Brian Cox
@ProfBrianCox
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Professor of Particle Physics at The University of Manchester, The Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science
Absolute space doesn't exist
Joined December 2008
A passport is only worth the rights it confers. It means nothing inside ones own country. This passport is weaker than the one it replaces, symbolising the removal of our rights to move and operate freely across our own continent. It therefore represents abject political failure.
Our new blue passports will be the most technologically advanced and environmentally friendly British passports ever. Read more about them here:
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Sad to hear about Stephen Hawking. What a remarkable life. His contributions to science will be used as long as there are scientists, and there are many more scientists because of him. He spoke about the value and fragility of human life and civilisation and greatly enhanced both.
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As you watch the Aurora this evening, it’s worth reflecting that you’re getting a rare direct glimpse of the power of Nature. Those charged particles causing the atmosphere to glow came from a sunspot complex 17 times the diameter of Earth and traveled across 90 million miles at.
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I keep being asked what I make of the UFO thing in Congress yesterday, so here it is: I watched a few clips and saw some people who seemed to believe stuff saying extraordinary things without presenting extraordinary evidence. Therefore I have nothing more to say, other than: It.
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I've always suspected that an advanced alien civilisation with the technology to travel at close to light speed across interstellar distances would arrive in Earth orbit unobserved and proceed to dispatch a fleet of small, easily detectable balloons into our atmosphere.
"An official admitted he couldn't rule out the objects were extra-terrestrials. The object has been described by defence officials as an unmanned octagonal structure with strings attached to it.".Wow! Aliens use string!? Do they have blu-tak as well?:.
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Sorry to tweet about politics - I’m trying not to - but I look at the news in the morning and I’m sickened by what has happened to our country. It’s a great place, about to be ruined by absolute charlatans.
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I’ve found someone to do all the long lens staring at the sky shots on top of mountains for the next series. Nobody will notice.
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I’m so sick of this ‘The British People’ nonsense. It’s inflammatory and divisive and also errant vacuous nonsense with no meaning in a multi-party democracy. The phrase should be banned from political discourse.
We also need the cooperation of the French to intercept boats and return migrants back to France. I know that when the British people say they want to take back control of our borders – this is exactly what they mean.
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The reason the UK will have the lowest growth in the G7 next year is Brexit. We're not going to reverse the decline until we begin to remove the barriers - economic, social, scientific - that we chose to erect with the rest of our continent. That's not rocket science. Just say it.
Under this Tory government, Britain’s growth has ground to a halt. And they are too distracted by their own failings to deal with it. Labour has a plan to tackle the cost of living crisis and build a stronger, more secure economy.
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You were lucky. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would.
"I remember as a child in South Wales swimming in sewage". Conservative MP @DamianGreen says water pollution from sewage dumping has always been an issue, but it used to be perceived as more acceptable . #Peston
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Brexit is now, in a majority of voters minds, linked with high interest rates, trade friction, travel friction and general incompetence. The reality may be more complex, but that doesn’t matter - it’s about perception, and the perception is that Brexit is not only a failure but a.
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What you’ve also done, @pritipatel , is to end freedom of movement for UK passport holders across our continent. The citizens of 27 other countries, the great majority of Europeans, still retain it. That’s not something to fly our flag over in my book.
We’re ending free movement to open Britain up to the world. It will ensure people can come to our country based on what they have to offer, not where they come from.
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I’ve signed this petition to revoke A50 and deal with the consequences afterwards - referendum, election, whatever. I have no idea whether these things do any good but after May’s astonishingly irresponsible speech this evening I’ll give anything a go.
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It is clear that the government must urgently request an extension to the transition period. Any other course of action would be utterly irresponsible; close to criminal negligence.
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We are about to see the installation of a scoundrel as PM by a small cabal of ageing xenophobic golf club bores who will crash us out of the EU causing irreparable damage to our country and it can’t be stopped. Think about that. Voters cannot stop Johnson and cannot stop no deal.
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I'll never understand why these people celebrate removing their own right to free movement. Everyone else in Europe still has an entire continent to call home.
After many years of campaigning, I am delighted the Immigration Bill which will end free movement on 31st December has today passed through Parliament. We are delivering on the will of the British people.
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Honestly - a few of the replies to this little tribute to engineering excellence exhibit a level of stupidity that suggests to me that it won’t be long before our spacecraft are the only thing that remains of our increasingly dim-witted civilisation. Until recently my guess has.
It never ceases to amaze me that a spacecraft launched in 1977 can be fixed remotely from Earth.
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This is amongst the most illogical thing I’ve ever seen. In order to prevent the spread of a virus you cram thousands of people into a confined space for 7 hours?.
