It seems that there are about 10 hypervelocity stars detected speeding away form our own Milky Way Galaxy. One of these stars, HE 0437-5439, has been analyzed and found to be too young to have been ejected from our galaxy. So, where did it come from? It appears likely that it was part of a binary pair that got ejected from one of our neighboring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). What did the ejecting? It’s a likely scenario that the binary pair came close to a black hole, which whipped the pair around, consuming one and ejecting the other out of the galaxy at high speed. If so, this would be the first observational evidence of a black hole at the center of the LMC, a close-by galaxy with a known metallicity that is estimated to be about 40% that of our own galaxy.

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I have a link below to an excellent article in the Economist discussing a possibly new era, ‘The End of Cheap Food‘. Many Americans have a complicated relationship with the stuff that is our daily sustenance, and, why not? We have so much of it, so much variety and most of us can afford to buy more than we need. So, going to the store can be like going on a little adventure, wondering what new and tasty thing we might try for dinner tonight. The other side of our complex relationship with food is darker. Have we had too much? Do we need to lose weight? What the hell are we eating, anyway? Some of the ingredients require serious googling to understand why company X even put them in our snacks, let alone the implications for eating them on a regular basis. One ingredient, corn syrup, goes to the heart of our modern food world. It’s in EVERYTHING! Why, you ask? Well, it’s, as I said, complicated. Practical-minded folks remember that there is no civilization without food, not without adequate food anyway. So, it’s important to make sure that your country always has a reliable food supply, either by growing it in-country, or importing it from a very reliable source. So, many countries indulge in subsidies to their farmers. It keeps the land prepared and ready for agriculture, keeps you in the game so to speak. The United States does this, of course. This has not resulted in assuring Americans food diversity. Nope. We grow a lot of corn and wheat and soybeans. This has not saved the small farmer, which means jobs for a local economy. Nope. Instead, large industrial operations are steadily the only farms that can afford to do business these days. So, for us, we get lots of corn and corn by-products (corn syrup) in our food, reduced variety, and lots of questions about the quality of our diets. We also get industrial farming, which is very bad for the environment.

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