Mars is dusty. Like, really dusty. And that dust may suffocate NASA’s InSight mission.

InSight sits on the surface of Mars measuring marsquakes and observing the local weather, powering itself with a pair of solar arrays that soak up energy from the sun. Since it landed in November 2018, InSight has been operating for more than 920 sols (Mars days), equal to about 940 Earth days.

That’s seven months longer than its planned two-year mission. In that time, dust has obscured around 80 percent of the arrays, InSight’s principal investigator Bruce Banerdt shared in a presentation on June 21.

The team expects to keep InSight running through the summer, but as that dust keeps piling up, it won’t be able to press on much longer.

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Along with his work on InSight, Banerdt was project scientist on the Mars Exploration Rover Project, which launched the solar-powered Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity in 2003. He’s been dealing with Martian dust for years.

“Dust is definitely up there as one of our major design challenges,” he said in an interview. “My black piano notwithstanding, we don’t really have a lot of dust on Earth compared to Mars.”

“My black piano notwithstanding, we don’t really have a lot of dust on Earth compared to Mars.”

Where there are rocks, there is erosion, and where there is erosion, there is dust. On Earth, 71 percent of the surface is water, and when dust touches water, it sticks to it and eventually gets deposited on the ocean floor. Mars is notably devoid of water, so all the dust that’s blowing around just keeps blowing around, sometimes even resulting in planet-wide dust storms.

Shortly before InSight landed, Opportunity found itself in such a storm, which blocked out the sun for multiple sols. Having run for 14 years on the red planet, the storm was too much for Opportunity’s solar panels. Last contact with the rover was made on June 10, 2018, just a few days into the storm.

This series of images shows simulated views of a darkening Martian sky blotting out the Sun from NASA’s Opportunity rover’s point of view during the 2018 global dust storm.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/TAMU

Spirit and Opportunity were both encumbered by dust at various points in their journeys, but the rovers caught breaks that InSight just can’t seem to match: cleaning events. Strong Martian winds can blow dust off of technology, giving them much-needed power boosts and prolonging their operations.

“We think this is because of dust devils, or more precisely ‘atmospheric vortices,’ that actually passed over the spacecraft,” Banerdt said, referring to the rovers’ cleaning events. “We hoped that we would experience the same thing with InSight.”

Alas, it seems that there just aren’t as many dust devils spinning around InSight’s landing site as there were around Spirit and Opportunity. If a cleaning event does happen for InSight though, it could remain in action for a long, long time.

Learning from the dust

As we spend more time exploring Mars, scientists can develop new strategies to tackle problems like dust in the future.

“[InSight] is the first mission that was actually designed to last a long time” Banerdt said. “We didn’t really have a lot of a lot of information and data to go on.”

As it happens, solar arrays tend to maintain an electric charge, as do particles banging around in the sun’s radiation on Mars. That means the dust is extra attracted to solar arrays.

Future missions could use special coatings on arrays to make them less adhesive, or even a grid of electrical wires above the arrays that a spacecraft could run a charge through and zap dust off, Banerdt said. Another option involves double-sided arrays set on a revolving joint that could flip over every couple of years.

For InSight, the team has found a method that sometimes helps to push some dust off the arrays: Pouring sand on them. Using a scoop, InSight grabbed some sand and dropped it upwind of a solar array. As the grains blew over, they picked up some dust, giving InSight a measurable power boost. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always seem to be very effective.

InSight’s scoop can be seen lifted above the solar array on the left side of the image before it drops sand.
Credit: nasa/jpl-caltech

“People are always asking us why we don’t just put wipers on to clean them off,” Banerdt said. “The main reason we don’t do that is because of weight and complexity. It’s not a trivial thing to set something up there with motors, and rubber doesn’t work very well in a vacuum with an oxidizing environment.”

In the future, astronauts on Mars could just sweep a rover’s solar arrays every once in a while. Or future rovers could just rely on nuclear power, like NASA’s Perseverance and Curiosity rovers.

But using nuclear power is expensive. Perseverance’s plutonium-based power supply cost NASA $75 million. Solar arrays are much cheaper.

Nuclear power involves environmental risks, too. If something went wrong, radiation could contaminate parts of Mars and ruin the results of future research missions.

“People are always asking us why we don’t just put wipers on to clean them off.”

If astronauts make it to Mars, dust could also be a serious health problem.

“The dust might be kind of toxic,” Banerdt said. “Mars is a very oxidizing environment, and the ultraviolet radiation hitting the ground is not filtered out by the atmosphere. So the dust could be kind of reactive, and probably not deeply poisonous, but could be very irritable to lungs and mucous membranes and things like that.”

Over long periods of time, dust can mess with a rover’s other parts, even corroding wheels. Spirit lost the use of two wheels, and Curiosity has some wheel damage that NASA chemist James Gaier pinned mostly on Martian dust in a Medium article.

Martian dust will continue to be a challenge, but that’s just part of the fun of exploring places that aren’t like Earth.

Whether you’re planning on spending the summer traveling, staying home in the air conditioning, or working extra hours, these software and app deals — active as of July 4 — can help improve your season.

From apps that automate your social channels to software that makes learning a new language a breeze, you can save on these 25 apps and software picks for a limited time.

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Tweet Ninja Twitter Automation Solo Plan: Lifetime Subscription

With built-in tools for automated retweeting and following and suggestions for the right people to follow, Tweet Ninja is a powerful platform that saves you time by setting your Twitter account to autopilot. A $540 value, you can use the code SUMMER20 at checkout and score this lifetime subscription for just $39.20 for a limited time.

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Scopio’s royalty-free stock photos are part of a growing library of more than 300,000 diverse images taken by more than 13,000 photographers in more than 150 countries. A standard lifetime subscription to Scopio is valued at more than $3,000, but you can get it for just $29 for a limited time.

