内容摘要：Brandishing evidence presented during a recent three-week stretch of hearings, Justice Department lawyers are attempting to persuade Mehta to order a radical shake-up that includes a ban on Google paying to lock its search engine in as the default on smart devices and an order requiring the company to sell its Chrome browser.

Brandishing evidence presented during a recent three-week stretch of hearings, Justice Department lawyers are attempting to persuade Mehta to order a radical shake-up that includes a ban on Google paying to lock its search engine in as the default on smart devices and an order requiring the company to sell its Chrome browser.

Peters, whose parents had been imprisoned by Nazis and who focused on social inequalities as a journalist and academic criticised the Mercator projection as “Euro-centred”.The fervour with which he and his supporters promoted the projection as a scientific feat and a social justice breakthrough bordered on what some called propaganda. It caused concerned groups like the United States National Council of Churches to take notice and immediately adopt the map.

Critics, though, were quick to call out Peters on two things. The map, observers pointed out, was only distorted differently: Where the Mercator projection makes areas near the poles appear much larger, the Peters projection relatively represents accurate sizes throughout, but slightly stretches areas near the equator vertically, and areas near the poles horizontally.“There was also the fact that this map had already been presented by another cartographer decades ago,” Braun said, explaining the second problem.Scottish scientist James Gall indeed first published an identical projection in a science journal in 1855, but it went unnoticed. There is no proof, some researchers say, that Peters outrightly plagiarised Gall, but critics say his failure to credit the earlier researcher is still problematic.

In 2016, the debate resurfaced with renewed vigour after public schools in the US city of Boston switched to what many now refer to as the “Gall-Peters” projection. Officials said the move was part of a three-year effort to “decolonise the curriculum”. Teachers said they were amazed to see students questioning their view of the world after the switch.However, many experts and map enthusiasts were annoyed by the fact that Boston chose Peters, and as such, gave the projection renewed relevance.

Al Jazeera reached out to the Boston Public Schools (BPS) for comment.

Amid the Boston schools’ drama, one group of researchers decided they’d had enough of Peters and set out to do something.Where did the scientists find this evidence?

The researchers relied on data captured by NASA’s James Webb telescope, which was carried into outer space in 2022, and sits about 1.5 million kilometres (930,000 miles) away from Earth, as humanity’s watchtower peering into the universe.They focused on one particular planet, K2-18b, because it had already shown promising signs as a candidate extraterrestrial body with conditions similar to those on Earth.

K2-18b lies in a constellation called Leo, and is so far away from Earth that a spaceship would need to travel for 124 years at the speed of light to get there. In reality, it would take much, much longer since the laws of physics don’t allow anything other than light to travel that fast.The planet is 8.6 times heavier than Earth, and 2.6 times as large. Critically, it sits in what is known as the “Goldilocks Zone” of its sun: that’s the region around a star where a planet’s temperature could, in theory, support water in its liquid form on the surface.