Three astronauts and a cosmonaut of NASA's Crew-12 mission have safely returned to Earth after an almost eight-month trip to the International Space Station.

The crew, commanded by NASA's Jessica Meir and pilot Jack Hathaway with mission specialists Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency and Andrey Fedyaev of Russia's Roscosmos, splashed down into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Los Angeles, Calif., on Thursday, aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

Their trip home started about 45 minutes before, at an orbital speed of 17,500 mph.

The spacecraft lit its thrusters to nudge it out of orbit, causing the capsule to plunge into the atmosphere, its ablative heat shield battling extreme temperatures (up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit) during the fiery reentry. Over the course of about half an hour, the capsule slowed to a few hundred miles per hour, and then four orange-and-white parachutes took over, easing the spacecraft to just 16 mph above the cool, blue ocean and a gentle plop into the water.

The Crew-12 mission was the 20th time SpaceX had sent humans into orbit, lifting off in February on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida. It docked with the space station the next day. During the eight months in space, NASA said the crew completed dozens of science experiments and research, including studies of stem cells, how crystals grow in space and bone loss in microgravity.

Not all of their work happened inside the space station. Meir conducted four spacewalks totaling just over 27 hours to perform maintenance and upgrade the aging orbital outpost. Adenot performed three spacewalks.

Before departing, members of the Crew-12 mission were relieved by the three astronauts and cosmonaut of Crew-13, who arrived at the space station last week to start a six-month rotation.

During a pre-departure news conference on the station last month, Meir said she couldn't wait to be reunited with her 3 1/2-year-old daughter.

But there was something else she missed after all this time in orbit. "So looking forward to seeing nature again, feeling the breeze on my face, the wind rustling through the leaves. Experiencing all those things that we don't have up here," she said.

The two-time space veteran said there were two things she'd miss about space: weightlessness and the wonderful views of Earth.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Every Wednesday, MPR News with Angela Davis explores health and wellness topics with experts and listeners across Minnesota.

Listen to highlights from recent broadcasts on colorectal cancer, the potential health benefits of fermented foods and breaking down barriers to dental care.

Guests:

• Dr. Ajay Prakash is an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and an oncologist who specializes in gastrointestinal cancers at M Health Fairview. He is also a Masonic Cancer Center researcher.

• Dr. Shahnaz Sultan is a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School, a gastroenterologist with M Health Fairview, and a Masonic Cancer Center researcher.

• Dr. Elmi Abdulkadir Elmi is a dentist and co-founder of All About Dentistry, a general dental practice with locations in Burnsville and West St. Paul. He was also selected as a 2026 Bush Fellow, recognized for his work expanding access to oral health care.

• Dr. Sheila Riggs is an associate professor of dental public health in the School of Dentistry at the University of Minnesota and chair of the Association of Critical Access Dental Providers of Minnesota.

• Andres Gomez is an associate professor of animal science and food science and nutrition at the University of Minnesota.

• Kylene Guse is a researcher and founder of the Living Food Initiative where she explores the connection between food, microbes, ecology and culture. She was also co-owner of the now-closed GYST Fermentation Bar in Minneapolis.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

In a Winona State University biology lab, freshman Chayse Pulvermacher was isolating the DNA of an apple and then pipetting it into a special gel to see if she could identify it. The process is full of skills she hopes will help her land a job after college.

“I would love to work in a hospital, but bedside is my worst nightmare,” she said. “[I’d] much rather work in a lab setting, testing things — basically like this,” she said gesturing to the lab equipment around her.

Pulvermacher may have great luck finding a job in nearby Rochester in a few years, where a slew of new bioscience companies are cropping up around Mayo Clinic.

Nurturing and growing these startups is a big goal of Destination Medical Center, Rochester’s 20-year, $5.6 billion endeavor to remake the city and diversify the employer base beyond Mayo Clinic.

But some of those bio-science startups are struggling to find the right employees with the right skills.

In recent years, the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development convened a working group of the region's public and private sector institutions to come up with solutions.

Starting early

Employers in the DEED working group often say they are looking for people with specific lab skills, said Becky Zoubek, who leads the working group for DEED.

“Cell culture, [laboratory] quality control and regulatory expertise are pretty high on that list,” she said.

Schools like Winona State University have adjusted their curriculum in recent years to meet employer demand.

“[Students] are learning techniques that are being used diagnostically, research-wise,” said WSU Biology Department Chair Amy Runck. “And then all those other skills along the way too, whether it's pipetting, centrifuges, running gels, quantifying DNA and RNA, all those supportive techniques they're learning that make them well qualified to work in a lab.”

The working group is also exploring short-term courses that could be taught locally and quickly to expose new hires to a specific skill.

Meanwhile, Destination Medical Center officials are working to rebrand the city as one that’s not only home to Mayo Clinic, but one where innovation can thrive. They tout a soon-to-open shared lab space downtown called One Discovery Square as a big step forward: Once open, it will allow startups born inside Mayo to grow locally without having to build huge, expensive laboratories.

Gov. Tim Walz joined local government, business and health care industry leaders at an event at One Discovery Square Wednesday to praise the DMC’s progress in becoming what Mayo Clinic President and CEO Dr. Gianrico Farrugia called “a world class health care innovation hub and a nexus for economic development in the state and the country.”

Because of the “robust biomedical innovation ecosystem” that has been developed, “world class companies and organizations are now constantly looking to Rochester as the place to come pursue these innovation ideas,” Farrugia said.

It’s an advantage the region is trying to capitalize on.

“Rochester really has a combination of assets that's really difficult to replicate, especially with the Mayo Clinic, and that's obviously an extraordinary anchor,” DEED’s Zoubek told MPR News. “Companies can be located in close proximity to the Mayo researchers and clinicians and other life science companies and a growing innovation infrastructure.”

But these biomedical and med-tech startups are not just having difficulty finding people with bioscience degrees and experience working in laboratories; that’s just one piece of Rochester’s employment puzzle. Employers also need workers with business, legal, technology and bookkeeping skills and experience, too.

Niche skills

Cytotheryx is a Mayo Clinic spin-off that focuses on growing human liver cells called hepatocytes in pigs, so they can be used in research and in liver disease treatment.

Finding workers with animal husbandry experience has been essential to the company’s success so far, said Anna Argo, who is the company’s interim CEO. It’s a niche expertise, but one easier to come by in the rolling farmland of the Upper Midwest compared to the east and west coasts, where most biotech science and commercialization is happening.

"It's the workforce that we have here — the ability to draw from people who have lived and grown up around animals, and who studied animal science,” she said.

But Argo said filling other jobs is more difficult. For example, she said it took a year to fill a finance and operations job. Argo said it can be difficult to draw certain types of candidates to Rochester because of Mayo’s dominance.

“When you recruit people, especially from out of state, if they were to want to take a career step someplace else, there's Mayo, of course. There are smatterings of biotech companies here, but not a lot,” she said. “And so, you're asking them to relocate for potentially a very small pool of next opportunities."

Another Mayo spin-off is Vyriad, which is developing new cancer therapies. After developing the concept within Mayo’s walls, Vyriad was created in 2015 — and staying in the community was an obvious choice, said Vyriad president Luke Russell.

Vyriad has drawn on expertise within Mayo Clinic and recruited employees from the hospital, too. It grew quickly into unused office space once home to IBM.

But Russell said it's hard to find executives with drug development experience in Rochester, partly because the city doesn’t have a major academic anchor.

"In large cities like in Boston or in San Francisco where the ecosystem for biotech exists in just a much stronger way, it's also much easier to find the biotech executives that you need to run these types of companies."

Russell said diversifying Rochester's workforce will take time, because the city's reputation needs to change, too. In the meantime, the company is developing talent from within, giving younger hires opportunities to grow professionally, with the hope that they’ll put down roots and stay for the long haul.

"It’s a huge branding operation. Just getting the name out there, talking about what we're doing, and talking more about the number of opportunities that exist here,” Russell said. “I think it’s really helpful in making people aware that this really is an opportunity, and it's worth moving for."

The fall equinox brings shorter days, and the change of seasons. In some U.S. cities, it's also a chance to witness the striking alignment between the sun and Earth, as sunrises and sunsets align with city streets running east and west. It's a modern version of ancient observances of a celestial shift, like sunrise at Stonehenge.

"Humans still connect with how special it feels," says Geoff Boeing, who studies city design as the chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis at the University of Southern California.

"The things we built helped us to frame the universe in a certain way," Boeing adds.

In this case, that framing is literal. Take Chicago, for instance.

"In Chicago's canyon of tall buildings, especially in the downtown area ... the rising sun and the setting sun will be framed by those tall buildings," says Michelle Nichols, senior director of public programs at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. "The effect itself is accentuated by the height of the buildings and the width of the streets."

Fans of the phenomenon call it "Chicagohenge," after England's famously solar-aligned Stonehenge. It occurs thanks to Chicago's street design that follows the cardinal points of the compass: north, east, west and south. All you need to see it, Nichols says, is a wide street running east and west. A bit of elevation might also help.

The 2026 fall equinox arrives on Sept. 22 in the U.S., with the precise time falling in the evening, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. It means roughly equal hours of day and night, as autumn begins in the Northern Hemisphere and spring starts in the Southern Hemisphere.

Other cities that are laid out on a grid, such as Washington, D.C. and Phoenix can also offer good chances to spot a "henge" moment.

A new twist on an ancient tradition

Humans have long laid out cities in ways that correspond to the skies, and cardinal points of the compass.

"It's interesting because this is a very old phenomenon," Boeing says. "Especially thousands of years ago, a lot of early cities would be developed with these almost cosmic urban plans."