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Having to deal with multiple irritating issues today because of Brexit when I could be doing useful stuff. I suspect that's the case for a lot of people and businesses. Waste of time and money. Blue passports my arse.
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You will find Jeremy that I and millions of others will never forgive THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY for this shit storm because it is your fault. The damage has been done. At least have the dignity to own your own mess.
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This is why all the bullshit about bringing the country together after no-deal won’t work: Nobody who actually loses their job or business is going to sit back and say ‘ah well, it was worth it to keep the Tory Party together and for my blue passport I can’t afford to use’.
#Marr: Are you prepared to look people in the eye and say you’ve got to lose your job due to no deal #Brexit?. Jeremy Hunt: “I would do it with a heavy heart”.
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The more I hear from the Covid enquiry, the more I think that the PM and the majority of ministers did not have the intellectual tools necessary to understand scientific advice and therefore to be able to weigh it successfully alongside economics, social science etc. In my view.
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I'd like to see Stephen Hawking on the £50 note. He made invaluable contributions over half a century to our understanding of cosmology, the early universe and black holes. He also inspired thousands of scientists + millions of people, me included, through his books and lectures.
New £50 note: Bank of England asks public to nominate scientist
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One of the problems with Johnson’s character in my view is he seems incapable of taking responsibility, either personally or as a leader, for anything. The casual shifting of blame seems second nature - he can’t stop himself.
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I’ve been through about ten revisions of this tweet, trying to remain civil, but I am finding it hard to contain my anger at Theresa May. I’ll settle on near-criminally irresponsible. She is focused entirely on keeping her party together irrespective of the real-world damage.
Prime Minister Theresa May says the Government will not bring a meaningful vote on her Brexit deal this week.
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Three squabbling boy-men who’ve dragged the whole country into their myopic vacuous petulant egocentric shitshow.
David Cameron blames Michael Gove not Boris Johnson for his defeat in the EU referendum and the loss of his political career and will launch a withering attack on him in his memoirs, The Sunday Times has learnt
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I’m often asked for evidence that Brexit was a mistake.
UK to have worst economic decline in Europe next year -and by some margin.
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For me, this is the most important aspect of Brexit and why I cannot understand or support it. The EU is essentially a peace project aimed at removing barriers between people. It is far from perfect, but we have benefited hugely. Surely the UK should be working to strengthen it.
Ahead of the #EUCO discussions on #Brexit, let's take a moment to remember what we are all trying to safeguard today. Reconciliation, remembrance for those who suffered, the protection of human rights & peace, on the 21st anniversary of the #GoodFridayAgreement #BelfastAgreement
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Watching the inauguration of Joe Biden, and I don’t know how to avoid cliche, but it really does feel as if civility and basic decency and perhaps even optimism has returned to Washington. Maybe things do sometimes get better :-).
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This is the moment the government lost control of events. It is inconceivable to me that my government - a British government - would so blatantly devalue the concept of a rules-based international order. Churchill must be turning in his grave. MPs from across the house must act.
🚨 Brandon Lewis confirms the Government will break international law on EU Withdrawal Deal: . "Yes, this does break international law in a very specific and limited way".
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This has to be the future if we are to prosper. A million people marching in good humour but with a fierce commitment to our country and our continent, asking for tolerance, reason and compromise. There will be no winners if we continue on our current course.
#PeoplesVoteMarch organisers say more than a million people joined protests in central London.[tap to expand].#Brexit
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It will be a sad day when we lose contact with the Voyagers - they’ve been communicating with us from deep space since I was 9 years old! I watched them launch, watched them arrive at Jupiter, Saturn and, in the case of Voyager 2, Uranus and Neptune. I remember when Voyager 1.
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We are in control. We can revoke article 50 and retain control of our borders (we are not in schengen), our money (we are not in the Euro) and our laws (parliament is sovereign). This deal - the best deal of any EU member state by a mile - is available. Let’s put it to voters.
#ECJ: UK is free to unilaterally revoke the notification of its intention to withdraw from the EU – Case C-621/18 Wightman #Brexit
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The most valuable feature of democracy is that it has built in error correction.
Impressive figure… and very indicative of the country’s mood. Brexit had failed everyone. Time to rejoin !. 🇬🇧 🇪🇺
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A turning point in The Telegraph? Project fear was right and ‘if anything have underestimated both the calamitous loss of international standing and the scale of the damage that six years of policy confusion and ineptitude has imposed on the country.’
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In Dundee this evening and the box office are concerned that a percentage of the audience will get something they weren’t expecting ….
