact is suggested to be the source of material that created the Moon. (Illustration by Tobias Roetsch/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Curious Earth Lumps Might Be Leftovers From Another Planet It Ate

People carry injured and dead Palestinians from the rubbles of buildings as civil defense teams and civilians conduct search and rescue operations after Israeli attacks on Al-Shati refugee camp of Gaza City, Gaza on October 27, 2023 as Israeli attacks continue on the 21st day on Gaza