Marking celestial change was a deeply religious and spiritual experience for people, he says, "and their cities would be designed almost like cosmological maps to follow it, where you could have points in the city that corresponded to certain stars in the night sky."

For example, Tenochtitlan, the Aztec precursor of today's Mexico City, was "carefully planned with astronomical knowledge," as a 2021 academic paper noted.

In modern cities, such points are often towers of steel and concrete, and asphalt streets. And their alignment with celestial features is more a byproduct of a grid layout than a cosmological goal. But, Boeing says, that hardly matters.

"Even if we didn't do it intentionally, we're still getting the same side effects at least once or twice a year."

As Nichols puts it, "We don't rely on these alignments to tell us things, but they are really great reminders that, hey, the sky really is still up there."

Does your city have a ‘henge’ alignment?

Cities like Chicago and Denver are good candidates for viewing an equinox because of their faithfulness to the compass, according to Boeing, who has published a comparative analysis of cities' street grids.

He says the cities "are really good examples of this kind of 19th century urban planning, spatial logic that spread across the Midwest and the Great Plains during the Great Westward expansion in the U.S. in the 19th century, that was really aligned with orthogonal grids."

Grids made it easier to buy and sell land, Boeing says. It also made it easier to map out infrastructure like railroads.

Some cities use a grid that's aligned not with the compass but with local geography, like waterways or mountains. That's why another famous "henge"— "Manhattanhenge" — doesn't occur on the equinox dates; neither does San Francisco's stunning "California Henge."

Even if your local streets "are all sort of wonky with the directions that they go," Nichols says, you might spot an interesting alignment.

"You just have to pay attention," she says.

Take your photos, but not in the street

Instagram and other photo-sharing apps have made the equinox something of a media darling, the Adler Planetarium's Nichols says, because of the dramatic scenes it can create. During pandemic lockdowns, she adds, the equinox gained popularity for another reason.

"The opportunity to experience an effect together while still being apart," she says. "That was extraordinarily important to people."

But Nichols says people should also be careful for their own safety, as they seek to create dramatic images and memories.

"Just be mindful," she says. "Don't walk out in the middle of the street to be able to take the perfect photo. You can do this from the sidewalks, on the side. It's totally fine."

And if you're driving in the morning or afternoon around the time of the equinox, it's good to remember that on east-west streets, you're likely to get a blast of sunshine directly in your face, with glare that makes it hard to see other cars, pedestrians and traffic signals

"You do see traffic buildups and backups because of the location of the sun in the sky," Nichols says.

Copyright 2026, NPR

C.J. Keene | South Dakota Public Broadcasting

In the 1930s, astronomer Fritz Zwicky hypothesized the existence of dark matter, a theoretical substance that physicists believe accounts for 85 percent of all matter in the universe but has never been detected.

Nearly a century later, scientists at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota’s Black Hills, may have just proven Zwicky right. They believe they’ve detected dark matter at their Lux Zeplin experiment site in an old gold mine nearly a mile underground.

If confirmed, it would be a world-class scientific discovery and shake the field of particle physics, although Sanford researchers aren’t quite ready to pour out the good Scotch. Instead, they’re now poring through massive amounts of data to make sure they’re absolutely sure they have what they think.

“What haven’t we thought of? What could this be that isn’t dark matter?” Jaret Heise, director of science at the underground lab, asked aloud.

Researchers, he said, will spend the next few months “scrutinizing the data, wracking their brains for every possible avenue that might confuse this signal as a more vanilla type of event as opposed to a fabulous new type of particle interaction that no one has ever seen before.”

Searching for WIMPs

Dark matter is called “dark” because it is invisible. NASA describes it as “the invisible glue that holds the universe together” and “shapes the cosmos, organizing galaxies and cosmic objects on a large scale.”

Theorizing about its existence is one thing. Proving it is another.

Scientists in Minnesota seemed close to cracking the code in the early 2000s. The Soudan Underground Laboratory, a half-mile below the Iron Range town of Soudan, was a hot spot for dark matter research. In 2009, scientists came close to announcing the discovery of dark matter on Earth. Six months later, the lab announced it was leaving Minnesota for a much deeper site in Canada.

Like the Minnesota project, scientists at the South Dakota site have been searching for weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. These subatomic particles are seen as candidates for dark matter.

Finding these WIMPs or dark matter signatures is no simple feat. It’s less like finding a needle in a haystack and more like finding a specific grain of sand on a beach.

“A dark matter particle hitting an atom doesn’t give off a lot of energy, but the LZ experiment and other dark matter experiments using Xenon — others using argon — are really chasing this mysterious particle, looking for these very, very faint signatures that would indicate the existence of a dark matter particle,” Heise said.

Xenon and argon, noble gasses from the periodic table, are ultradense in liquid form. When something as small as a WIMP hits their atomic core it creates tiny flashes of light.

To be able to detect these tiny flashes, scientists set up their equipment deep in the Black Hills mineshaft.

‘Path of light’

Trying to prove dark matter exists remains the elusive prize. It interacts very weakly with ordinary matter.

It does exert a gravitational attraction and the effects can be seen among galaxy clusters, they’re “almost impossible to detect close-up. It’d be like trying to measure how the mass of the Eiffel Tower is pulling you towards it when you’re standing next to it. (It is, but very weakly),” according to the University of Chicago.

“Looking out at our solar system and into our universe and trying to understand how stars are rotating, how light is bending around objects we can’t see led to the hypothesis that there must be some matter out there that doesn’t emit light, but is, nonetheless, effecting the rotations and speeds of galaxies, and the path of light,” Heise said.

The Sanford Underground Research Facility findings are being submitted for peer review by collaborative scientists worldwide. They could mean a serious breakthrough if the data confirm this particle interaction as dark matter.

Meanwhile, the work continues.

Heise said there’s only one way to go from believing this could be dark matter, to being the first on Earth to know they’ve seen it with their own eyes. “More data.”

This story comes from the Upper Midwest Newsroom, a public media collaboration between Wisconsin Public Radio, South Dakota Public Broadcasting, Prairie Public in North Dakota and Minnesota Public Radio News made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Researchers who study wolves in far northern Minnesota have found that wolves eat a lot more than just white-tailed deer, their preferred prey. They also hunt beaver, catch fish, and will even gorge on blueberries in July and August when fresh meat can be tough to come by.

A new study released this week shows that not only do those blueberries help wolves survive during the lean summer months; but the wolves also benefit blueberries by spreading their seeds, and helping those seeds grow faster and germinate more successfully.

Published in the journal Biology Letters, the study found that blueberry seeds digested by wolves and then deposited in their scat were between 5 and 27 percent more likely to successfully germinate and sprout into new blueberry plants. They also germinated about seven days faster than seeds that were not consumed by wolves.

Those increases may not seem enormous. But Tom Gable, who leads the Voyageurs Wolf Project and is co-author on the study, said the faster germination and growth are significant when put in the context of just how many berries wolves can eat.

“Our previous work has estimated that there are hundreds, if not thousands of seeds that are passed through a wolf's gut every time they basically poop out berries.” said Gable.

So even a five percent difference in germination success is meaningful, Gable said, “when you think about how many seeds are being processed through wolves' digestive systems in this ecosystem.”

Scientists with the project have found that blueberries can make up to 83 percent of the diet of wolves living in and around Voyageurs National Park during July and August, when it’s more difficult to catch deer and beaver.

Deer fawns are larger and more elusive in the summer months than earlier in the year. And beavers spend most of their time in ponds in the hot summertime, where they are much more difficult for wolves to hunt.

So wolf pups also rely on berries for about 30 percent of their diets during the summer. The researchers have also documented adult wolves regurgitating berries and feeding them to their young.

So why would blueberry seeds found in wolf poop have a better chance of successfully sprouting? The scientists who study them have two theories.

First, as the seeds pass through a wolf’s digestive system, they get scarred by bone shards and other things in the wolf’s gut. That scraping of the seed coat could give it a better chance to germinate.

Second, the fecal material in wolf scat may create a micro environment that benefits seeds, said Alex Gross, a masters student at Northern Michigan University who works with the Voyageurs Wolf Project and is the lead author of the study.

“Think of [it] like a fertilizing effect on blueberry seeds, and that may protect the seeds from harmful pathogens that would maybe inhibit growth or harm the seeds in some way,” said Gross.

Other studies have shown that bears and birds also disperse seeds and help them propagate. But the researchers believe this is the first study to look at the impact that wolves may have on the broader success of blueberry germination.

“We just don't think of wolves really as blueberry eaters,” said Gross. “So I think further research would really benefit to see, does this trend continue to hold up over time with larger samples?”

Researchers collected five fresh wolf scats in 2017 and 2018 that were made up mainly of digested fruits. From those poop piles they collected and studied more than one thousand seeds. Then they collected about 500 control seeds from ten wild blueberry plants in the area.

Gable estimates that a wolf needs to eat about a pound of blueberries to produce one scat of digested fruit. “So you just think about how many seeds are in a pound of blueberries, and it’s a lot of them.”

And because wolves travel long distances when they hunt and search for mates, they are likely dispersing blueberry seeds over a wide territory.

“Much farther than a fox would be able to, or a bear, or some other species that also regularly eat blueberries and deposit those seeds in their scat,” said Gross.

Because wolves cover so much ground, Gross believes they could potentially play a role in the formation of new blueberry patches. More broadly, Gable believes the study provides yet another fascinating example of the role wolves play in the interconnected ecological web of northern Minnesota, and likely in other forests around the world where wolves prowl.