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My hope is that May wins her confidence vote 52:48 and concludes that the will of the Party must therefore be the absolute opposite of what the 48 wanted and withdraws A50, causing the ERG to retreat into a leathery private club to console themselves with a game of soggy biscuit.
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Proof reading my book on black holes, I noticed that they have removed the word shit and replaced it with bad. I have changed it back. WTF?.
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This is the simplest and most lucid explanation I’ve heard from any politician from any party of what trading with the world on WTO terms actually means. Intellectual clarity is a rare commodity amongst the current crop of politicians.
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My timeline is full of bile again because of Brexit. Utterly polarised. Damn that bloody referendum and damn the bloody Conservative Party for what they’ve done. Totally irresponsible. I can’t see how this damage can be repaired.
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In my opinion all government policy stretching back up to five years has been a bag of shite. That's one less talk to give . .
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This is the way to deal with a bullshitter. If more TV and radio interviewers did this, we'd be in a lot less trouble now.
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Rees-Mogg wishes to vote again (for a third time) because the information he has access to and the circumstances have changed and he’s changed his mind. Why is this not an arguement for also putting the final deal to a public vote to assess if they agree with his change of mind?.
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I haven’t got the heart to tell him it was my Scottish namesake who appeared on Question Time this week. Might tip him over the edge :-)
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If you missed the Aurora last night and / or would like another go, then it looks like there is a good chance we’ll have another display this evening.
Extreme (G5) geomagnetic conditions have been observed!
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Things Can Only Get Better is of course the most appropriate song for today, but let me throw another one into the ring to add a little variety…
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Nothing here is in the long term interests of the UK and its people. It is indefensible beyond the only justification you can give - a slim majority in 2016. It is permanently damaging and you know it. Your only aim now is to seek a slim majority of MPs. I will never support it.
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The origin of our current malaise was the Brexit referendum. Charitably, it was a risky bet on a radical shift in our long-established and reasonably successful economic and geopolitical model and the bet has been lost. What we are seeing now is government by sunk-cost fallacy.
'What has this country done to itself?': Historian and former Telegraph editor says Tory MPs unaware of UK's 'ridiculous' image internationally
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A few more thoughts on the possibility of life beyond Earth. All these thoughts are guesses. The lack of firm evidence for alien intelligence (so far) is sometimes called the Fermi Paradox, and it is a paradox. Put simply, there has been over 10 billion years and there are many.
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Tragic news about Michael Mosley. He was such an important figure both on and off screen in the BBC science unit, and as a mentor to many of us when we started out in science presenting. And, as many of our colleagues have already said on here, he was a genuinely lovely man. So.
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Johnson and his coterie have never met people like this. I’m sure they thought they could wind them up a bit to borrow their votes in order to become PM / get brexit done / whatever / and then put them back in their box. I suspect he now knows it’s not that simple.
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I do not want to keep banging on about brexit, but I just get exasperated. Look at the tweet below - this overgrown schoolboy (surely whichever side of the debate you are on you’d agree this is nothing more than a tantrum) is a potential prime minister. Where are the grown-ups?.
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A problem with May’s article in today’s Telegraph is she assumes the country will ‘come back together’ if her deal passes. This is nonsense. One obvious point: the causes of brexit were not in general anything to do with the EU, therefore leaving it will solve nothing.
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It’s almost as if he didn’t understand what he was voting for …. .
These checks are an unnecessary act of self harm that will increase prices in an era of inflation. Brexit is an opportunity for deregulation not becoming a mini protectionist EU.
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The PM really does need to understand that he is now further damaging U.K. science by not immediately rejoining Horizon, presumably to placate some know-nothing fringe bloviators who know nothing about science, its value or how it’s conducted. As Lord Rees says below, it is
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If you haven’t got the grades you needed today it’s disappointing, stressful and maybe unfair. I didn’t get the grades I needed. I re-applied at 23 and Manchester let me in. I know all Universities will try to help you, but if it doesn’t work out there will be other chances.
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This is so strange because I was led to believe that all these families would now be going to countries surrounding the Pacific Ocean for the school holidays.
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They’ve given up now. It seems to me that the Conservative Party’s strategy is to bury their heads in the sand until after the election, at which point they will blame the in-coming Labour government for the (escalating) consequences of Brexit and claim that it would have been.
ITV News has learned that imports of food and plants from the EU are being waved through customs even if they have incorrect paperwork. @ITVJoel reports on the new Post-Brexit border checks which came into force this morning
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Disgraceful. Disrespectful. Genuinely doesn’t give a shit.
