The galaxy of the Star Wars universe stretches to infinity
media life and society 21 minutes ago
The end to spin off stories from 1977's first Star Wars movie looks like being a galaxy far, far away.
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The Spinoff
an hour ago
- The Spinoff
Gone By Lunchtime: New polls, old PMs and a sacrificed goat
At the political half-time mark, we assess the ritual changeover, a brace of new surveys and a very New Zealand altercation at the music awards. We're officially in the second half of the term, a milestone marked by the historic handover of the hallowed deputy prime minister amulet from Winston Peters to David Seymour. The moment comes with pageantry, a flurry of interviews and a pair of new polls, which deliver intriguing, and sometimes divergent results. In a new episode of Spinoff politics podcast Gone By Lunchtime, Toby Manhire, Annabelle Lee-Mather and Ben Thomas pore over the results and what they mean for the parties and the politicians in the post-budget, post-pay-equity-reshape wash-up. Plus: Jim Bolger and Jacinda Ardern have both been in the headlines in recent days. What do these returns tell us about the performance of their Chris-themed successors? And Chris Bishop found himself in a media moshpit after the Aotearoa Music Awards for calling the Stan Walker Toitū Te Tiriti parade 'crap' and earning the most painful denunciation imaginable: being called a dickhead by living legend Don McGlashan.
RNZ News
6 hours ago
- RNZ News
‘That was rude': why the new Broadway musical Death Becomes Her was ripe for TikTok memes
By Gregory Camp of Photo: AFP A few snippets of musicalised dialogue from the cast album of the new Broadway musical Death Becomes Her - with music and lyrics by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, and a book by Marco Pennette - have recently become trending sonic memes on TikTok. In all sorts of situations, users are lip synching to audio clips of Broadway star Jennifer Simard, in the character of Helen Sharp (played by Goldie Hawn in the 1992 cult film on which the musical is based), saying things like "That was rude. That was pretty f**kin' rude" and "She stole my life. She made me cuckoo. She's why I spent four years locked in that health spa." Musical theatre fans love a good meme (scholar Trevor Boffone has written a whole book about the phenomenon) and Death Becomes Her is primed to create a lot of them: a show featuring two divas (played by Simard and Megan Hilty as Madeleine Ashton, Meryl Streep's role in the movie) based on a cult film about divas begs to be shaped and reshaped by fan culture. Helen and Madeleine are longtime rivals who both take a magic potion that makes them immortal. This leads them to find increasingly extravagant ways to try and do away with each other, with the help of Helen's put-upon husband Ernest (Christopher Sieber), a plastic surgeon who reluctantly falls into the role of restoring their bodies after each "accident". Some of Hilty's clips have also been TikTok-ified (notably Tell Me, Earnest) but Simard is winning the numbers game. Her "That was rude" clip alone has 321,000 videos and counting. There seem to be two main reasons for the attraction of these clips. First is Simard's delivery of the words. Simard is a longstanding Broadway star and an expert at musical comedy timing. Second is the rhythmic quality of the dialogue. Not fully sung, these bits are spoken in mostly strict rhythm over orchestral accompaniment. That they have become such earworms demonstrates it is not only melody that burrows into the brain, but also rhythmic contour. There is a long history of this style of speak-singing in musical theatre, notably popularised in the late 1950s by Robert Preston in The Music Man and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. Neither of those actors was a strong singer, but both had excellent timing and were able to deliver spoken lines above music with a strong sense of musicality. Simard is an excellent singer with a very wide range, but the comic role of Helen - ever the underdog to her rival famous actress Madeleine - lends itself to this style of heightened speech. Most effective rhythmically, and the most popular excerpt, is the "That was rude" meme, where Simard begins slowly without accompaniment; the bass comes in on "rude" and sets a groove for the rest of the short excerpt. This one has been used in every possible situation, from responses to nasty notes left on people's cars to complaints about incorrect drink orders. Some of the TikTokers refer to Simard in on-screen text, but this one seems to have become popular outside any specific reference to the show, in a truly viral moment. The lengthiest of the trending excerpts is the one that begins with "We talked about killing her before", which sets off a monologue about Helen's plan to do away with Madeline once and for all. This is a tour de force for Simard's comic timing, as it begins in free rhythm and then gradually takes on a more consistent beat. TikTokers are tending to use this one primarily as a demonstration of their lip-syncing skills, as opposed to the other shorter clips that are applied in different ironic situations. This trend also shows the continuing importance of the cast album in musical theatre culture. The majority of TikTokers probably have not seen the show, currently only playing on Broadway with high ticket prices. Yet the cast album (easily available on all the main streaming sites) gives access. The fact these clips come from a cast album also more easily allows fans to create their own visuals around it. Unless they actually saw the show they only have production photographs and short publicity clips (and the occasional shaky bootleg or slime tutorial) to go on in terms of what it looks like. Audio from a source like the soundtrack of the Wicked movie has not led to so many lip-sync videos because the visual track is so readily accessible; as a film, Wicked's visuals define its audio while a cast album can more easily work the other way round. I saw Death Becomes Her on Broadway in January and enjoyed it. It's a fun show full of special effects and comic bits. The score is serviceable (it's not Sondheim), but it is catchy - very important for its use in these TikTok trends - and well performed by Simard and the rest of the cast. This whole phenomenon demonstrates that the current cultural sphere of "Broadway" extends well beyond the street itself. This has been the case at least since the rise of the cast album in the 1950s (My Fair Lady's was the best-selling LP of 1956), but now the reach is intensified by social media spaces like TikTok; you don't have to have actually seen Death Becomes Her to experience it.