“This pattern of wolves being seed dispersers in the ecosystem is a really interesting wrinkle in our understanding of what sort of ecological role wolves play in places like Minnesota, and probably an unexpected one.”

If you’ve been near a boat landing in Minnesota this summer, you’ve probably seen dire warnings about zebra mussels. The Department of Natural Resources says about five percent of Minnesota’s more than 11,000 lakes are infested with the fingernail-sized mollusk, and they are always trying to limit spread.

That word — infested — hints at what the DNR thinks of invasive zebra mussel. It’s the language of contamination, infection and ruin. In her new book, “Undesirable: Invasive Species, Humans, and Where We All Belong,” science writer Amy Crawford examines how we came to see certain plants and animals as invading and marauding. She writes that, in his age of anxiety, “stories about invasive species tap into widely held feelings about environmental loss.”

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Undesirable: Invasive Species, Humans, and Where We All Belong

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This week on Big Books and Bold Ideas, Kerri Miller talks with Crawford about invasion biology and the hard questions that surround it: What’s considered native to an ecosystem? What do we do when our own damage of a habitat gives way to new plants, insects and animals? And is it time to reconsider our attempts to control these environments?

Guest:

• Amy Crawford is a Michigan-based freelance journalist. Her new book is, “Undesirable: Invasive Species, Humans, and Where We All Belong.”

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Now it’s the moon’s turn to pull a disappearing act.

After being shut out of this month’s total solar eclipse, the Americas will have the best seats in the celestial house when Earth’s shadow briefly envelops the moon. Almost the entire lunar surface will be masked Thursday night into Friday — a whopping 96 percent — making this an especially deep partial eclipse.

The moon is already in the spotlight. NASA sent the Artemis II astronauts on a record-breaking lunar flyby in April, the prelude to eventually landing on the surface and building a base swarming with people and robots over the next several years.

“This is a great time to be part of the space program, right? We’re not slowing down,” NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway told The Associated Press from the International Space Station last week.

It’s the second act of the greatest show in the solar system, coming two weeks after a total solar eclipse paraded through Greenland, Iceland and Spain.

Eclipses always travel in pairs as the sun, moon and Earth align so precisely that one obscures the other. That’s because the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, which is 400 times farther away, making them appear the same size — a cosmic coincidence and gift from the universe.

Unfolding at a more leisurely pace, the upcoming lunar eclipse will have a much bigger audience than Europe's solar show. The eclipsed moon will be visible to billions across North and South America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, provided the skies are clear.

The lunar eclipse may also be visible to Hathaway and the nine other people living off the planet — seven astronauts at the International Space Station and three aboard China’s orbiting outpost.

Space provides a “unique perspective” for viewing cosmic wonders like eclipses and auroras, said the space station's commander, Jessica Meir.

In this case, Earth will pass between the moon and the sun, casting a reddish-orange shadow onto our closest neighbor. Because this is a partial eclipse, the lineup won’t be perfect and it won’t be a true blood moon. The partial phase of the eclipse will last more than three hours. But the entire eclipse, from the time the full moon enters the faintest, outermost edge of Earth’s shadow until it leaves, will stretch 5.5 hours.

The eclipse will peak just after 11 p.m. CDT, with the eclipse spanning from around 9:33 p.m. to 12:51 a.m. Friday.

Nearly 1 billion people in the U.S., Canada, and Central and South America will have front-row views for the entire eclipse. More than 3 billion people — 44 percent of the world’s population — will be in position to catch at least part of it.

The eclipsed moon will be setting in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, cutting the show short. It will be rising in Hawaii, getting the eastern Pacific off to a late start along with northwestern sections of the U.S. and Canada.

This is the year’s second lunar eclipse and the fourth eclipse overall. A total lunar eclipse graced the skies over the Americas, Australia and eastern Asia in March.

The next complete lunar blackout won’t be until New Year’s Eve 2028, with Asia and Australia at center stage. And it will be 2029 before stargazers across North and South America are treated to another full eclipse of the moon.

MPR News Chief Meteorologist Ben Cathey contributed to this report.

A string of foodborne illness outbreaks has raised new questions about the safety of fresh produce. A major cyclospora outbreak has sickened thousands nationwide, salmonella linked to jalapeños has infected more than 100 Minnesotans and recalled alfalfa sprouts grown in the state have been connected to cases of both E. coli and salmonella.

MPR News host Angela Davis talks with food safety experts about what’s behind the recent outbreaks, how produce becomes contaminated and what consumers can do to reduce their risk of getting sick.

Guests:

• Amy Johnston is a food safety expert and extension educator with the University of Minnesota. She develops education and training on safe food handling, preparation and processing for food producers, businesses and consumers.

• Craig Hedberg is a professor in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and co-director of the Minnesota Integrated Food Safety Center of Excellence. He studies foodborne-illness surveillance, outbreak investigations and prevention.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.    

Nearly all of the terrestrial earthworms in Minnesota are invasive species from Europe and Asia. The most recognizable is the nightcrawler. It's commonly used as fishing bait, but it came overseas from Europe more than 100 years ago.

Jumping worms are the latest invasive worm to arrive in Minnesota. While often found in gardens and compost piles, they represent a threat to the health of our landscapes.

MPR News host Clay Masters spoke with Lee Frelich, the lead researcher on the University of Minnesota’s Jumping Worms Project, about the species and its impacts on the ecosystem.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

A Tyrannosaurus rex fossil billed as one of the world’s largest and most complete specimens was sold for a record $50.1 million Tuesday to a mystery bidder.

Sotheby’s said the 67-million-year-old fossil, nicknamed “Gus,” is now the most expensive set of dinosaur bones ever auctioned off, besting the almost $45 million price tag for a nearly complete stegosaurus sold by the same New York auction house in 2024. The previous record holder had been a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton nicknamed “Stan” that sold for nearly $32 million in 2020.

“Gus is not only an exceptional find, but a specimen that’s been excavated, documented, prepared and cared for with real excellence,” Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s vice chair, said after the sale was completed. “The market responds when great specimens are taken care of in the right way.”

Why the bidding for this T. rex was intense

Standing upright with its tail extended and right foot slightly raised, “Gus” is an adult dinosaur specimen measuring about 12 ½ feet tall and 38 feet long.

He’s about 61 percent complete, with what Sotheby’s describes as an “exceptionally preserved” skull including a gaping jaw of powerful teeth, two “well represented” feet and a number of rarely found bones, including a furcula, or wishbone.

The fossil was discovered in 2021 on a ranch in South Dakota and named in honor of property owner Gary Licking, who died during the roughly five year excavation, restoration and mounting process.

The auction house said the winner, who participated by phone and wants to remain anonymous, outbid six other prospective buyers during Tuesday’s 10-minute bidding battle. The piece had been estimated to fetch anywhere from $20 to $30 million ahead of the sale.

“Try a bigger bite,” auctioneer Phyllis Kao cajoled the bidders at one point during the auction, which was conducted live and online. “It’s a T. rex, after all.”

Scientists want ‘Gus’ on public display

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, an advocacy group of scientists, scholars and students, said scientifically significant fossils such as “Gus” should be publicly displayed in museums and other research institutions so that they can be "preserved, documented, and accessible for future generations."

"Our hope is that the new owner recognizes the extraordinary scientific and educational value of Gus the T. rex and that they aim to keep it in the public trust by immediately donating it to an accredited natural history museum," Kristi Curry Rogers, the society's president-elect, said in a statement Tuesday. "That outcome would ensure that this remarkable specimen continues to advance science, rather than becoming unavailable for study."

Indeed, "Apex," the stegosaurus, the previous dinosaur fossil record-holder, is currently on long-term loan to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. "Sue" the T. rex, the first dinosaur ever sold at auction in 1997, also by Sotheby's, is a centerpiece of the Field Museum in Chicago.

And "Stan" is on display at the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi, posed in combat with another fossilized T. rex over the remains of a triceratops.

A Cretaceous king and Hollywood staple

Tyrannosaurus rex, whose name roughly translates to “King of the Tyrant Lizards,” stood firmly at the top of the food chain when it ruled during the late Cretaceous period.

With its fearsome jawline and comically stubby arms, it has become the most recognizable and beloved of the dinosaurs, depicted in everything from children's programs like Barney, the purple T. rex, to the enduring “Jurassic Park” movie franchise.

The great beasts roamed what is today western North America, during a time when the region boasted “warm climates, high sea levels, and rich coastal floodplains” that allowed their primary prey, giant herbivores like the triceratops, to flourish, according to Sotheby’s.

Copyright 2026, NPR

An astronaut from Minneapolis will make his first trip to the International Space Station Tuesday.

Anil Menon plans to be on board the space station for eight months. While there, he’ll work on a range of technology and medical research projects, including production of semiconductor crystals and in-space ultrasound medical monitoring.

Before his astronaut career, Menon grew up in Minneapolis and later trained as a physician. He has worked as a flight surgeon for NASA and SpaceX; this will be his first space flight.

Speaking to MPR News last year, Menon said he’d spent two years in training for the trip. He said space is a unique place to use his training as a physician, with limited access to equipment and other doctors.

“This is really the extreme of wilderness medicine, so it’s very cool if you're into those kind of challenges and helping people in unique ways like that,” Menon said.

He said he got the idea of being an astronaut on a trip to the Science Museum of Minnesota as a kid, watching a documentary about space travel.

“I couldn’t believe that that was a career. My mom worked at a pizza place and my dad was doing computer programming, so it planted a seed, and I hung on to it for a very long time,” Menon said.

