The Tories introduced the 50% strike ballot threshold to make industrial action harder. MATT WRACK argues that a Labour government has no justification for leaving it on the statute book
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The stars that tell us about ourselves
Tonight you can see the best shooting stars of the year, but what can they tell us about our place in the universe?
Often, the locations of falling meteorites are predicted by looking at the trajectories of a group of shooting stars
In the wake of Ann Widdecombe’s murder, JOHN GREEN wonders whether the government will really get to grips with the root cause of these attacks on our MPs
The new PM’s opening addresses offered hope, council homes and reform — but little detail on how any of it will be delivered, warns CLAUDIA WEBBE
Despite the screeching from the right-wing media, Burnham’s speech chimed with the public mood - and socialists should take advantage, says Morning Star editor BEN CHACKO
Scotland's Labour leader cannot continue to evade responsibility for the party's decline, argues LAUREN HARPER
Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
TONIGHT is one of the best nights of the year for shooting stars, as we go through the huge annual meteor shower called the Perseids.
Shooting stars are what we see as small objects travelling through space collide with the Earth’s atmosphere. The speed of their movement through the air causes so much friction that they burn up in a fireball. These meteors, some of which are no bigger than a grain of sand and travel 15 times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet, often burn up 60 miles up in the sky, well before they reach the Earth’s surface. However, some larger meteors fall all the way to Earth, leaving a meteorite — the space rock itself.
There are so many tiny fragments of rock from space colliding with Earth and its atmosphere that every year they increase the Earth’s mass by 20,000 tons, (although this is infinitesimal compared to the weight of the Earth which is twenty million billion times heavier than this). This perpetual rain of small objects from space isn’t so scary, but on rare occasions in Earth’s history, some rather larger objects have arrived: the “Chicxulub impactor” object often blamed for the extinction of many dinosaurs 66 million years ago is thought to have had a mass of at least one trillion tons.
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