RNZ News
3 days ago
- RNZ News
A reservoir of gold lies hidden in Earth's core. Scientists say it's leaking
By Jacopo Prisco , CNN Gold and other precious metals deep beneath the Earth eventually make their way up to the surface during the formation of volcanic islands, a study suggests. Photo: 123rf Gold and other precious metals are leaking from Earth's core into the layers above, eventually making their way up to the surface during the formation of volcanic islands like Hawaii, a new study suggests. The theory results from a three-year analysis of Hawaii's basaltic rocks, which originally formed from plumes of magma, or molten rock, rising from the ocean floor. Clues in the form of heavy metals found in the volcanic rocks could confirm a suspicion long held by geologists - that Earth's molten core is not isolated but likely bleeds into the rocky mantle, the layer between the planet's thin crust and the core. "About 40 years ago, people first came up with the theory that maybe the core is losing some material into the mantle, but the signals we got so far were really ambiguous," said Nils Messling, a geochemist at the University of Göttingen in Germany and lead author of the report, published 21 May in the journal Nature . "Now, in my opinion, we have the first very strong evidence that some of the core is actually ending up in the mantle." Scientists already knew that most of the gold on the planet - more than 99.95 percent, according to Messling - lies hidden in the molten core, along with other heavy elements such as platinum. Basalt sampled from a drill core section from the Kilauea Iki lava lake, which erupted in 1959, is shown. The Hawaiian lava rock contains a small trace of Earth's core, the analysis found. Photo: Supplied / CNN / Nils Messling As meteorites bombarded one another in Earth's early history, a reservoir of these precious metals developed when the core formed about 4.5 billion years ago. But this study suggests that at least a tiny amount of that gold has escaped to the surface, raising the fascinating prospect that, if the leaking continues, more and more of this precious metal could travel from the centre of Earth to the crust in the future. "Our findings not only show that the Earth's core is not as isolated as previously assumed. We can now also prove that huge volumes of super-heated mantle material - several hundreds of quadrillion metric tonnes of rock - originate at the core-mantle boundary and rise to the Earth's surface to form ocean islands like Hawaii," said study coauthor Matthias Willbold, a professor at the University of Göttingen, in a statement. To find evidence of this core-mantle interaction, Messling and his coauthors obtained some samples of Hawaiian volcanic rocks from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. The research team extracts precious metals from samples of Hawaii's volcanic rock. Photo: Supplied / CNN / Nils Messling "Some were taken by a submarine, from a deep sea volcano, but [otherwise] it's basically just very ordinary-looking basaltic rock, very unassuming, that you would find anywhere on Hawaii," he said. "We started with half a kilogram of rock, we crushed it into a powder, and then we melted it in the oven with some different chemicals, to end up with a sample in liquid form." From that sample, the team extracted all the elements in the platinum group , which includes platinum itself as well as the lesser-known rhodium, palladium, iridium, osmium and ruthenium. The scientists then focused on ruthenium, a silver-grey metal about as rare in Earth's crust as gold. "The mantle has almost no ruthenium in it," Messling said. "It's one of the rarest elements on Earth. But Earth is basically made of meteorites that crashed together, and meteorites [contain] ruthenium, which went into the core when the core formed. So the mantle has next to no ruthenium, and the core has all of the ruthenium. The same with gold and platinum." Earth's core has two layers. A hot, solid metal sphere of iron and nickel is roughly 70 percent the size of the moon, with a radius of about 1221km. A liquid metal outer core is about 2253km thick and extends to about 2897km below the surface, or right up to the mantle. Photo: 123rf In contrast, the mantle, which lies between the planet's outer crust and the molten core, is 2897km of mostly solid rock. To determine whether the extracted ruthenium was originally from the core and not the mantle, the team looked at a specific isotope, or type, of ruthenium that was likely more abundant in Earth's early building materials during the time the core formed billions of years ago. "The vast majority of gold and other precious metals like platinum were likely delivered by massive meteorite impacts during the final stages