English : On the 7th of July 2017, 122 countries voted in favour of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Countries that don’t have nuclear weapons but live under their threat voted for a ban. Without the knowledge of most of their citizens, the governments of the world’s nuclear powers didn’t vote, and yet the ban went ahead. Something new is happening. On September 1st, 1939, Nazi Germany and Slovakia invade Poland, beginning the European phase of World War II.
English : Histoires ou Contes du temps passé avec des moralités, by Charles Perrault, in French. LibriVox recordings by Ezwa. Cendrillon ou la Petite Pantoufle de verre (Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper).
English : What are the Geneva Conventions? International humanitarian law seeks to limit the suffering caused by war. The 1949 Geneva Conventions draw a clear line between those who are considered combatants and those who are not. Today, they are adapting to the new challenges posed by modern conflicts.
English : American silent feature film Intolerance (1916). An epic silent film directed by D. W. Griffith regarded as one of the most influential films of the silent era.
English : An independent and neutral humanitarian organization, the ICRC protects and assists victims of armed conflict and other situations of violence. We also promote respect for international humanitarian law and its integration into national legislation. Today, we are present in more than 90 countries, alongside the National Red Cross and the Red Crescent Societies.
English : Wallaa, 25, grew up in the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk. Fadwa, from Damascus, has lost two sons and her daughter, Hiba, wants to prove that “Syrian refugees are not all illiterate”. They have known the war, the bombardments and now live in exile, in Lebanon, in poverty and idleness. writing with playwright Mohammad Al Attar and director Omar Abousaada. Their version of the migrant crisis. September 16th is the anniversary of the massacre of Sabra and Shatila by the Christian militias of the Phalangists, in Beirut, Lebanon.
English : Since 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster has been associated with sound. This is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster's hot gas that could be translated into a note — one that humans cannot hear some 57 octaves below middle C. Now a new sonification brings more notes to this black hole sound machine. This new sonification — that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound — is being released for NASA's Black Hole Week this year.
In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before (1, 2, 3, 4) because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The popular misconception that there is no sound in space originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through. A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.
In this new sonification of Perseus, the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time. The sound waves were extracted in radial directions, that is, outwards from the center. The signals were then resynthesized into the range of human hearing by scaling them upward by 57 and 58 octaves above their true pitch. Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency. (A quadrillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000.) The radar-like scan around the image allows you to hear waves emitted in different directions. In the visual image of these data, blue and purple both show X-ray data captured by Chandra. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida).
English : Le peintre néo-impressioniste is a 1910 French silent short by Émile Cohl based on the paradox of a figurative completely monochromatic painting, as favored by the Incoherents.