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If you’re looking to invest in real estate, you’ll want access to data and analytics to save you time and energy, which is precisely what Mashvisor does. This lifetime subscription lets you easily find investment properties and optimize their rental performance — and it’s on sale for only $39.99 ($1,499 value).

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Stop me if this sounds familiar: It’s a Friday night, you’re in the mood for a movie, you’ve fired up Hulu…and now you’ve spent 40 minutes racked with indecision, just trying to decide which of the endless options in front of you feels right for right now.

Well, we can’t tell you what your heart wants. But we can tell you what our hearts want — what movies we love the most, which ones we never get sick of, which ones we still think about, which ones we’d happily recommend to anyone asking. Like, you know, yourself. Here are the best films on Hulu.

1. Gone Girl

Gone Girl, directed by David Fincher and adapted by Gillian Flynn based on her own bestselling book, stands out as one of the sharpest dissections of modern gender roles put to the big screen. Nominally, it’s a thriller about a twisted cat-and-mouse game played out between a heterosexual married couple, and it’s a spectacularly entertaining one at that. But in the process of puzzling out exactly what happened to Amazing Amy, Gone Girl becomes so much more. It delves into the impossible standards placed on women, the expectations we have of men, the unknowability of a marriage’s secrets, our national obsession with dead white girls, and the vast chasm between public perception and private truth, in ways only fiction can. (*)

How to watch: Gone Girl is streaming on Hulu.

Can’t get enough Fincher? His The Social Network is also streaming on Hulu.

2. Romeo + Juliet

Countless filmmakers have tried to modernize Shakespeare for the big screen, but for our money, few have managed to do it more memorably than Baz Luhrmann with Romeo + Juliet. His is an adaptation that goes way over the top on every single level, and then keeps going several more miles for good measure: Everything, from the flamboyantly colorful costumes (by Catherine Martin), to the unimpeachably cool soundtrack, to the tongue-twisting delivery of the Bard’s best lines, seems to be taking a more-is-more approach. What grounds it is the believably raw passion between its star-crossed lovers, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes at the respective heights of their teen-idol powers. Is it maybe a bit cheesy? Yes. Do we fall for it every single time? Also yes.

How to watch: Romeo + Juliet is streaming on Hulu.

Love a romance with a killer soundtrack? Julie Taymor’s Beatles musical Across the Universe is also streaming on Hulu.

3. Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Taika Waititi’s last New Zealand-set film, released after What We Do In The Shadows but before Thor: Ragnarok, follows a spiky, defiant young teenager named Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) who finds himself and his dog Tupac on the lam in the New Zealand bush with a cantankerous and reluctant carer (Sam Neill), pursued by a dogged but well-meaning child services agent. Dennison is a gift in this, his toughness and sweetness and indignant speeches creating one of the most instantly memorable, lovable teenage characters in recent memory. And Neill’s gruff “Uncle” Hec traces the contours of the “taciturn old fella comes to care for the scrappy kid” arc with so much nuance it feels made anew. The utter genius Rachel House, meanwhile, whom Waititi rightly yoinked into the MCU with him in Ragnarok, almost steals the show as the hysterically relentless “villain” of the film. (“I’m like the Terminator. You’re like Sarah Connor. In the first one, before she could do chin-ups.”) 

It’s an occasionally devastating coming-of-age tale for both main characters, a story of the revelation that you can go much farther when you let other people in. But more than anything, it’s hysterically funny. — Caitlin Welsh, Australia Editor (*)

How to watch: Hunt for the Wilderpeople is streaming on Hulu.

Big Waititi fan? Boy, from his early career, is also streaming on Hulu.

4. Bound

Jennifer Tilly in ‘Bound’
Credit: Dino De Laurentiis / Summit Ent / Kobal / Shutterstock

Before The Matrix, before Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending, there was Bound. The Wachowskis’ directorial debut is a slick neo-noir thriller centering on an ex-con (Corky, played by Gina Gershon) and a mobster’s girlfriend (Violet, played by Jennifer Tilly) who fall first into a dangerous affair, and then into an even more dangerous scheme to steal from the Mafia. Compared to the sprawling, effects-heavy epics the sisters became known for later on, Bound feels positively tiny — but what it lacks in scope and budget, it more than makes up for with style, swagger, and seductive allure.

How to watch: Bound is streaming on Hulu.

Up for a very different take on neo-noir? Robert Altman’s idiosyncratic The Long Goodbye is also streaming on Hulu.

5. Die Hard

Die Hard may be a Christmas movie, as a certain subset of its fans are all too eager to point out each December, but its appeal endures year-round. Bruce Willis lends an everyman charm to John McClane, a New York City cop caught in the crosshairs of a terrorist plot during one extremely stressful office holiday party. But it’s Alan Rickman who very nearly steals the show as the slick, scornful villain Hans Gruber. Though John McTiernan’s action classic has inspired several sequels and countless knockoffs in the years since, few have matched or surpassed the 1988 original for sheer, simple fun. (*)

How to watch: Die Hard is streaming on Hulu.

Craving more ’80s action goodness? The Terminator is also streaming on Hulu.

6. Fast Color

Julia Hart’s Fast Color is set in a dystopian, drought-struck near future, and centers on a family with special powers: Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), her mother Bo (Lorraine Toussaint), and her young daughter Lila (Saniyya Sidney). But it’s not your typical sci-fi superhero movie. It’s less interested in explosive action or intricate mythology than in nuanced character work, charting the family’s emotional journeys as they work to heal the bonds between them and learn to harness their gifts for good. The results are thoughtful, moving, and — in a sea of same-y blockbusters about great powers and great responsibility — refreshingly unique.