The spacecraft will launch Tuesday morning from Kazakhstan. Menon will make the trip with two astronauts from Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency. They’ll join seven astronauts who are currently working on the space station.

The spacecraft is set to launch at 9:47 a.m. central time and will orbit the earth twice before docking on the International Space Station. NASA will stream the launch in the morning, and the opening of the hatch and welcoming of the astronauts on board the station, scheduled to start at 2:30 p.m. CDT.

That will all be available on NASA’s website.

Kimchi. Kombucha. Yogurt. Sauerkraut. Fermented foods have been part of the human diet for thousands of years but researchers are still trying to understand their potential health benefits.

MPR News host Angela Davis talks with two researchers about the connection between fermented foods and our health.

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Guests:

• Andres Gomez is an associate professor of animal science and food science and nutrition at the University of Minnesota.

• Kylene Guse is a researcher and founder of the Living Food Initiative where she explores the connection between food, microbes, ecology and culture. She was also co-owner of the now-closed GYST Fermentation Bar in Minneapolis.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.    

A team at the University of Minnesota has created the world’s first synthetic cell with a complete life cycle. The cell named "Spudcell," like Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, was built entirely from non-living chemical components.

MPR News host Clay Masters spoke with synthetic biologist at the U of M College of Biological Sciences, Kate Adamala about the Spudcell .

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Archaeologists have discovered a huge Viking Age textile production site in Denmark that dates back more than 1,000 years and underlines the sophistication of Viking society.

Experts from the Moesgaard Museum said this week that the sprawling 100,000-square-meter (more than 1 million-square-foot) site features an area for processing flax as well as more than 80 pit houses — semisubmerged huts that were used as workshops and dwellings in Viking times.

It's located in Søften, 10 kilometers (6 miles) north of Denmark's second-largest city, Aarhus, on the Jutland peninsula. The site dates back to the late Iron Age and early Viking Age, sometime between A.D. 600 and 950.

Archaeologist Liv Stidsing Reher-Langberg, who led the 10-month dig, said that "we have a clear focus on textile production, which makes this settlement different from other kinds of settlements of this period."

"We have spindle whorls, we have weight looms; that tells us about what has been going on in the pit houses," said Reher-Langberg, adding that archaeologists had also discovered silver coins, glass beads and pottery.

Experts found separate areas for production and crafts, plus a single residential home, which suggests work was overseen by a powerful individual with control over resources and production.

Reher-Langberg said that, over the last three decades, people with metal detectors had unearthed several silver coins in the area. A trial excavation 1½ years ago, before the start of construction work on a new road and industrial area, then piqued archaeologists' interest.

"We could see in the trenches that it just keeps on going, with these houses and pit houses and textile production features," Reher-Langberg said.

Moesgaard Museum historian Kasper Andersen said that the discovery at Søften is "another piece in the puzzle" to understanding the local economic, cultural and political structure at the time.

During the Viking era, Aarhus — then known as Aros — functioned as a center for royalty and international trade. And last year, archaeologists discovered another Viking site in Lisbjerg, just 4 kilometers (2½ miles) away, that was likely home to members of the nobility.

Goods and resources were likely brought from the countryside and settlements like Søften, before entering an extensive international trade network, Andersen said.

"When you have a production site of this scale, it cannot be only because of the local area. It needs to be understood as part of a greater network, a much bigger international perspective," Andersen said.

Reher-Langberg hopes future carbon dating and pollen analysis might answer some lingering questions, for instance about what kind of textile production went on at the site.

During the Viking Age, considered to run from A.D. 793 to 1066, Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raids, colonization, conquest and trade throughout Europe, even reaching North America.

Andersen said that the discovery at Søften shows that Vikings were "not just simple, uncivilized, barbaric hordes, rambling about Europe."

"To have a place like Søften, you need a very well-organized society with a production line, and you also need a market to have the production," he said. "The textiles from Søften go into a market that's much bigger than just the local area."

Copyright 2026, NPR

Get set for a rare blue micromoon this weekend — a blue moon that's also the most distant and smallest-looking full moon of the year.

A bonus: The brilliant star Antares will photobomb Sunday's spectacle for a celestial three-for-one.

A blue moon occurs every two to three years when a second full moon squeezes into a single month. May 1 saw this month’s first full moon.

Since the moon's orbit isn't a perfect circle, the upcoming full moon will be farther from Earth than usual at a distance of 252,360 miles (406,135 kilometers), making it seem a bit smaller and dimmer. It's the opposite of a supermoon when a full moon comes closer to us than normal. The most recent supermoon, for instance, was just 225,130 miles (362,312 kilometers) away.

The Virtual Telescope Project’s Gianluca Masi, who will provide a live webcast from Italy, said Sunday’s micromoon will appear about 6 percent smaller and 10 percent dimmer than that of an average full moon — “differences that are subtle enough to likely go unnoticed by most observers.”

The scene will be especially thrilling south of the equator across the Pacific.

For stargazers in Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, eastern Australia, parts of Antarctica and a smattering of other islands, Antares will vanish temporarily as the blue micromoon passes in front of it.

The red supergiant star, 550 light-years away, is known as the “heart of scorpion” in the constellation Scorpius. A light-year is almost 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers).

There won't be any disappearing act for those looking up elsewhere in the world, with Antares constantly visible alongside the full moon.

And despite the name, this blue moon won’t appear turquoise, sapphire or any other shade. The term simply refers to the uncommon occurrence of two full moons in one month.

Aditi Gandhi spends a lot of time in the pool. The 17-year old started swimming when she was four, and she now swims competitively for her high school, the Blake School in Minneapolis.

When she’s out of the regular swim season, she also swims for a club team, so she spends at least a couple of hours in the pool almost every day.

And she loves it.

“It’s very calming mentally. It makes me physically feel good, and it's just a great way to keep in shape,” Gandhi said. “I've met some very close friends on the team as well, which has kept me going.”

However, swimming doesn’t always make her feel good.

“Me and my teammates, we would notice after long practices that we would start feeling very sick,” Gandhi told MPR News. “I would notice increased inflammation and pain after swimming, when swimming is actually supposed to take away your pain, because it circulates blood.”

Gandhi has a venous condition. While swimming should provide relief by increasing blood flow, she found, at times, being in the pool was actually making her condition worse.

She said she and her teammates often get other symptoms, too, like coughing or wheezing, eye redness and irritation, and runny noses after spending long periods of time in the pool.

She did some online research and found that chloramines were likely making her and other swimmers sick.

Chloramines cause that distinct and sometimes noxious pool smell that many of us think is chlorine — but it’s not, and it’s not a good sign.

Chloramines are gases that release when chlorine in pool water reacts with substances like urine, sweat and oils from swimmers’ bodies.

Experts say that most swimmers don’t shower before getting into the pool, and many of them urinate in the pool, too. Those substances, along with excess chlorine and poor ventilation around the pool, can cause the harmful gases to build up.

Breathing in chloramines can cause allergy-like symptoms, respiratory problems and even asthma.

Experts say that while those who don’t swim often face little risk, chloramine exposure is a real issue for frequent swimmers like Gandhi and her teammates.

Dr. Avery Michienzi, a toxicologist at the University of Virginia and a former University of Minnesota swimmer, says long term exposure to chloramine gas can be very harmful, especially for athletes who rely heavily on their lungs to get them to the finish line.

“(Chloramines) can lead to a breakdown of your respiratory tract and also lead people to have not only asthma issues, but also just increased susceptibility to viral infections,” said Michienzi.

Dr. Michienzi is a friend of Aditi Gandhi’s high school coach, who put the two in touch with one another to talk about ways to limit her and other swimmers’ exposure to chloramines.

Gandhi’s invention

But to prove they were the cause of her symptoms, Gandhi first needed a way to test for chloramines, which are tricky to measure in the air.

It requires specialized equipment that is hard to find outside of a lab, according to Dr. Ernest “Chip” Blatchley III, an environmental engineering professor at Purdue University.

“There's really no convenient, simple, inexpensive method that allows us to measure these things in real time,” Blatchley said.

That was until Aditi Gandhi sprung into action.

The high school junior invented a device, which is a small, plastic box that sits next to the pool and has sensors that continuously monitor chloramine levels in the air.

A display on the box tells you if levels are higher than normal.

Because it is difficult to measure chloramines in the air directly, her patent-pending prototype device instead measures them by proxy, detecting four variables in the air that are associated with chloramines.

“One sensor measures total volatile organic compounds, which are gas compounds, and equivalent CO2, which is like carbon dioxide, as well as temperature and relative humidity,” Gandhi said.

“If the four variables increase, then it's more likely to have chloramines in the environment,” said Gandhi.

If chloramine levels are too high, swimming pool personnel will know right away and can then take steps to lower them.

“The development of a tool that would allow us to measure the chloramines or, in her case, to measure a proxy for the chloramines — I mean, that's filling a need,” said Blatchley, who also advised Gandhi in her development of the device.

As a former competitive swimmer herself, Dr. Michienzi said she was especially excited to learn about Gandhi’s invention.

“I thought it was a very amazing, very impressive endeavor for a high school student to do, and I think something that could potentially have a big health impact as well," said Michienzi. “I was very excited about it.”

After winning a few science fair awards for her invention, Gandhi will next bring her chloramine detector to the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) competition in Phoenix, Ariz., the week of May 9.

She will also be the spotlight of a Council for the Model Aquatic Health Code (CMAHC) webinar, a nonprofit that partners with the CDC to prevent injury and illness in public pools.

