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.

Editor’s note: 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.

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.

Copyright 2026, NPR

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.

Copyright 2026, NPR

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."

Copyright 2026, NPR

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.

Copyright 2026, NPR

What makes tree sap start running in late winter? And how do you tap a tree without harming it?

MPR News host Angela Davis talks about the science behind maple syrup, how climate change is affecting the sap season in Minnesota and what trees may better withstand climate change. 

Guests:

• Laura Irish-Hanson is an extension educator at the University of Minnesota.

• Brandon Miller is an assistant professor of horticulture and curator of Plant Collections at the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.

For more information, Angela’s guests recommended these resources:

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.

Tuesday will be the last day, for three years, to see a total lunar eclipse in Minnesota. But you might have to travel be able to see it at all.

Freelance writer Bob King for the Duluth News Tribune, also known as “Astro Bob,” said a total lunar eclipse occurs when the moon passes through the shadow of the Earth, cast by the sun.

“You got to have the sun, the earth and the moon lined up exactly so that the moon's orbit intersects the Earth, so it's squarely behind the planet,” King said.

The best viewing will be about 4 a.m. through 6:30 a.m. as earth’s shadow moves across the moon but clouds will obscure this mostly for eastern and southern Minnesota. The best chances of breaks in the clouds will be in western and northern Minnesota.

Listen to the full conversation with “Astro Bob” by clicking the player above.

By Celia Llopis-Jepsen, Harvest Public Media

Stars are disappearing above the middle of the country.

The night is getting brighter, as light pollution — much of which could be fixed by switching to better bulbs and light fixtures — washes out the views above small and large cities alike.

The college town of Kirksville, Miss., population 18,000, is nicknamed “the North Star of Missouri,” but spotting that celestial body within city limits is getting harder and harder.

And skyglow in large metros like Kansas City, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas and Chicago is a key reason those cities now rank among the top 10 riskiest for birds trying to survive spring migration each year.

As skies above the U.S. get about 10 percent brighter per year, confused birds aren’t the only casualties. Pollinators and other wildlife suffer. Our sleep and wellbeing do, as well.

But astronomer Connie Walker has good news.

Losing night skies isn’t a foregone conclusion, said the scientist at NOIRLab, the U.S.’ national center for ground-based astronomy, based in Tucson, Ariz. Communities could do a lot to protect their starry views both for the sake of the environment and for the breathtaking sight.

“We have a responsibility to maintain that access to a beautiful, dark, starry night sky,” Walker said. “It’s an easy thing to rectify.”

One way to help is to look up at the constellation Orion in February or March and report what you see on a smartphone to Globe At Night, a citizen science project that celebrates its 20th anniversary this month.

This simple act helps scientists track where skyglow is worsening and how fast the change is happening. The stars you can — and can’t — see in and around Orion reveal the extent of light pollution where you live.

Walker, who helped create Globe At Night two decades ago, explains how to participate on the Midwest and Great Plains environmental podcast Up From Dust.

She welcomes as many reports as possible, and especially encourages people to start participating in areas where the program doesn’t often receive data.

The project’s online interactive map shows that this includes many rural areas — such as much of Nebraska, Iowa, the Dakotas and Kansas.

“A lot more measurements from there would be to everybody’s benefit,” Walker said.

Documenting skyglow is just one step toward addressing it. Some cities, parks and college campuses are working to reduce their skyglow without sacrificing the need for people to see at night. They’re doing this by installing smarter fixtures and better bulbs.

Up From Dust offers three podcast episodes that will get listeners up to speed on the solutions and the stakes.

Episode 1: Say no to skyglow

This episode explains the basics on skyglow and how to reduce it with the right lighting.

It also tells the story of how a Missouri college campus and a state park are ditching bad lighting and installing smarter options.

Park workers, students and faculty are putting to rest any notion that more light is always better. Truman State University students observed just the opposite when they set about improving the lights on their campus. They found that well-designed lighting can reduce skyglow and look softer from afar while actually illuminating spaces better.

“Overall they look dimmer,” Truman State graduate Daphne Broski-Laing said of the improved lights she helped get installed on her campus. “But we measured the brightness underneath the lights and we found that on the ground the illumination level was brighter.”

Truman State professor Vayujeet Gokhale also offers a quick primer for homeowners on picking out good light bulbs and fixtures at a hardware store.

“You can fix the problem in your community if you get together and say, ‘Yes, we need lighting. Let’s do it responsibly,’” he said. “So that we are safe — and yet we can see the stars and yet the pollinators can benefit.”

Episode 2: Can we save millions of migrating birds?