How to watch: Fast Color is streaming on Hulu.

Looking for more grounded, emotional sci-fi? Arrival is also streaming on Hulu.

7. Parasite

Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite is a shapeshifter: Just when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the thing, it has a way of slipping through your fingers and transforming into something else entirely. It’s a heist film, a black comedy, a thriller, a horror, a satire, a tragedy, and part of the fun is simply sitting back to see what new shades it might take on next.

Through all these turns, though, the one thing that’s never in doubt is that we’re in the hands of a master. Every frame, every line, and every twist of Parasite feels considered and deliberate, and yet it never feels clinical or contrived, because the twin engines driving the whole thing forward are empathy and rage — specifically, class rage, directed not so much at the 1% (though they do get a healthy skewering) as at the entire rotten system that makes a story like this plausible in the first place. Parasite is one of the most entertaining movies in recent memory, and one of the cleverest, and one of the most deeply affecting. Simply put, it’s the best. (*)

How to watch: Parasite is streaming on Hulu.

Want more where that came from? The Host, also by Bong, is also streaming on Hulu.

8. Akira

Plenty of people have heard of Akira, or have at the very least seen enough of the sci-fi anime classic’s iconic motorcycle to have an association with that title. But have you ever sit down and watched it? It’s time to correct that if not. Akira isn’t just one of the best anime stories ever told, it’s also a shoe-in for virtually any “greatest sci-fi of all time” round-up that gets put together. The story, adapted from the manga created by Katsuhiro Otomo (who also directed), follows Shotaro Kaneda, leader of the Capsules biker gang, as he fights to save his telekinetic friend Tetsuo Shima from forces that want to exploit those abilities. The plot eventually spins outward into a much bigger cyberpunk-fueled story set against the backdrop of a dystopian “Neo-Tokyo” in 2019. — Adam Rosenberg, Senior Entertainment Reporter (*)

How to watch: Akira is streaming on Hulu.

Feeling extra dystopian? RoboCop is also streaming on Hulu.

9. If Beale Street Could Talk

So much of Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, based on the novel by James Baldwin, plays out in the way people look at each other: with love, with longing, with expectation or anger or pride. All those gazes make the film breathtaking in its intimacy, even as it connects a large cast of characters across years and even countries.

The plot is explicitly about racial injustice — it concerns a young Black man (Stephan James) sent to jail on a false accusation, as his fiancée (Kiki Layne) discovers she is pregnant — and the film does not shy away from the ugliness of their ordeal. But what’s most striking about it is its insistence on joy. Beale Street is a film concerned not just with the hardships of life, but in the big and small blessings that make it worth living anyway. (*)

How to watch: If Beale Street Could Talk is streaming on Hulu.

Interested in Baldwin? I Am Not Your Negro is also streaming on Hulu.

10. The Virgin Suicides

To watch The Virgin Suicides is to fall, as its narrators do, under the dreamy spell of the Lisbon sisters — five beautiful but untouchable teenage girls in 1970s Michigan — and then to be haunted, as its narrators are for decades to follow, by the unknowable mystery of the tragedies that befell them. But what the teenage boys miss even in their obsessive scrutiny of the Lisbons, writer-director Sofia Coppola catches. There are no satisfying answers to be found here. But in the questions, there emerges an empathetic portrait of growing up female in a world that seems more interested in projecting its fantasies and fears onto you than in trying to see you for who you truly are.

How to watch: The Virgin Suicides is streaming on Hulu.

Ready for another teen girl classic? Heathers is also streaming on Hulu.

11. Palm Springs

When Palm Springs arrived in 2020, most movie releases had been postponed because of the pandemic — yet here was a movie, a new movie, a festival darling, about people going quietly insane with monotony and losing grip on time itself.

Max Barbakow’s film showcases a cheerfully nihilistic Andy Samberg, along with Cristin Milioti in her best work to date as his increasingly frenzied companion, in “one of those infinite time loop situations you might have heard of.” Their chemistry makes Andy Siara’s script soar, leaving ample room for J.K. Simmons’ sinister interludes and just the right amount of time travel interrogation. It’s a sharp, original comedy worth revisiting again, and again, and again. — Proma Khosla, Entertainment Reporter (*)

How to watch: Palm Springs is streaming on Hulu.

Stuck in a time loop of time loop rom coms? 50 First Dates is also streaming on Hulu.

12. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

There’s a reason Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has a reputation as a stone-cold classic: It’s really that good. The story, which centers around two outlaws on the run after a train heist gone bad, provides plenty of thrills, but what really the film special is the chemistry between its two leads, Paul Newman as the charismatic Butch Cassidy and Robert Redford as the sardonic Sundance Kid. Bolstered by witty dialogue from screenwriter William Goldman, their friendship set the gold standard for countless buddy films to come — and remains irresistibly endearing to this day. (*)

How to watch: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is streaming on Hulu.

Ready for a different kind of Western? The Sisters Brothers is also streaming on Hulu.

13. The Princess Bride

Based on the fantasy novel by William Goldman (yes, the same William Goldman from the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid entry), The Princess Bride spins a fairy tale that’s equal parts sweetly sincere and cheekily self-aware. Cary Elwes and Robin Wright star as the dashing Westley and the beautiful Buttercup, a pair of star-crossed lovers who — alongside allies like the gentle giant Fezzik (André the Giant) and the vengeful fencing master Inigo Motoya (Mandy Patinkin) — must prevail over countless sword fights, Rodents of Unusual Size, an evil count, and even death itself on their way to happily ever after. (*)

How to watch: The Princess Bride is streaming on Hulu.

Satirical fairy tales your thing? Shrek is also streaming on Hulu.