Space has been a major topic of conversation lately, after four astronauts flew a figure-eight around the moon and returned safely back to Earth last weekend. The Artemis II livestream may be over, but if we are lucky, we can find a window to the universe just by looking up.

This week is International Dark Sky Week, which began in 2003 to raise awareness of not only the beauty of nighttime, but also the artificial light that can erase it.

Gov. Tim Walz recently signed a proclamation recognizing Dark Sky Week in Minnesota for a third year in a row. And Voyageurs Conservancy, the non-profit partner of Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota, is leading a series of programs focused on the night sky. MPR News guest host Kelly Gordon talked with the group’s associate director, Breanna Trygg.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

The crew of NASA's Artemis II mission are safely back on Earth after a nine-day mission took them on a trip around the moon and back, sending humans deeper into space than ever before.

To come home safely, the crew — NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — and its capsule had to endure near-record-breaking entry speeds and temperatures up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Orion spacecraft spent 13 and a half minutes falling through the atmosphere, hitting a top speed of more than 30 times the speed of sound.

Orion performed as designed. The capsule's heat shield protected the crew, and a series of parachutes helped the capsule gently splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.

With that landing, the mission came to a close, clocking more than 700,237 statute miles, said Artemis II entry flight director Rick Henfling.

Four members of the U.S. Navy Dive team pulled the crew from the capsule. Helicopters plucked them from a raft outside their spacecraft — called the porch — and within 24 hours of splashdown, they'll arrive at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"We did it. We sent four amazing people to the moon and safely returned them to Earth for the first time in more than 50 years," said NASA's Lori Glaze, who leads the Artemis programs. "To the generation that now knows what we're capable of: Welcome to our moonshot."

The crew's flight path took them around the far side of the moon at around 4,000 miles above the surface.

The crew made a number of geological observations and took thousands of photos to help scientists better understand what the moon is made of – and where it might have come from.

But perhaps the most profound vantage point came from looking back at home.

"Trust me, you are special, in all of this emptiness," said Glover, "This is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call The Universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together."

The Artemis II mission was a critical test flight for the Orion spacecraft, which will carry future Artemis astronauts, including those that will venture to the lunar surface.

The crew tested key systems of the spacecraft — its life support system, maneuverability, its heat shield, the toilet. What NASA learns from this flight will set future lunar missions up for success.

"Part of our ethos as a crew, and our values from the very beginning were that this is a relay race," said Koch "In fact, we have batons that we bought to symbolize physically, that we plan to hand them to the next crew, and every single thing that we do is with them in mind."

That next crew will come soon. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman accelerated the Artemis program, charging the agency with launching an Artemis mission each year.

Even before the Artemis II crew splashed down, work had begun at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to prepare for the next mission.

NASA engineering operations manager John Giles oversees the Crawler-Transporter, the massive vehicle that moves the mobile launch pad, and the SLS rocket that launches Orion, from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch site. His team is preparing to move the launch platform for Artemis II back into the Vehicle Assembly Building next week to begin putting together the rocket for Artemis III.

"We really haven't had too much time to relax and reflect on Artemis II, other than thinking what a perfect accomplishment it was," said Giles. "Moving right into Artemis III. No rest for the weary. It's moving on."

A key part of the Artemis III SLS rocket — the core stage fuel tank — is heading to Kennedy Space Center later this month. Parts of the solid rocket motors are already there.

Artemis III aims to launch next year. It'll stay in Earth orbit while testing spacecraft that are designed to land humans on the moon. The following mission, Artemis IV, could bring humans to the lunar surface, for the first time since 1972.

Copyright 2026, NPR

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen were ensconced in the Orion space capsule when they dropped into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego at 8:07 p.m. Friday. The USS John P. Murtha is stationed near the splashdown zone to help recover the crew.

To get back to Earth, the space capsule had to withstand predicted temperatures of about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit and slow down from nearly 25,000 miles per hour — or more than 30 times the speed of sound — to a gentle 19 mph or so before splashdown.

The roughly 13-minute journey from the top of the atmosphere to the surface is like "riding a fireball through the atmosphere," NASA astronaut and Artemis II crew member Victor Glover said before the maneuver.

But, he said, it's also a necessary one.

"We have to get back," Glover said. "There's so much data that you've seen already, but all the good stuff is coming back with us."

The crew of four, who looped around the far side of the moon on Monday April 6, took photos and made observations as they passed over the lunar surface. The crew is set to bring that data and more back to the team on the ground.

Nell Greenfieldboyce and Central Florida Public Media's Brendan Byrne contributed to this report.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Flying by the moon, witnessing an eclipse, and traveling farther from Earth than any humans have before: The four astronauts of NASA's Artemis II mission have hit many milestones since launching from Kennedy Space Center nearly 10 days ago.

Now, if all goes according to plan Friday, they'll have completed their most important one: making it home.

The crew's Orion space capsule is scheduled to enter the atmosphere at 7:53 p.m. ET, just southeast of Hawaii. About 13 minutes later, it should splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.

To make it there, the spacecraft will first have to punch through the Earth's atmosphere at about 25,000 miles per hour and experience temperatures upwards of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

As mission pilot and NASA astronaut Victor Glover put it: It's like "riding a fireball through the atmosphere."

The trip home

The Artemis II crew — Glover, his NASA crewmates Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — have been preparing for the return home for the past few days, which includes packing up equipment and reorienting the spacecraft for an ideal trajectory that will land them safely in the Pacific at 8:07 p.m. ET.

On return day, the crew will wake up at 11:35 a.m. and begin reconfiguring the Orion capsule for reentry. They will make an additional course correction to fine-tune the return trajectory at 2:53 p.m.

Before entering the atmosphere, the spacecraft will need to ditch its service module — which housed thrusters, solar panels and other spaceflight hardware for the mission. Orion will separate from the service module at 7:33 p.m., which will then fall back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere.

Orion, if all goes well, will avoid that fate. The spacecraft is set to begin its 13-minute plunge through the atmosphere at 7:53 p.m. During that time, it's expected that the crew will lose communication with Mission Control for about six minutes.

Much of Orion's speed will be lost as it plummets through the atmosphere. As the capsule nears the Earth's surface, a series of parachutes will help it to slow down even further, to a mere 20 miles per hour upon splashdown.

The USS John P. Murtha is stationed near the splashdown zone and will help recover the crew. A team will head out to the floating capsule and install an inflatable raft just below Orion's side hatch. The crew will be examined by a flight surgeon, then helped out of the capsule. From the transport ship, they will hitch a ride back to Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Risk of reentry

There's always risk when returning from space. Glover said that he has been thinking about this portion of the mission since he was selected for it back in 2023, and he's been looking forward to it ever since.

"We have to get back," he said from the Orion capsule Wednesday. "There's so much data that you've seen already, but all the good stuff is coming back with us. There's so many more pictures, so many more stories, and, gosh, I haven't even begun to process what we've been through."

To get back, the capsule must hit the atmosphere at a precise angle.

"Let's not beat around the bush," said Jeff Radigan, Artemis II's lead flight director. "We have to hit that angle correctly. Otherwise, we're not going to have a successful reentry."

All eyes will be on the heat shield — this is the piece of hardware beneath the capsule that protects the crew from the extreme temperatures during reentry. NASA tested it out on Artemis I, the previous, uncrewed mission, and found that the heat shield wasn't performing as designed.

NASA mission planners and the Artemis II team worked on a way to mitigate that risk. Instead of "skipping" through the atmosphere like Artemis I, this mission would hit the atmosphere steeper and faster, limiting the time the spacecraft spends in those fiery, energetic moments of reentry.

"It's 13 minutes of things that have to go right," said Radigan. "I have a whole checklist in my head that we're going through of all the things that have to happen."

Mission success

The Artemis II mission is a key flight test for Orion, and thus far, mission managers have been pleased with the results. The spacecraft has taken humans farther from Earth than they've ever been, breaking a record set by Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970.

The crew tested the manual control of the spacecraft, which will be needed for future missions that will dock with a lunar landing system. The mission tested the spacecraft's life support systems and ability to keep four astronauts comfortable within the confined space.

Artemis II returned humans to the moon for the first time since the Apollo program over 50 years ago. And while some astronauts back then did see the far side of the moon, the Artemis II crew was able to observe it from a vantage point never before seen by humans. Their images and geological notes will help better determine what the moon is made of and where it came from.

While some of the astronauts' observations may help scientists understand the distant past, others will help mission managers better plan for the future. Case in point: The crew tested out the very first toilet to go to the moon, and it quickly ran into issues during flight. Multiple times during the trip, the crew had to use manual urinals instead. The issue, NASA said, was not with the toilet itself, but the system that dumps the urine overboard when it gets full.

The Orion capsule will return to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida after the mission, where engineers will examine the spacecraft after its flight, including a closer look at the spacecraft's plumbing. The team will be picking apart the spacecraft to see how it performed — and make any necessary changes ahead of the next mission, Artemis III, set to launch next year.

Copyright 2026, NPR

The Science Museum of Minnesota has wowed generations with its dinosaur fossils, including an 80-foot Diplodocus. And tens of thousands of people have visited its other exhibits explaining everything from outer space to the history of race.

But these days, fewer people are visiting.

Like other cultural institutions across the country, the St. Paul museum has struggled to lure people back after the COVID-19 pandemic. Attendance is half of what it was in 2019, forcing the museum to eliminate summer camps, lay off employees and make other cuts.

MPR News host Angela Davis talks about what contributed to the drop in visitors and how the museum is trying to sell more people on its cool collections, current exhibits and educational programming.

Guests:

• Alison Rempel Brown has been the president and CEO of the Science Museum of Minnesota since 2016. She was previously chief of staff at the California Academy of Sciences.