of Earth's formation - a process known as late accretion," said Pedro Waterton, an assistant professor of geochemistry at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark who was not involved in the study. The presence of the ruthenium isotope in the basalt samples indicates that at least some of the rock was formed from material coming from the molten metallic core. That's because there is consensus, Messling said, that the material that coalesced during the early stages of Earth's formation does not exist in the meteorite record anymore. He added that the isotope signature in rocks from hotspot volcanoes like the ones in Hawaii is entirely different from any other known rock or meteorite. In other words, the ruthenium isotope Messling found was locked away in the core billions of years ago, so detecting the isotope in volcanic rocks today suggests it comes from the core. "It's quite a novel and difficult method," Messling said. "We managed to measure ruthenium in rocks that have next to no ruthenium in them. In half a kilo of rock, it was less than milligrams - a needle in a planet-sized haystack! That's quite exciting - for a geochemist, at least. It was a long but very exciting process." So what's the connection with gold? It's chemically similar to ruthenium, Messling said, so if the core is leaking ruthenium, it is also leaking gold in similar quantities. This would be a "minuscule" amount, however. And even if scientists wanted to extract gold directly from the source, the core-mantle boundary, that's much farther down than current technology could drill. In fact, it's about 236 times deeper than the deepest bore ever drilled - the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, which reaches a depth of 12.3km. The ruthenium isotope signature in rocks from hotspot volcanoes like the ones in Hawaii is entirely different from any other rock or meteorite on record, according to lead study author Nils Messling. geochemist at the University of Göttingen. Photo: Supplied / CNN / Nils Messling Proof that the core isn't isolated is particularly thrilling because the core and the mantle shouldn't interact at all, Messling said. "Their density is too different, like oil and water, so technically they shouldn't mix. And we still don't have a good mechanism to explain why they do. We don't really know much about the core at all," he said. The Hawaiian rock samples suggest that the leaking process takes between 500 million and 1 billion years to complete, Messling said. "It's something that has occurred a while ago, and we suspect that it probably has been going on forever, and it's probably still occurring now," he explained. According to Messling, if the leaking of precious metals is an ongoing process, it could be that at least some of the gold humans have mined may have come from the core even if the quantity of core material in a single rock is negligible and that the world's supply of gold seems to be replenishing. "It's a very interesting idea that, although this process is tiny and has zero effect if you look at just one island, if you scale it up to 4.5 billion years it could be that it changes the composition of the Earth," he said. Researchers who were not involved in the study expressed positive views on the findings. "We know that the Earth was built from different generations of meteoritic material that were added progressively to the growing planet, and that precious metals from the earliest generations of meteorite material became concentrated into our planet's core while metals from meteorites added in the final stages of the Earth's growth became stranded in our planet's mantle," said Helen Williams, a professor of geochemistry and planetary science at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. The study, she added, confirms that the mantle plumes - rising jets of molten rock coming from the core-mantle boundary that create hot spots like Hawaii - do indeed contain material somehow derived from Earth's metallic core, said Williams, adding that the result was "exciting." Jesse Reimink, an associate professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, agrees. "This is a very old debate, and new data over the past 10 or so years has reinvigorated the possibility that the core was chemically 'leaking' into the mantle over time," he said. "This study really does seem to nail the conclusion - the core does contribute some material to the mantle." The latest research also strengthens the case made in previous work that some mantle plumes incorporate material from Earth's core, said the University of Copenhagen's Waterton. Does that also mean some of the gold in Earth's crust is originally from the core? "Yes, but probably only a very small amount," he said. - CNN