14. 28 Days Later

Ah, the fast zombies movie. There’s a lot that stands out about 28 Days Later, from it being the sweetest fruit of a collaboration between director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland to the credit it’s gotten for reviving the zombie genre of horror movies (Robert Kirkman’s comic The Walking Dead arrived a year later). But the thing that most people remember about 28 Days Later is a new, fast-moving breed of zombie that’s inherently more terrifying and also rooted in the deeply unsettling fiction — especially in 2021! — of a global pandemic setting off a different kind of zombie apocalypse. — A.R. (*)

How to watch: 28 Days Later is now streaming on Hulu.

Can’t get enough of fast-moving zombies? Train to Busan is also streaming on Hulu.

15. Jennifer’s Body

Jennifer’s Body may have received a chilly reception upon its release in 2009, but as it turns out, it wasn’t so much a bad movie as one that was ahead of its time. Directed by Karyn Kusama and written by Diablo Cody, the feminist cult classic stars Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried as teenage BFFs whose lives are ripped apart when the former becomes possessed by a demon and starts killing local boys. Alternately creepy and hilarious (“You’re killing people!” / “No, I’m killing boys” will never not be funny), but shot through with an undercurrent of heartbreak, Jennifer’s Body speaks volumes about sexual abuse, female friendships, and the hell that is a teenage girl.

How to watch: Jennifer’s Body is streaming on Hulu.

Want more from Diablo Cody? Young Adult is also streaming on Hulu.

16. Fargo

25 years after its release, Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo remains so beloved, there’s a whole TV series that keeps trying to recapture its magic. But there’s still nothing like the original, with its mix of bleak humor, unexpected warmth, and “Minnesota nice.” Frances McDormand leads Fargo as Marge Gunderson, a small-town police chief investigating a spectacularly bungled kidnapping perpetrated by a desperate used car salesman (William H. Macy) and two career criminals (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare). You’ll groan at the grisly kills (one involves a wood chipper), laugh at the awkward details, and maybe come away realizing that Marge is right — there is more to life than a little money.

How to watch: Fargo is streaming on Hulu.

Like your murders with a side of comedy? The Nice Guys is also streaming on Hulu.

17. MLK / FBI

Directed by Sam Pollard and produced by Benjamin Hedin, MLK/FBI explores the damning relationship between its title subjects — the FBI’s consistent harassment of Martin Luther King Jr. at the height of his role as a civil rights activist. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI spied on King, exposed his personal affairs, and planned to discredit him in the eyes of the American people and thereby destroy the civil rights movement from within.

The full story has yet to be told — more documents will be declassified in 2027 — but Pollard’s film sets your teeth on edge, exposing the insidious actions of institutions that are supposed to protect and uphold American values. The system is broken, and MLK/FBI reminds us that it has been that way for a long time. — P.K. (*)

How to watch: MLK / FBI is streaming on Hulu.

Fascinated by the late ’60s? Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is also streaming on Hulu.

18. Galaxy Quest

This loving parody of, and tribute to, Star Trek‘s storytelling tropes and obsessive fandom has a heart of gold that would make Gene Roddenberry himself proud. Galaxy Quest sees the has-been cast of the eponymous cult sci-fi TV serial plucked off the regional fan-convention circuit by a people from a far-flung world who believe the show to be documentary footage of their heroics — making the pissy, self-absorbed, and cynical actors the very real last hope of the adoring (and adorably literal-minded) aliens.

A stacked cast — including Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub, Sam Rockwell, plus Rainn Wilson and Justin Long in their first film roles — is armed with a sweet and sly script that remains one of the best Hollywood stories ever about the power of falling in love with a fictional world. — C.W.

How to watch: Galaxy Quest is now streaming on Amazon Prime.

Prefer the real thing? Star Trek Beyond is also streaming on Hulu.

(*) indicates write up adapted from previous list.

Sometimes innovators are punished or laughed at, or they’re simply ahead of their time.

I’m not sure that’s the case here but whatever. You’ve still got to hand it to a motorist who apparently attached a Starlink satellite dish to the hood of their car. Starlink, for the unaware, is Space X’s satellite-based internet service provider.

Anyway, here, look at this innovation.

The California Highway Patrol posted on Facebook that the driver claimed the dish only blocked their view “when I make right turns,” which wouldn’t be great. CNBC reported that CHP gave the driver a ticket for the obstruction and that the motorist told an officer they used the dish to work from their car.

“Yes, it is in fact illegal to mount a satellite dish to the hood of your vehicle, obstructing your view under section 26708(a)(2) of the California Vehicle Code,” CHP Antelope Valley wrote on Facebook. “You also may not hang things from your rear view mirror, mount a GPS or cell phone in an unapproved location on your windshield, or display a handicap placard while the vehicle is in motion under this section. It’s about safety folks.”

As The Verge noted, Elon Musk, head of Space X, once said in a 2020 earnings call that he supposed “technically, you could buy [a Starlink antennae] and just stick it on the car.” He noted on Twitter, however, that it definitely wasn’t intended for cars.

Tweet may have been deleted

Musk said this week that Starlink has more than 1,500 satellites in orbit and more than 69,000 users. He has said the goal is to bring more affordable internet to places with lower populations.

“It’s really meant for sparsely populated areas,” Musk said during an interview at Mobile World Congress.

Got it: rural areas and not the hood of a car.

These aren’t actually fireworks you’re seeing, but they sure look the part.

As we head into Independence Day weekend in the United States, a new Hubble image drop from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) is here to kick off the festivities. While fireworks as we know them aren’t actually a thing in the vacuum of space, expansive star clusters like this one certainly look the part.