• Colleen Dilenschneider is founder and managing member of IMPACTS Experience, a market research firm that works with cultural organizations, including museums, zoos, aquariums and science centers. She is based in Chicago.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation. 

As NASA's Artemis II mission rockets four astronauts around the moon this week, an Indigenous symbol stitched onto Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen’s flight suit is drawing attention far beyond Cape Canaveral.

Along with the crew mission patch worn by all four astronauts, Hansen carries a personal patch — the Seven Grandfather Teachings — designed specifically for him by Anishinaabe artist Henry Guimond of Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba.

The patch is more than a mission emblem. It is the result of a decade of relationship-building between the Canadian astronaut and Indigenous communities across Canada, communities whose knowledge Hansen said have guided him on this journey.

It’s also a long-overdue moment of recognition for Indigenous knowledge, said Dennis Jones, an Anishinaabe elder from Nigigoonsiminikaaning First Nation in Ontario who taught Anishinaabe language and culture at the University of Minnesota for nearly two decades.

“I thought the trip to the moon, the Seven Grandfather Teachings, all of this is to open up the eyes of the world that Indigenous people have this knowledge that’s going to help — help us from polluting Mother Earth, help us from self-destructing," said Jones, who’s known by his Anishinaabe name Pebaamibines. “We need to turn to these teachings."

In a video shared on the Canadian Space Agency website, Hansen spoke directly to Guimond about what the patch means to him. “This is a reminder for me on how I need to walk as I go on this journey,” he said.

‘For all people’

The heptagon shaped patch features one side for each of the Seven Grandfather Teachings. It includes seven creatures — a buffalo, an eagle, a bear, a sasquatch, a beaver, a wolf and a turtle — with each carrying a teaching: respect, love, courage, honesty, wisdom, humility and truth.

At the center, aimed toward the moon, sit a bow and arrow launching from Turtle Island, which is an Indigenous term for the Americas. A silver border represents the Orion spacecraft. A thin blue line inside represents the spirit that lives in all living things, according to the Canadian Space Agency.

Hansen visited Indigenous communities across Canada over the past decade, sitting with elders and knowledge keepers.

In 2023, Dave Courchene III — known as Sabe, Leader of the Turtle Lodge Centre of Excellence in Indigenous Education and Wellness in Sagkeeng First Nation — invited Hansen to participate in a four-day ceremony at the lodge.

Afterward, Hansen asked Guimond to design the patch.

“It’s good for everyone to learn those teachings, the seven laws for all humanity,” said Guimond, who spent some 200 hours on the design. “Not just for Indigenous people, but for all people.”

‘Indigenous ways of knowing, Indigenous ways of being’

While the wisdom evoked by the patch is generations old, the origin story of how Pebaamibines came to know the Seven Grandfather’s teaching is more recent.

Pebaamibines said that it was in 2016 in his home community of Nigigoonsiminikaaning First Nation in Ontario, when workers were building a road when they dynamited a hill and discovered a large quarry of black pipestone underneath.

Community elders, alarmed that a sacred site had been disturbed, went to ceremony to seek guidance. The answer that came back surprised them: They had done nothing wrong. It was time for the pipestone to be revealed, Pebaamibines said.

One elder had a dream about a pipe — a Seven Grandfathers pipe — and spent four years carving it from that stone. When it was finished, he presented it to Pebaamibines.

“I had no idea what his Seven Grandfathers pipe was at the time,” Pebaamibines said. “So I went to ceremony, and I asked for clarity on this pipe. This pipe was confirmed — there are seven grandfathers, seven spirits that come with the pipe.”

He learned the origins of the Seven Grandfather teachings, a constellation visible in the Northern Hemisphere.

“The Ojibwe call it Manidoo-wigamig,” he said. “And that’s the origin of the Seven Grandfather teachings that I received. I think it’s time for the world to know Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous ways of being.”

Of all seven teachings, Pebaamibines returns often to the first.

“The first one is Zaagi'idiwin,” he said. “Zaagi'idiwin is love. And the seven grandfathers are teaching us — how do we learn about our purpose in our life? What you do is, you follow these spiritual principles.”

On Monday, those principles traveled farther than any human has gone before as the Artemis II crew broke the distance record for human spaceflight, traveling more than 250,000 miles from Earth.

Hansen, along with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, rounded the moon Monday and are now heading home, expected to splash down Friday in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.

Speaking on behalf of the crew as they broke the distance record, Hansen said in a conversation shared by NASA that they had traveled into space “honoring the extraordinary efforts and feats of our predecessors in human space exploration.”

“We will continue our journey even further into space before Mother Earth succeeds in pulling us back to everything that we hold dear,” he added.

The Upper Midwest Newsroom is a public media collaboration between Wisconsin Public Radio, South Dakota Public Broadcasting, Prairie Public in North Dakota and Minnesota Public Radio News, made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The four-astronaut crew of NASA's Artemis II mission is now on its way back to Earth after a record-breaking trip around the moon, traveling farther than any other humans have before.

As the Orion capsule whipped around the back side of the moon Monday, Earth was out of sight — and the crew was unable to communicate to Mission Control for about 40 minutes due to the moon blocking a connection to the Deep Space Network.

"And to all of you down there on Earth and around Earth, we love you, from the Moon," radioed mission specialist Christina Koch ahead of the radio blackout. "We will see you on the other side."

During the blackout, according to NASA, the capsule reached its closest approach to the moon at about 4,067 miles above the lunar surface. Just minutes later, the crew reached the mission's maximum distance from Earth at 252,756 miles, beating the previous record set by the Apollo 13 mission in 1970 by 4,111 more miles.

"We will explore, we will build, we will build ships. We will visit again," said Koch as the spacecraft reestablished communication, beginning its journey back to Earth.

"We will construct science outposts. We will drive rovers. We will do radio astronomy. We will found companies. We will bolster industry. We will inspire, but ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other," she said.

Orion and its crew now begin the nearly quarter-million-mile journey back to Earth with new knowledge of the lunar surface and key test flight data from the Orion spacecraft to aid future missions that will take humans to the surface of the moon as early as 2028.

New lunar data

During the mission's loop around the moon, the crew took geological observations of around 35 places of interest on the lunar surface using their own eyes and snapping thousands of photos of the surface.

Orion's high altitude above the far side of the moon gave the crew a never-before-seen view. Working in teams of two, the astronauts observed these features and spoke to scientists in real time back at Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston about what they were seeing — like changes in color on the lunar surface.

These color changes can help scientists understand the composition of minerals on the surface, according to NASA, because while there is plenty of satellite imagery of the moon, the human eye is better at spotting the changes of color.

"The plateau is hard for me to see from this window, but that had green issues to me and was very unique," said mission specialist Jeremy Hansen in a conversation with NASA's lunar scientists. "I didn't see anything like that anywhere else on this side of the moon. And then I see a lot of these, what I would call brownish hue areas."

Their observations will help scientists better understand the moon's composition and help plan for future robotic landings on the far side.

The flight trajectory took the spacecraft through a solar eclipse — when a mostly darkened moon transited in front of the sun. The roughly hourlong phenomenon gave the crew the chance to study the solar corona as it peeked around the edge of the moon.

"This continues to be unreal," said mission pilot Victor Glover, relaying his observations to Mission Control. "It is quite an impressive sight."

The astronauts will share more of their science data and observations with science officials during an in-flight meeting Tuesday.

The crew also took the flyby opportunity to dedicate an unnamed crater to commander Reid Wiseman's late wife, who died from cancer in 2020.

"We lost a loved one, her name was Carroll. It's a bright spot on the moon. And we would like to call that Carroll," said Hansen.

Returning home

Artemis II is a test flight of the Orion spacecraft, and the crew will continue to perform flight tests on the vehicle as it makes the trip home. That includes the deployment of a radiation shield and once again testing the maneuverability of the spacecraft during manual flight.

But one of the most critical tests will come during reentry Friday, as the Orion space capsule punches through Earth's atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour, enduring temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The crew and the spacecraft will be protected by a heat shield beneath their capsule that was designed to protect the astronauts for this dynamic event. A series of parachutes will slow Orion down to just under 20 miles per hour as it gently splashes down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. Airbags will deploy to make sure the crew is right side up.

Personnel from NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense will assist the crew out of the capsule and take them to a recovery ship, ending the nearly 10-day mission to the moon and back.

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The astronauts aboard NASA's Artemis II have now reached farther into space than humans have ever ventured.

This marks a critical milestone of the agency's Orion space capsule, which launched atop an SLS rocket from Kennedy Space Center last week.

The mission, which is set to complete its historic loop around the moon on Monday, is the first mission to send humans to the moon in more than 50 years. NASA's live coverage began at noon.

The Orion spacecraft is now in the lunar sphere of influence, meaning the moon's gravity has more pull on the vehicle than the Earth. At 12:57 p.m. Central, the crew surpassed the record for the farthest distance traveled from Earth by humans, which was set by the Apollo 13 mission at 248,655 statute miles from Earth. At 1:45 p.m., the crew will begin making observations of the surface of the moon during the flyby.

As the vehicle circles the far side of the moon, communication back to Earth is expected to be blocked for about 40 minutes. At 6:02 p.m., the crew is expected to have reached the mission's maximum distance from Earth at 252,760 statute miles.

The flyby is scheduled to conclude at 8:20 p.m., and then the crew will be on its way home, with a planned splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego, Calif., on Friday at 7:07 p.m.

During the Artemis II flyby, the crew will pass over two previous human lunar landing sites — Apollo 12 and 14.