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This statement - that the government may decide not to obey the law - confirms that the current minority government is dangerous. Every MP with integrity from any party must stop them this coming week. This is no longer about Brexit - that can be dealt with afterwards.
Would the government abide by a new law from MPs to delay #Brexit? . #marr asks the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Michael Gove .
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The speed of development of vaccines has been breathtaking - and whilst it shouldn’t really need saying, demonstrates the almost incalculable value of a strong University sector and wider science base. Thank you to the researchers from post docs to Profs who did this work.
Today marks an important milestone in the fight against #COVID19. Interim data show the #OxfordVaccine is 70.4% effective, & tests on two dose regimens show that it could be 90%, moving us one step closer to supplying it at low cost around the world>>
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In general, but especially during a pandemic, anybody with an IQ above that of a fence post would try to arrange things so they don’t have to stand for hours in a long queue. We are indeed, to quote from Withnail, drifting into the arena of the unwell.
How MPs joined kilometre-long queue in a vote to end virtual parliament – video
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Some good news. By the way, this is one of the many reasons why we fund research institutes and universities and PhD’s etc etc. as a society. It may all seem a bit of a luxury to some until we actually HAVE to find something out about Nature very quickly.
Canadian Research team has isolated the COVID-19 virus - Sunnybrook Research Institute
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‘You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the Universe.’ On these two narrow points I agree.
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German is a wonderfully precise language. This, from The Times: ‘’Mrs Merkel has dismissed what she called Öffnungsdiskussionsorgien, loosely meaning “orgies of debate about opening things up”.
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My timeline is currently populated by people who believe that God is Flat, that Darwin supported brexit and that Jesus is not a greenhouse gas. Or something like that.
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The idiocy of the position we’ve got ourselves into is that we - that is U.K. citizens - will be the only citizens on our continent (28 countries!) who will NOT have the right to travel freely or to work on our continent. That’s a total failure. We are second class Europeans.
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Wait until he hears that the second is defined as the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom!.
This video of Tucker Carlson blessing someone for their righteous fight against the metric system is such a self parody of Fox News
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I don’t think I’ve seen a Prime Minister lose their cool quite so spectacularly at PMQs. Reminded me of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. Extraordinary scenes.
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The thing I don’t understand about these Conservative MPs is that they are such angry people. They haven’t done badly out of Britain - they aren’t on the receiving end of their own policies. And yet they want to smash everything up. The EU, The Union and now their own party.
Why Tory MPs tell me they expect at least 48 letters of no confidence in Theresa May to have been lodged with Brady of 1922 committee by lunchtime today
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I’m not impressed with government’s handling of Brexit, but Labour are no better. How can you have the ‘exact same benefits’ as being in the EU without being in? I can’t have the exact same benefits of flying across the Atlantic in a plane without actually being in the plane.
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Brexit is a self-indulgence from another age. It should be shelved for an indefinite period until we have dealt with the long-term economic and social fall out of COVID-19. There can be no justification for imposing a second, voluntary shock on the country in early 2021.
BREXIT NEWS: The first meeting of the EU-UK joint committee today, by teleconference. Michael Gove and EC Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič. Draft agenda: EU citizens rights, NI protocol, Cyprus, Gibraltar, divorce bill
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The frustrating thing to me about the quote from this article is that the columnist knows, and the Conservatives know, and Labour knows, that Brexit was an awful economic and geopolitical error. This was obvious in my view in 2016 and it’s ten times more obvious now, for the.
"Our economic model is bust. Being a services superpower is not enough". Nick Timothy, strong Brexit proponent, concludes in the Telegraph there's a rise of regional protectionism but then doesn't join the dots to the only country outside that protectionism because of Brexit.
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This is drivel. The only way life will continue as it was before brexit in the event of a no deal brexit is not to brexit. You can’t pull out of hundreds of international treaties and then carry on as if those treaties were sill in force. Forget politics. This is just logic.
The U.K. will signal that it wants life to continue as normal in the event of a “No Deal” Brexit, in the face of warnings that aircraft might be grounded and hospitals run short of medicine
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Listening to the News, I can’t help coming to the tentative conclusion that J. Corbyn and T. May might not be the party leaders one would choose in order to resolve the current impasse in Parliament. Just a feeling.
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To all the idiots with opinions replying to this article about science post Brexit - the article quotes two U.K.-based Nobel Prize winners and two Presidents of the Royal Society. How about you shut up and listen, just for once, to people who know more than you about something.
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Here is the image of the black hole in M87, and at the press conference the Event Horizon team just said it is precisely as predicted by General Relativity. Einstein right again - wouldn’t he have loved to see this!.
Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun
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I took a photo of the Moon last night with my phone through telescope eyepiece whilst waiting for Jupiter to appear. I quite like it :-)
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This is a senior cabinet minister literally laughing at himself, so absurd are the intellectual contortions he’s been required to perform by the Prime Minister in defence of a political advisor. I conclude there is something not quite right at the heart of government.
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I’ve seen many cabinets come and go since I began paying attention to politics in the 1980s - some I liked more than others, some I voted for, some I didn’t - but Johnson’s cabinet has demonstrated to me, in hindsight, just how relatively competent they all were.
The Times view on the prime minister’s suitability for No 10
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This is the first time in my life I’ve wanted the laws of physics to be violated.
Uri Geller preventing Brexit with the power of his mind sounds as plausible as everything else right now.
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This’ll confuse the Flat Earthers ….
For the second day in a row, Qantas flight #QF28 is flying over Antarctica, en route from Santiago to Sydney.
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We’re going to spend decades negotiating to help tackle the impact of Brexit on everything from the music industry and the City of London to car manufacturing and tourism. Instead, why can’t politicians explain to voters why it’s in the U.K’s interest to be inside the single.
The @labour4europe has been calling for the UK to be part of the pan European Mediterranean convention to help tackle the impact of brexit on rules of origin requirements. The jobs now at risk in our car manufacturing sector show why the government should listen …#brexithaos.
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An appreciable number of people would panic buy toilet roll.
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We could all agree to turn our passports blue by running towards them, thus saving a lot of hassle. Assuming the wavelength of a blue passport is 470nm, and red is 670 nm, I calculate a speed of 0.34c would do it.
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A previous version of that Widdecombe speech has been uncovered . .
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And she’s donated all the money to support and encourage physics students from under-represented groups. Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a towering scientist and a remarkable person.
British astrophysicist overlooked by Nobels wins $3m award for pulsar work
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It never ceases to amaze me that a spacecraft launched in 1977 can be fixed remotely from Earth.
#Voyager1's interstellar comeback is like music to our ears! For the first time since Nov. 2023 @NASA's most distant spacecraft is returning data from all four of its science instruments again — all from beyond the heliosphere out in interstellar space:
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We are seeing the long overdue shattering and reshaping of UK politics. Both major parties have failed the country absolutely when we needed them most. They have no answer to the crisis Cameron created having exposed the rest of us to the Tory civil war. They are beneath contempt.
If, as I expect, a quartet of Tory MPs quit the party today to become independents, in a way that is even more significant than the Labour defections. Because the minority government of @theresa_may will become even more of a minority, with even less grip on the Commons. So. .
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Is there anyone who will defend the ludicrous notion that MPs should be whipped on the indicative votes? What’s the point of them? I’m beginning to think that electoral reform is the only way forward. The Party system is a large part of our current problem.
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Whether or not you think Brexit will be good for the UK in the long term (I do not), I think it’s now beyond doubt that it was the proximate cause of the dumbing down of the Conservative Party which in turn contributed to the disasterous health and economic outcomes of Covid-19.
UK economy likely to suffer worst Covid-19 damage, says OECD
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I’m not buying this line of argument. Johnson knew, as everybody in the Conservative Party knew, that the Brexit referendum was about heading off the (over-stated) electoral threat from UKIP and simultaneously dealing with a fringe group of MPs in the party who were a distraction.
On #Brexit. ITV: You told us that we should do this and you hadn't devoted any serious thought to what came next. BJ: I wanted to win an argument. What we expected was that the Cameron gov't would deliver it. ~AA
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Absolutely superb news. Wonderful. Thanks to all the researchers and indeed everyone involved in the testing and approval process who’ve moved so quickly and efficiently to get this first vaccine ready for use. Finally, light at the end of the tunnel.
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The reason we knew there would be an eclipse today, @realDonaldTrump, is that science works.
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For the final time: You haven't removed freedom of movement across our continent from anyone other than poorer UK citizens. Every citizen of the 31 EU, EEA and EFTA countries, everyone born in NI (if they choose) and in practice every UK citizen who has enough dosh still has it.
💬 Home Secretary @PritiPatel: "Last year the British people sent a clear message that they wanted to end free movement and our landmark Immigration Bill delivers exactly that."
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I don’t like this sort of politics. Societies are made up of individuals with different backgrounds, opinions, economic interests and moral and philosophical positions. The primary job of politicians in my view is to at least try to navigate these differences (guided of course by.
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Isn’t the message of the EU elections very simple? There is no unambiguous majority for anything without making assumptions about the Conservative and Labour vote. We therefore need to take our time as a country and work out what we actually want and what is actually deliverable.
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