This Picture of the Week depicts the open star cluster NGC 330, which lies around 180,000 light-years away inside the Small Magellanic Cloud. The cluster — which is in the constellation Tucana (The Toucan) — contains a multitude of stars, many of which are scattered across this striking image. The most stunning object in this image is actually the very small star cluster in the lower left corner of the image, surrounded by a nebula of ionised hydrogen (red) and dust (blue). Named GALFOR 1, the cluster was discovered in 2018 in Hubble’s archival data, which was used to create this latest image from Hubble. To better understand this star cluster, specifically whether the nebula surrounding the cluster also contains a bow shock, scientists will need high resolution infrared imagery from the upcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. This image also contains clues about the inner workings of Hubble itself. The criss-cross patterns surrounding the stars in this image — known as diffraction spikes —  were created when starlight interacted with the four thin vanes supporting Hubble’s secondary mirror. As star clusters form from a single primordial cloud of gas and dust, all the stars they contain are roughly the same age. This makes them useful natural laboratories for astronomers to learn how stars form and evolve. This image uses observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, and incorporates data from two very different astronomical investigations. The first aimed to understand why stars in star clusters appear to evolve differently from stars elsewhere, a peculiarity first observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The second aimed to determine how large stars can be before they become doomed to end their lives in cataclysmic supernova explosions. Links Video of A Scattering of Stars
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Kalirai, A. Milone

Say hello to star cluster NGC 330. This bright region of space sits about 180,000 light-years away from Earth, tucked inside a dwarf galaxy known as the Small Magellanic Cloud. It’s one of our own Milky Way galaxy’s closer neighbors, though it’s tiny by comparison, with only hundreds of millions of stars compared to our own roughly 100 billion.

This image, like most other Hubble imagery we see, is actually a composite that combines a scene snapped by the satellite’s Wide Field Camera 3 with “data from two very different astronomical investigations” that, respectively, looked at how stars inside of clusters evolve differently from non-cluster stars, and how large stars of any type can get before they explode in a supernova.

All the stars you see in this brilliant cluster are around the same age, which is a product of how star clusters are formed (and a reason why such celestial bodies are often a target for research). The lens flare-like patterns you see emanating from certain stars, however, isn’t a natural occurrence; rather, it’s a little gift from Hubble itself.

As NASA’s blog post notes: “The crisscross patterns surrounding the stars in this image, known as diffraction spikes, were created when starlight interacted with the four thin vanes supporting Hubble’s secondary mirror.”

I used to be a baseball fan. Hell, I used to play the sport (albeit, kind of poorly).

Now though, I cannot even recall the last televised game I watched. Baseball isn’t a part of my life, with one massive, glaring exception: viral clips of Shohei Ohtani.

But first, let’s backtrack. More than a decade ago, during the Jimmy Rollins-Chase Utley-Ryan Howard era of the Philadelphia Phillies, I lived and died with the team. I, a millennial with an attention span no longer than this sentence, followed baseball religiously. What a world.

As time passed, however, I kind of just gave it up. There’s too much stuff to do. Too many things that need my limited attention and time. And baseball was kind of boring. I’ve got reality TV to watch, dammit. Sure, I’ll still go to a baseball game, but that’s more about hanging out in the sun, having a couple beers, and eating a hot dog.

So yes, that’s all to say I don’t really care about baseball anymore. Or at least I didn’t. Enter Shohei, the grim reaper of baseballs.

I will watch any and all viral Shohei Ohtani clips. If you don’t know who he is, picture a vengeful demigod swinging a Louisville Slugger. Try to grasp the vast power of the ocean concentrating on hitting a silly little ball. Imagine an axe chopping softened butter.

Why am I wasting my time trying to describe it. Watch this.

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Hear the violent sound this ball makes, as if it briefly came to life, only to immediately wail for mercy.

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Here is our hero, a 26-year-old Japanese murderer of baseballs, hitting his 30th home run, most in the league. Notice how his bat cuts downward, slicing into the ball like a scythe whipping through long grass, searing the ball to the opposite side of the field.

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He hits a ball like it he is ordering it to never stop its flight.

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Oh and in case this all wasn’t enough: He’s a freaking dominant pitcher. Nobody — and I mean nobody — does that anymore. It’s unheard of in the modern era. It is not possible. Nobody pitches and plays the field — let alone do both at an All Star level.

The only comparison is Babe Ruth. Literally. That’s it. We’re only halfway through the season and Ohtani has already blown past the all-time high for homers the Great Bambino hit in a season where he also pitched a significant number of games.

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So, no, I will not watch a full baseball game. But I will search Ohtani’s name on Twitter and see the latest feat completed by the giant of a man. I cannot tell how many times I’ve been sucked down this rabbit hole. Ohtani did what? OMG look at that. Holy hell how does he swing so hard. Etc. Etc.

And honestly, this feels like the ideal way to take in baseball. I don’t have to sit for freaking four hours and cheer for the long relief pitcher eating innings. I just spend 30 seconds of my life watching baseballs get ground into a fine powder. Not to go all they should make the entire plane out of the black box…. but they should make all baseball out of Shohei dingers and splitters. It’s kind of what I’ve done for myself.

Leave sacrifice bunts for the purists. Being a diehard is for the birds, baby. I’m here to watch viral clips of a man who seems like he was dropped on this Earth to exact vengeance on puny white baseballs.

But, in all seriousness, this does feel like one small, good thing the internet can do. I can appreciate Ohtani, and see stuff that makes me genuinely giddy, on command. No watching a whole-ass game. No thanks. As long as we’re all being drenched with the internet’s permanent waterfall of hate spew, we might as well portion ourselves a bit of joy as well.

I find supreme joy in watching Ohtani disregard the laws of the baseball gods. He makes anything possible on the diamond, the laws of physics and man be damned.

It is the only way I watch baseball: thirty seconds at a time and absolutely slack-jawed. And it rules.