Lunar science observations

During the lunar flyby, the closest Orion will come to the surface of the moon is 4,070 miles. From that distance, the crew will have a unique vantage point of the moon as a full disc — and the ability to take observations never before seen by human eyes.

NASA scientists have identified about 35 geological features for the crew to observe. Working in pairs, they will take photos of the sites and describe them in real time to scientists at Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"They're going to be absolutely buzzing," said Artemis II lunar science lead Kelsey Young on Sunday. The team will monitor the observations and provide guidance to the crew.

"The science team will get to work right away, kind of synthesizing those [observations], and then we'll actually downlink the rest of the descriptions overnight, in advance of a crew conference we'll have the following morning to continue the science discussion."

Artemis II has 10 science objectives for the flyby. One is to observe color variations on the lunar surface. Changes in color can indicate the composition of the minerals on the surface. These changes are hard to detect with satellite images.

"This is something that human eyes are just incredibly good at teasing out nuances about," said Young.

Satellites like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched in 2009, have given scientists a better understanding of the lunar surface. The Artemis II crew's observations will build on that knowledge.

"We understand, you know, what it's made out of. We understand the topography, but we don't know what the crew are going to see in these specific illumination conditions from a scientific perspective," said Young. "And that's exciting."

The observations will help future landing missions. One target site is a potential future landing area for an uncrewed payload mission. The crew will also get a small glimpse of the lunar south pole — where humans might land as early as 2028.

The mission so far

Artemis II is more than halfway through its slingshot mission around the moon and back. This is a test flight of the Orion space capsule, carrying a human crew for the first time.

"Our mission continues to go incredibly well," said Lori Glaze, who leads NASA's Artemis program.

Tests include manual control of the Orion spacecraft. Mission pilot Victor Glover practiced the maneuverability of the capsule for future rendezvous with lunar landing vehicles.

The crew tested the spacecraft's life support systems, like the carbon dioxide scrubbers, and donned their spacesuits midflight — which future astronauts might have to do in an emergency.

The Artemis II mission is also testing the first deep-space toilet. NASA's Universal Waste Management System is stowed in the floor of Orion and allows the crew to use the bathroom in private. So far, the hardware has had a few hiccups (not having enough water in the bowl and, at a different point, not being able to dump the waste overboard due to a frozen line), but those seem to be resolved.

"We're continuing to proceed with the mission and the use of the toilet nominally," said Artemis II flight director Rick Henfling, meaning the crew is allowed to use the onboard lavatory.

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The Trump Administration announced a massive reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service this week that will result in the closure of two research facilities in northeast Minnesota, including an office in Grand Rapids that leads internationally recognized projects on the impact of climate change on peatlands and northern forests.

The Grand Rapids office is one of 57 research facilities that will be shuttered across the country, more than 20 of which are part of the Northern Research Station, which spans from upper Midwest states, including Minnesota and Wisconsin into New England.

The agency’s five regional research stations will now be consolidated under a single Forest Service research organization based in Fort Collins, Colo. But other details on the closures and how it will affect ongoing research projects are scarce.

“These changes are designed to unify research priorities, accelerate the application of science to management decisions, and reduce administrative duplication,” the Forest Service said in a statement announcing the moves this week.

The restructuring is expected to take place over the next one to two years. No staff in Grand Rapids will be fired. But it’s not known how many staffers will be relocated, and where they will be reassigned.

In response to several questions requesting more details on the announced closures in Minnesota, a USDA spokesperson said “The transition will occur in phases. Employees will receive clear information about relocation timelines, available options, and resources to support their decisions.”

The announcement did not come as a big surprise to Brian Palik, a research forest ecologist who worked at the Northern Research Station in Grand Rapids for 30 years before retiring about a year ago. He said staff was told last year the agency would be reorganized to make it more streamlined.

“Having said that, it still comes as a shock, because that facility has been there for 65 years. It’s kind of a fixture in the community,” said Palik.

Palik estimates eight to 10 Forest Service scientists work there. The office also houses researchers from the University of Minnesota and the U.S. Geological Survey.

For decades researchers there have conducted long-term and large-scale experiments on wetlands and forests. Much of the research has been conducted at experimental forests within the nearby Chippewa National Forest, including the Marcell Experimental Forest, a 2,800-acre site established in 1960 to study peatland hydrology and ecology.

Having scientists physically close to the experimental forest to conduct research has been key to the facility’s success, Palik said. “It's just something that's hard to do in the same way when you're three hours away at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul,” Palik said.

One of the best-known projects is called SPRUCE, short for Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environment.

Scientists have built 10 huge chambers in the woods near Grand Rapids where they artificially vary the climatic conditions to simulate possible future temperatures due to global warming.

Then, every day, they measure how the ecosystem is responding to warmer conditions. It’s one of the largest ecosystem-level experiments in the world.

“That project is globally recognized for the work that it's doing about how climate change may affect our forested peatland and lowland conifer ecosystems in the state,” said Eric Schenck, executive director of the Minnesota Forest Resources Council, a state organization that represents a variety of interests, from the forest products industry to environmental groups, and provides policy recommendations to state officials.

“I don't see how we can afford to lose this ongoing research,” Schenck added. “And in the absence of having Forest Service leadership, I think we're going to be hard pressed to figure out how to maintain it through our existing means and institutions.”

Palik led projects that studied what species of trees could replace Minnesota’s one billion black ash trees, which are expected to soon be wiped out by the invasive emerald ash borer.

He’s also launched a project examining how the state’s red pine forests can survive climate change, and what other species may be able to best survive in northern Minnesota in warmer conditions. It’s one of the largest studies of its kind in the world.

“And it's run out of the Grand Rapids lab,” Palik said. “It’s hard to imagine. The impact is international of the research that has and does come out of there.”

The U.S. Forest Service did not specify which research facility in Ely would be closed. The Kawishiwi Research Station there has not housed Forest Service employees for several years.

It’s currently being leased by the Northern Bedrock Historic Preservation Corps, which uses the site for hands-on training in historic preservation trades. The group says it has not been told about any potential changes at the site.

Other possibilities include a water lab that collects baseline water data on area lakes and rivers and has studied the impacts of copper-nickel mining, and a site that monitors air quality, including mercury pollution.

“The research is long-term, ongoing research on things that are important to us in northern Minnesota,” said Aaron Kania, retired former district ranger for the Kawishiwi Ranger District in Ely who’s now running for a seat in the state legislature.

“So if we were to lose that research, that baseline monitoring, it would have some pretty major implications for all the work that's happening in northern Minnesota,” Kania said.

On a national level, the U.S. Forest Service restructuring will move the agency’s headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah. Regional offices will also be replaced by a state-based organizational model, with the closest center to Minnesota in Madison, Wis.

The announcement indicates a research facility in St. Paul will be retained. There aren’t any expected changes for district offices or their staffing at the Superior or Chippewa National Forests in northern Minnesota.

“The Superior and Chippewa National Forests are committed to ensuring that all operations — including wildfire readiness and response — continue without interruption,” a USDA spokesperson said.

For the first time in more than 50 years, astronauts are heading to the moon. The Artemis II crew launched Wednesday atop NASA's SLS rocket, which left thick trails of vapor across a clear-blue Florida sky. The four astronauts and their team on the ground are now busy preparing for the challenges that lie ahead.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ensconced in an Orion capsule attached to an SLS rocket. The historic mission — the first time in more than half a century that humans have visited the moon — will take them on a 230,000-mile journey around the lunar body and back that will serve as a critical test flight of the Orion spacecraft.

The nearly 10-day mission will not only test the spacecraft's life-support systems and maneuverability, but conduct critical science ahead of future deep space missions to the lunar surface.

The trajectory

The mission is on a flight path that keeps the spacecraft in Earth's gravitational influence past the moon, then falls back to the planet for splashdown. This path, called a free return trajectory, uses less fuel and is less risky than entering a lunar orbit.

About a day after launch, the spacecraft is set to perform a translunar injection, firing its engine and sending the Artemis II crew on their lunar journey.

The path will take the crew to within about 5,000 miles above the lunar surface. Apollo missions typically orbited the moon under 100 miles (or touched down on the surface).

"When they pass by the far side of the moon, it'll look like a basketball held at arm's length," said Artemis II mission scientist Barbara Cohen. "It'll be that kind of view."

Testing, testing

After separating from the rocket that got them into space, but before heading to the moon, the crew tested the Orion spacecraft closer to home.

Just hours after entering high-Earth orbit, the crew performed what's known as a proximity operations test — taking manual control of the vehicle to see how it handles in space.

"We are essentially going to make sure that the vehicle flies the way that we think it does, that we designed it to do," Artemis II pilot Victor Glover said ahead of the launch.

Controlling the spacecraft will be important for future missions, which will need to dock with a lunar lander in orbit. And while this process is likely going to be automated, NASA wants to know how it handles should astronauts have to take manual control.

"We also want to give qualitative and quantitative feedback to the ground team, so letting them know what it feels like now that we can hear and feel the thrusters, and to just understand the human experience," said Glover.

Near the end of the maneuver, the pilot appeared to give the vehicle high marks.

"Overall guys, this flies very nicely," he told team members on the ground.

Time for science

The astronauts themselves will be the subject of science experiments: Because the crew is going farther into deep space than any human has gone before, researchers are taking this opportunity to study the impact it will have on the human body.

Medical researchers will be collecting data on physiological changes in response to space travel and increased radiation exposure. The astronauts' cells have been placed on tiny chips and distributed throughout the capsule — in an effort to understand these effects in greater detail.

