A once-in-a-millennium asteroid flyby, and touch returns to a paralyzed hand

Scientists at the Apophis T-3 Years workshop in Padua, Italy, mapped exactly who will be able to see it: up to 7.6 billion people, about 90 percent of everyone on the planet, with nothing more than their own eyes [13]. It's the first time astronomers have ever been able to predict, years ahead of time, an asteroid flyby visible without a telescope. "Sighting Apophis as it passes by is a way of feeling a shared cosmic experience, realizing the smallness of Earth in the vastness of space," MIT planetary scientist Richard Binzel said [13]. There's currently zero chance it hits us, this pass or within the next century [13].

When sea levels rose, shallow coastal shelves trapped this nutrient before it reached the open ocean, so fewer marine organisms grew, less carbon sank and got buried in seafloor mud, and carbon dioxide built up in the air instead, warming the planet. When seas fell, the reverse happened: more phosphate reached open water, more life grew and sank, and more carbon came out of the atmosphere and into the seafloor [6]. "We have had remarkably little understanding of where that carbon ended up," Rickaby said. "Our results suggest that enhanced burial of organic carbon in marine sediments played a much more important role than was previously appreciated" [6].

When a STAT reporter caught up with him over Zoom, Thomas talked animatedly with his hands, telling stories about his dog, a Malshipoo named Bow [85].

Google put in $15 million and the Bezos Earth Fund $26 million to help build it. Fire agencies in California, Colorado, Australia, and Portugal start using the data this year, covering every fire-prone region on Earth at least twice a day, building toward hourly global checks by 2029 and 20-minute checks once the full fleet of more than 50 satellites is up in the early 2030s [139]. Meanwhile in Spain's Doñana National Park, the fire prevention technology is a lot lower-tech: donkeys. Animals named Leonor, Ainoa, and Ume graze seven hours a day along fire breaks, eating the shrubs and dry grass that would otherwise become fuel, and the park hasn't had a wildfire in nine years [212]. "A donkey weighs three times as much as a goat, so when it moves, it breaks up vegetation more effectively," said Joan Cedó, who started a donkey brigade in Catalonia in 2020. "Since we introduced donkeys in our municipality, there have been no wildfires," he said [212].

Instead of long corridors and dispensed meals, the center is now 27 independent townhouse-style homes, each with a working kitchen and living room, housing six or seven residents grouped by shared interests and supported by two attendants apiece [101]. Caregivers noticed that even residents with severe cognitive decline kept pursuing the hobbies and routines of their earlier lives, joyfully, once simply given the chance and the support to do so [101].

Sent away to study in Srinagar, he struggled with an unfamiliar language and watched capable Ladakhi students get labeled failures by a system that was never built to understand where they came from [224]. After finishing his engineering degree in 1988, he went home instead of taking an easier path, founded SECMOL, and in 1994 helped launch Operation New Hope, training teachers and building locally relevant material so students learned by repairing solar heaters and building their own mud-brick dormitories instead of only reading textbooks [224]. Over two decades, regional pass rates climbed from around 5 percent to nearly 75 percent [224]. He later invented the Ice Stupa, a cone-shaped artificial glacier that stores winter meltwater for farmers to use in spring, and won the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Award for the work [224].

Catnip, unlike DEET, is cheap and easy for subsistence farmers to grow and distill themselves. "DEET is out of the price bracket for most rural Ugandan subsistence farmers, so buying commercially available mosquito repellents is just not practicable," said Cardiff's Dr. Simon Scofield [210]. The team designed the lotion so local people could be part of producing and selling it, rather than depending forever on imported repellent or grant money [210].