Fans of He-Man have lots of questions about what to expect from Netflix’s star-studded Masters of the Universe: Revelation series, created by Kevin Smith and based on the classic Mattel toys. This latest trailer at last brings some answers for the first part of the series, which spans five half-hour episodes.

Picking up after the events of the beloved ’80s cartoon, Revelations opens into an Eternia — the setting for these stories — where the magic that created it is fading. Whatever the cause may be, it sounds like this is a big enough threat that one-time enemies may have to work together. Though it also sounds like He-Man’s arch-nemesis Skeletor, voiced here by Mark Hamill, may not be on board with that plan.

We won’t have to wait much longer to find out more. Part 1 of Masters of the Universe: Revelations comes to Netflix on July 23.

Lovecraft Country won’t be returning to HBO for a second season.

The network confirmed the news in a Friday announcement. Lovecraft Country was adapted from Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel, which used historically racist author H.P. Lovecraft’s notions of cosmic horror to fuel stories set in the American South during (primarily) the 1950s.

“We will not be moving forward with a second season of Lovecraft Country. We are grateful for the dedication and artistry of the gifted cast and crew, and to Misha Green, who crafted this groundbreaking series. And to the fans, thank you for joining us on this journey,” HBO said in a statement on Friday (via The Hollywood Reporter).

Green, who served as Lovecraft‘s showrunner, didn’t comment on the cancellation directly, though she did share a tiny peek at t he “Season 2 Bible” on Friday after the news emerged. The theoretical second season would have carried the subtitle “Supremacy,” and it was to have introduced viewers to a reorganized “Sovereign States of America.”

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Markings on the restructured U.S. map in Green’s tweet suggest the Season 2 journey would have spanned the length of the map’s “Whitelands,” between southern Pennsylvania and northern Texas. Though that’s just a red dot and a red X; who’s to say what the route from one to the other would’ve looked like?

Green then shared a tiny morsel of additional detail on Saturday that offers a better sense of what might have been.

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It’s a tantalizing tease, but perhaps the bigger standout feature of Green’s tweet is her choice of hashtag. The “#noconfederate” hashtag ties to a social media pressure campaign that sprung up after HBO’s announcement of the show Confederate.

It was pitched as an alt-history sci-fi drama set in a world where the U.S. southern states successfully seceded as a result of the Civil War. The show would have picked up generations later, introducing a reimagined North America where the nation founded by the former U.S. states evolved slavery into a modern institution.

Notably, Confederate was to be spearheaded by Game of Thrones executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — both of whom are white. So the #noconfederate pressure campaign was conceived to protest HBO’s support for the idea. It seemed to work. The network went relatively silent after the show’s announcement in 2017, and the project was ultimately confirmed as canceled in 2020.

Which brings us back to Green’s tweet. The #noconfederate hashtag existed for a very specific purpose: To protest the existence of an ill-advised TV project that many felt had no business being in the hands of two white creators (particularly in light of some of the criticism directed at Thrones). It’s hard to read Green’s use of it in response to the Lovecraft cancellation as anything other than a swipe at HBO.

Confederate never ended up happening, but not necessarily because HBO was cowed by the criticism. The network only ever went as far as acknowledging that the initial announcement was handled poorly. And when news emerged in 2020 that it was, in fact, no longer happening, it only came after Benioff and Weiss had stepped away from a high-profile Star Wars project that was apparently derailed by a deal they’d struck with Netflix.

In other words: HBO never really closed the book on Confederate in a way that suggested it had actually listened to critics. So Green’s use of the hashtag now is a little reminder of the network’s fraught recent history with another alt-history project that it seemed only too willing to press forward with until other business considerations — as opposed to social considerations — surfaced.

Green will be fine, though. She co-created the excellent Underground on WGN America, and despite the cancellation, Lovecraft Country has proven to be a winner with critics and audiences both. She has a number of other projects lined up, including a sequel to the Alicia Vikander-starring Tomb Raider movie, (tentatively) titled Tomb Raider: Obsidian.

UPDATE: July 3, 2021, 9:27 p.m. EDT Added Green’s follow-up tweet.

One of the best things about an Apple Watch is how customizable it is. Any old watch lets you switch the band, but with an Apple Watch, even your watch face can match your mood, your outfit, or both.

While changing your watch band is a straightforward process, switching up your watch face might not seem so simple (at first). Don’t worry though — it’s child’s play once you get the hang of it.

Here’s how to change the watch face on your Apple Watch in a few easy steps.

How to change it directly on your Apple Watch

All it takes is a long press on the display.

Credit: screenshot / apple

You can scroll to the left or right to see some of your options.

Credit: screenshot / apple

Press your Apple Watch’s Digital Crown so that the current watch face appears. Then, long press on the display until the watch face is minimized. From there, you can swipe to the right or left and choose from your already saved watch faces.

If you don’t like any of the already saved options, you can also swipe all the way to the left until you reach the ‘New’ option. You can then scroll up and down through the additional watch faces and tap ‘Add’ when you find one you like.

If you don’t like any of your saved options, you can add new ones to your watch face library.

Credit: screenshot / apple

When you find one you like, you can tap ‘Add.’

Credit: SCREENSHOT / APPLE

Depending on the watch face, you can also edit the style, color, and complications. Once you’re done, press the Digital Crown to save and set the watch face.

You can change the color by turning your Digital Crown.

Credit: Apple / screenshot

Tap on the display to change a specific complication.

Credit: screenshot / apple

To edit any of the existing watch faces in your library, long press on the display and tap ‘Edit’ underneath each one. Then, swipe to the left to cycle through your editing options.

How to change it using your iPhone

You can also control the face options on your watch using the Watch app on your iPhone.