The crew will also lend their eyes for geological research, since they are flying around the far side of the moon, where no human has ventured before.

"They'll be able to see places on the moon that, actually, no human eyes have ever seen before," said Cohen.

Geologists on Earth trained the crew to spot unique features on the lunar surface, and snap photos of them for further study. (This follows in a time-honored tradition: Apollo astronauts who visited the moon more than a half century ago were also trained by geologists.) These observations will help them better understand that side of the moon, and possibly help plan for a human landing.

And the mission's high-altitude flyby of the moon gives them a unique perspective.

"The benefit of that to science, is that kind of like when you're traveling cross country on an airplane, what you can see is a strip of land below you. You don't see the whole globe of the Earth. That's what the Apollo astronauts did," said Cohen. "The Artemis II astronauts will be able to see it from much farther away."

The mission is also carrying stowaways in the form of CubeSats — tiny satellites bound for high-Earth orbit. The payloads are from Germany, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina, and will study various impacts of space radiation on space hardware, monitor space weather, and how the environment affects electrical hardware bound for the moon.

Heading home

As the crew makes their return home, their capsule will be traveling close to 25,000 miles per hour as it re-enters the atmosphere. The friction generated by hitting the atmosphere at that speed will cause the Orion capsule to experience temperatures of close to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The capsule is equipped with a heat shield to protect the astronauts from the intense heat of reentry. During an uncrewed test flight in 2022, NASA discovered unexpected damage to the heat shield. To further protect the crew, the capsule will hit the atmosphere at a much steeper angle than Artemis I, which will limit the time it will experience those harsh conditions.

Once the spacecraft is past that danger zone, eight parachutes will slow the spacecraft down even more before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. A series of airbags will deploy to make sure the capsule is right side up. A crew at sea will scoop up the astronauts, bringing their mission to a close.

What's learned on this flight is critical to future Artemis missions. Last week, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced plans to increase the frequency of launches to the moon, and a plan to establish a permanent base on the lunar surface. That effort begins with Artemis II.

"It is our strong hope," said Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch, "that this mission is the start of an era where everyone, every person on Earth, can look at the moon and think of it as also a destination."

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It’s humanity’s first flight to the moon since 1972.

In a throwback to Apollo, NASA’s Artemis II mission will send four astronauts on a lunar fly-around. They’ll hurtle several thousand miles beyond the moon, hang a U-turn and then come straight back. No circling around the moon, no stopping for a moonwalk — just a quick out-and-back lasting less than 10 days.

NASA promises more boot prints in the gray lunar dust, but not before a couple practice missions. The upcoming test flight by Artemis astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen is the first step in settling the moon this time around.

Here’s a snapshot of the Artemis II mission.

The Artemis astronauts are a diverse and international crew

The moon is about to welcome its first woman, first person of color and first non-American.

Koch already holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. During her 328-day mission at the International Space Station spanning 2019 and 2020, she took part in the first all-female spacewalk.

Glover, a Navy test pilot, was the first Black astronaut to live and work aboard the space station in 2020 and 2021. He also was one of the first astronauts to launch with SpaceX.

The Canadian Space Agency’s Hansen, a former fighter pilot, is the lone space rookie. Their commander is Wiseman, a retired Navy captain who lived aboard the space station in 2014 and later headed NASA’s astronaut corps. They range in age from 47 to 50.

The Space Launch System is more powerful than the Saturn V rocket

NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket stands 322 feet (98 meters), shorter than the Apollo program’s Saturn V rocket but more powerful at liftoff thanks to a pair of strap-on boosters. Atop the rocket is the Orion capsule carrying the astronauts.

Made of salvaged space shuttle engines and other parts, the SLS uses the same fuel — liquid hydrogen — as the shuttles did. Hydrogen leaks repeatedly grounded the shuttles as well as the first SLS rocket test without astronauts aboard in 2022. More than three years later, Artemis II suffered the same hydrogen leaks during a February fueling practice run, missing the first launch window. A repeat of helium-flow issues bumped the mission into April.

How Artemis II will fly around the moon

After liftoff, the astronauts will spend the first 25 hours circling Earth in a high, lopsided orbit. They’ll use the separated upper stage as a target, steering their Orion capsule around it as docking practice for future moonshots. Instead of fancy range finders, they'll rely on their eyes to judge the gap, venturing no closer than 33 feet (10 meters) to the stage.

“Sometimes simple stuff is the best,” Wiseman said.

If all goes as planned, Orion's main engine will hurl the crew to the moon some 244,000 miles (393,000 kilometers) away. This free-return trajectory made famous in Apollo 13 relies on the moon and Earth’s gravity, minimizing the need for fuel.

On flight day six, Orion will reach its farthermost point from Earth as it sails 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) beyond the moon. That will surpass Apollo 13’s distance record, making Artemis astronauts the most remote travelers. After emerging from behind the moon, the crew will head straight home with a splashdown on flight day 10 — nine days, one hour and 46 minutes after liftoff.

What to expect during the Artemis flyby

The Artemis II crew may behold never-before-seen regions of the lunar far side — with the moon appearing the size of a basketball at arm’s length during the closest part of the roughly six-hour flyby. They’ve been poring over maps and satellite images of the lunar far side and anticipate a photo frenzy. Their lunar mentor is NASA geologist Kelsey Young, who will monitor the flyby from Mission Control in Houston.

“The moon is like such a unifying thing,” she said. “What we're doing with this mission is going to bring that a little closer to everybody around the world.”

Besides professional cameras, they’ll carry the latest smartphones. NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman added smartphones to the mission for “inspiring” picture-taking.

While NASA and private companies have focused over the years on reaching the moon's near side — the side that constantly faces Earth — only China has planted landers on the far side. That makes the astronauts' observations of the lunar far side all the more valuable for NASA.

Artemis astronauts will splash back down to Earth

Like Apollo, the Artemis mission ends with a splashdown homecoming into the Pacific.

All eyes will be on Orion’s heat shield as the capsule plunges through the atmosphere. It’s the part of the spacecraft that took the biggest beating during 2022’s test flight, with charred chunks gouged out. The heat shield is being retooled for future capsules but remains the original design for Artemis II.

NASA is limiting the heat exposure during reentry by shortening the capsule’s atmospheric descent. Navy recovery ships will be stationed off the coast of San Diego as Orion parachutes into the ocean.

Using the oldest dog genes studied so far, scientists are finding more evidence that our furry friends have been our companions for thousands of years.

Scientists think dogs descended from an ancient population of gray wolves somewhere in Europe or Asia. Tens of thousands of years ago, those wolves got used to living with people and became less aggressive. As they became domesticated, their genes shifted along with their behavior, giving rise to the pups we know today.

But exactly when and where this happened remains a mystery. Scientists are studying bits of DNA found in ancient dog and wolf remains to figure out what the earliest dogs may have looked like and where they came from.

In two separate studies published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers pushed the timeline back. They established a new way to study ancient canine DNA — which is often contaminated and tough to extract — by isolating just the doggy bits.

They examined ancient genes from the remains of over 200 dogs and wolves. The oldest dated back to about 15,800 years ago, moving the origin of dogs back by at least 5,000 years.

“This unique relationship between people and dogs has existed for such a long time and is continuing on today,” said University of Michigan dog genomics expert Jeffrey Kidd, who was not involved with the new research.

The genes showed that dogs were already spread out across Western Europe and Asia 14,200 years ago, at a time before agriculture and farming. These dogs lived with hunter-gatherer humans who were constantly on the move.

The dawn of agriculture — a major shift in human history — brought new people to Europe from southwest Asia. They mixed and mingled with Europeans, leaving a lasting and varied imprint on their genes.

But the dog genes studied by the scientists, stretching from the United Kingdom all the way to Turkey, stayed more consistent. They were less impacted by the arrival of new humans during the development of agriculture, and more by interactions between different hunter-gatherer groups and their dogs thousands of years before.

That's different from dogs in Asia and the Americas, whose genes more closely reflect the movement patterns of their owners.

Scientists don't know exactly what the first dogs looked like, but they have some ideas.

“We're suspecting they would have resembled smaller wolves,” said study co-author Lachie Scarsbrook with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

It's also not clear how these ancient dogs lived alongside their humans. They could have stood guard or helped them hunt, but probably also played with young children.

There's still more work to go to pinpoint exactly when dogs emerged — the first few pages of a storied relationship that's still going strong.

“They are humanity's best friend, alongside our societies for the last 16,000 years and will continue to in the future,” Scarsbrook said.

OpenAI is shutting down its social media app Sora, which went viral last fall as a place to share short-form videos generated by artificial intelligence but also raised alarms in Hollywood and elsewhere.

OpenAI said in a brief social media message Tuesday that it was "saying goodbye to the Sora app" and that it would share more soon about how to preserve what users already created on the app.

"What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing," it said.

The company behind ChatGPT released Sora in September as an attempt to capture the attention, and potentially advertising dollars, that follow short-form videos on TikTok, YouTube or Meta-owned Instagram and Facebook.

But a growing chorus of advocacy groups, academics and experts expressed concern about the dangers of letting people create AI videos on just about anything they can type into a prompt, leading to the proliferation of nonconsensual images and realistic deepfakes in a sea of less harmful "AI slop."

OpenAI was forced to crack down on AI creations of public figures — among them, Michael Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mister Rogers — doing outlandish things, but only after an outcry from family estates and an actors' union.

Disney, which made a deal with OpenAI last year to bring its characters to Sora, said in a statement Tuesday that it respects "OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere."

"We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators," Disney's statement said.

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