Under the ‘My Watch’ tab, you’ll find all your saved watch faces. When you tap on ‘Edit’ in the right-hand corner, you get a screen where you can rearrange the sequence of the watch faces that appear on your Apple Watch. Simply long press on the hamburger button on the right, and move it wherever you’d like.

You can change the colors of the watch face.

Credit: screenshot / apple

You can also change the complications.

Credit: screenshot / apple

You can also tap a specific watch face to edit its color, complications, and more. Once you’re done, tap ‘Set as current Watch Face.’ This is also where you can remove a watch face from your library.

Lastly, there’s the ‘Face Gallery’ tab. Here, you’ll find a ton of different watch face options separated by categories such as “Activity,” “Gradient,” “Infograph Modular,” “Motion,” and more. As with the other watch faces, you can also edit each one to your liking by tapping on each option.

The ‘Face Gallery’ tab has tons of watch faces to choose from.

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When you pick one you like, tap ‘Add.’

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Once you’re done tweaking the design, tap ‘Add’ on the top right and it’ll automatically save to both your Watch app and your Apple Watch.

Don’t trust anything on the internet — until Mashable tries it first. Welcome to the Hype Test, where we review viral trends and tell you what’s really worth millions of likes.

If you’re like me, then the Instagram algorithm’s got you pegged as some kinda aspiring fairy-princess-mermaid-goddess-witch (maybe you’re even part of the magical Instagram niche). So, in all likelihood, you’ve probably seen those irresistibly dreamy ads for Selkie’s viral puff dress.

At its core, the Selkie dress is a bewitching promise of fantastical escape from it all, for the reasonable price of $245. The small, independent, woman-owned high fashion boutique brand’s Instagram feels like a secret garden into a femme fairytale land, where this foppishly girlish garment is all you need to earn passage into their beautiful, otherworldly alternate dimension.

It’s no mystery, then, why the popularity of the handmade Selkie puff dress — which was always in high demand and perpetually out of stock before — only soared higher during the pandemic. More than ever, trapped alone inside our dreary bedroom walls, folks needed this kind of playful pretend dress-up that Selkie captures. It became far more than a dress, serving instead as a retreat (however brief) from the soul-crushing realities of the pandemic, a luxury we could justify purchasing with the disposable income usually spent on the social lives we could no longer have.

I wish I lived in the Instagram fantasy world the Selkie dress was made for.

I’m sure the Selkie puff dress served this purpose admirably for so many who desperately needed it, too. Some — like the ethereal goddesses who make up the array of diverse, size-inclusive models featured in Selkie’s marketing — only need to wear this kind of statement piece in order to seduce themselves and everyone around them into believing in that spellbinding alternate reality.

But for others like me, putting on a dress that looks like it was carried to my apartment on the backs of angel wings only heightened my awareness of my depressing surroundings, the jarring juxtaposition feeling more like a cruel reminder than an alluring invitation to escape.

I wish I lived in the Instagram fantasy world the Selkie dress was made for, where women and femmes are given wholesale permission to embody whatever unearthly magical beings they choose. But I live in this world, as a grown adult human woman with a job and bills, where flouncing about my daily life dressed as an oversexed Baby Princess Peach is perceived by other’s (*cough*cough* men) as an invitation to let their most disturbing fantasies run wild.

This is only exacerbated by the fact that the Selkie puff dress is extremely sheer, especially around the breast area. And in the real world, human women tend to have nipples that photoshop can’t erase — nipples which man-made human laws have deemed a literal crime to expose in public.

Yaaas kitchen puff dress queen, give us NOTHING!
Credit: SELKIE

At the same time, I still wasn’t ready to let go of the enchanted world Selkie wants to allow us all to live in. My disappointment in their most popular puff dress only made me go right back to the website to try and find a more, uh, socially acceptable fantasy.

Like many other people though, the Selkie puff dress entered my life during the darkest depths of the pandemic, as my city (Los Angeles, which is coincidentally also Selkie’s headquarters) became the U.S. epicenter of the virus. Crushed beneath the weight of being left to the wolves by our government leaders while untold, unstoppable, ever-mounting suffering kept piling up outside my window, I reached my limit. It’s selfish, I know, but the final straw that threatened the last vestiges of my ailing mental health was the prospect of spending Christmas and then (months later in May) my second birthday still stuck in this pandemic hell world with what seemed at the time like no end in sight.

So I bought the damn Selkie dress.

Though sky-high demand and covid-related production issues meant it wouldn’t arrive until spring, I gave my future self the gift of looking forward to the celestial escape the puff dress represented. If I was going to be forced to spend the last remaining birthday of my 20s alone in my apartment, I’d at least look like a princess goddamnit.

I wasn’t the only one with this exact same thought, either, as social media posts of folks in the Selkie dress even gave our timelines a brief respite from the horrors of existing in 2020.

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When months of delays outside the company’s control kept pushing the arrival date of the dress further and further back, Selkie’s customer service was extremely apologetic and kind (without even knowing I was press). I offered my understanding in return, but did gently ask if there was still a chance it’d arrive in time for my birthday. They vowed to do all they could. When it wasn’t possible, they even gave me a full refund for the pink puff dress that arrived just a week too late.

The unadulterated joy I felt ripping open that package when it finally came was the closest I’ve felt in years to waking up on Christmas day as a kid. Its delicate fabric felt as otherworldly as it looked on Instagram. Yet when I put it on and looked in the mirror, a wave of sadness overcame me.

The dress did not instantaneously transform me into an ethereal, celestial creature made of cotton candy like it did for others. I instead gazed upon the reflection of an ordinary mortal woman, just some lady, only now with her nips out in what looked like an out-of-season Halloween costume.

I don’t know how to become “that girl,” but would take any class from a Selkie model
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Also by that point, Los Angeles was re-opening after consistently scoring the lowest national numbers of new COVID-19 cases. During pandemic isolation, I might’ve been able to say “fuck it” and live my dreams as a nips-out siren type. But the sudden return to society was already causing anxiety-inducing realizations of how bad I’d gotten at being human, and all the social norms I now had to agonizingly relearn.

Could I really afford the added stress of reemerging into this scary post-pandemic world dressed like a lost cast member who strayed too far from the Bridgerton set? Could I stomach casually striding down the litter-strewn pavement of Sunset Boulevard on a Tuesday afternoon, waltzing past all our unhoused neighbors suffering under the LA summer heatwave, dressed like a horny prepubescent doll moonlighting as a puff pastry? I simply could not imagine going about my day in this heightened-reality femme fever dream of an outfit without at least a few well-meaning people stopping to inform me that, “Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s.”

Obviously, I don’t blame Selkie for my own personal hang-ups.

For one, I think I failed to take my measurements properly (despite the website’s best efforts). For another, the dress is as beautifully crafted as advertised. Most importantly, there are plenty of folks made of stronger stuff than me (or at least who don’t have a social anxiety disorder) who can absolutely exude the fantasy the puff dress promises without batting an eye.

The real fantasy here is that her hair is *less* messy in the subway shot.
Credit: selkie

The Selkie models are themselves often pictured crossing the barrier between our disparate dimensions, flitting effortlessly between wearing the dress in pedestrian IRL settings and the magical Instagram settings. Their shoots aren’t all Venetian castles, with plenty of bedrooms and cityscape backdrops included in the product images. Better still, their models include the marginalized folks typically excluded from these opulent Instagrammable beauty ideals, whether it’s fantasy genre scenery, the high fashion industry, or cottagecore and romantic Victorian aesthetics.

But the struggle of bringing all that into the real world comes down to the fact that the puff dress (and others like it), while clearly catering to a feminine gaze, is still also unavoidably subjected to the reality of life under the male gaze.

Fashion aesthetics like the puff dress are unavoidably in conversation with the pedophilic male gaze that has dominated our culture for centuries.

The Selkie puff dress, it can be argued, is part of a pantheon of fashion aesthetics that — while gorgeous and potentially empowering in some ways — still glorify the infantilization of adult women and, by extension, the sexualization of underage girls. Japan’s storied Lolita fashion scene is also often subject to this same debate, though it comes with its own socio-cultural, historical, and community-specific nuances.

Regardless of the creators’ and wearers’ intentions, fashion aesthetics like the puff dress are unavoidably in conversation with the pedophilic male gaze that has dominated society for centuries.

It’s the same pedophilic male gaze that Tavi Gevinson, a teen fashion mogul who grew up to become a writer and actor, called out recently as a major source of the trauma both she and a teenaged Britney Spears fell victim to. A majority of our mass media industries, from fashion to music to TV and film, is grounded in normalizing the sexual exploitation of young girls. In recent decades, it’s been rebranded as feminist empowerment — but it’s an empowerment still defined and controlled by the grown men who use their actual power to prey on said underage girls. As a culture, we still systematically disempower girls in every way that matters, only to then offer them (and the women they grow up to become) a false sense of power derived from being sexually desired. But we’re only desired for fitting this feminine ideal of youth, physical smallness, and naïveté that makes men feel strong and superior by contrast.

Now, I am the last person who can cast any judgment on women and girls who like playing into this gender norm, or who seek to reclaim it for themselves. I literally buy into this aesthetic myself. I spent $245 on that babydoll-cut Selkie dress precisely because it fits my style, best described as sexed-up-little-girl-who-murders-you-in-your-sleep.

How does she make the dress look better in the city than the fantasy world?
Credit: selkie

But it’s one of those things that, while we can’t blame women and girls for enjoying it, we still need to recognize how it’s rooted in the fucked up patriarchal ideals that victimize and oppress us. I can’t blame Selkie — and won’t blame us — for finding this kind of alluring, fantastical escapism wherever we can in a society systematically designed to rob us of all joy.

In my heart of hearts, I think the fantasy that the Selkie dress embodies is actually a desperate desire to go back to the precarious innocence of girlhood — those brief, shimmering moments of pubescence when we didn’t realize the thrilling newfound power we had was infected by creepy older men sexualizing our transitioning bodies.

Wearing the puff dress and wanting to live in its Instagram fantasy world isn’t our crime. It is, perhaps, even a way of unconsciously processing or even consciously reclaiming the traumas of girlhood by wearing whatever the hell we want as grown ass women.

The aesthetic of the Selkie puff dress is “girlish,” to say the least.
Credit: selkie

So the problem isn’t the dress, or our desire to take part in an alternate reality where we’re allowed to be magically super-powered, ethereally detached from patriarchy, unabashedly the center of attention, and luxuriously dripping in the opulence of a royal status that used to be women’s only chance at governmental power. That’s all awesome. The real problem is all the disturbing ways others treat our return to girlhood daydreams as something inherently sexual, the men who see our love of playing dress-up to escape back into our youth as only a performance for their titillation. Women don’t get all fucking weird and predatory about it when men dress up as their favorite childhood comic book superheroes, do we?

At the end of the day, I just wanted to feel like a princess on my birthday again — to feel as alive and as special as I did when I was the girl in kindergarten class who for several weeks insisted on coming to school dressed in her Snow White Halloween costume. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll live in a world where Selkie’s Instagram doesn’t feel so diametrically opposed to our oppressive realities. Maybe (hopefully) one day I can wear whatever I’d like without fear of what it might bring out in men.

Until then, I’ll keep endlessly scrolling Selkie’s feed and dreaming on.