This episode tells the story of one exceptionally determined museum employee, a whopping 40,000 dead birds and a discovery that could save millions from suffering the same fate.

It’s a decades-long journey that started in 1978 and ended up documenting the link between a Chicago convention center’s lighting and the number of birds that crash into it and die.

The center of the country is a vital bird migration corridor, which makes light pollution in cities from Texas to Missouri to Minnesota a particularly dangerous problem for these creatures.

But the discovery in Chicago is helping to inspire families and businesses to turn out unnecessary lights during migration season, pull curtains closed and take other steps to help birds make their long biannual treks.

This episode offers a primer for helping during bird migration season, whether or not you live in one of the major cities that pose the biggest risks.

“The notion that the problem is just in cities is wrong,” Andrew Farnsworth, with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, explains on the podcast. “Your kitchen window, your living room window, your glass door — whatever it is. When you walk outside and you find a dead bird beneath glass, you can address that.”

Episode 3: Stargazers, unite for science!

This episode explains step-by-step how to participate in Globe At Night.

“It’s a way you can be a steward of your earth,” Walker said, “by looking up and taking these measurements.”

The project has so far gathered 300,000 observations worldwide. In 2023, scientists used this data to conclude that the night sky is getting about 10 percent brighter per year.

Joining in the effort doesn’t require any special astronomy equipment, Walker said. People simply look at a constellation, such as Orion, and then compare it to several star charts on Globe At Night, selecting the one that best matches what they see.

Participants should do this activity when there’s no moon in the sky, since the moon interferes with accurate measurements. Also, people should make their observations at least 1.5 hours after sunset and at least 1.5 hours before sunrise, to avoid interference from the lingering light of dusk and dawn.

Yes the darkest day of the year is here, but that means brighter days are ahead.

Sunday is the shortest day of the year north of the equator, where the solstice marks the start of astronomical winter. It’s the opposite in the Southern Hemisphere, where it is the longest day of the year and summer will start.

The word “solstice” comes from the Latin words “sol” for sun and “stitium” which can mean “pause” or “stop.” The solstice is an end of the sun’s annual march higher or lower in the sky. The winter solstice is when the sun makes its shortest, lowest arc. The good news for sun lovers: It then starts climbing again and days will get a little longer every day until late June.

People have marked solstices for eons with celebrations and monuments such as Stonehenge, which was designed to align with the sun’s paths at the solstices. But what is happening in the heavens? Here’s what to know about the Earth’s orbit.

What is the solstice?

As the Earth travels around the sun, it does so at an angle, making the sun's warmth and light fall unequally on the northern and southern halves of the planet for most of the year.

The solstices mark the times when the Earth's tilt toward or away from the sun is at its maximum. This means the hemispheres are getting very different amounts of sunlight — and days and nights are at their most unequal.

At the Northern Hemisphere's winter solstice the upper half of the Earth is at its furthest lean away from the sun — leading to the shortest day and longest night of the year. The winter solstice falls can fall between Dec. 20 and 23 — this year it's the 21st.

The opposite happens at a Northern Hemisphere summer solstice: The upper half of the Earth is leaning toward the sun, creating the longest day and shortest night of the year. This solstice falls between June 20 and 22.

What is the equinox?

During the equinox, the Earth’s axis and its orbit align so that both hemispheres get an equal amount of sunlight.

The word equinox comes from two Latin words meaning equal and night. That’s because on the equinox, day and night last almost the same amount of time — though one may get a few extra minutes, depending on where you are on the planet.oo

The Northern Hemisphere’s fall — or autumnal — equinox can land between Sept. 21 and 24, depending on the year. Its spring — or vernal — equinox can land between March 19 and 21.

What’s the difference between meteorological and astronomical seasons?

These are just two different ways to carve up the year.

While astronomical seasons depend on how the Earth moves around the sun, meteorological seasons are defined by the weather. Meteorologists break down the year into three-month seasons based on annual temperature cycles. By that calendar, spring starts on March 1, summer on June 1, fall on Sept. 1 and winter on Dec. 1.

Just after 6 p.m. on Saturday night, Al Sorensen was in Hayward, Wis., watching a holiday parade. She had her phone out, filming the floats passing by, when she saw something zooming across the night sky overhead.

“It was just this green ball with this trail, and it looked so bright.”

Her first thought was maybe it was something to do with the parade.

"You could see a trail of kind of sparks behind it, but the color was just so surreal. It was just this vivid green with maybe a little bit of a blue tinge to it.”

Sorensen is an avid night sky watcher of the northern lights and meteor showers. But she had never seen anything like this.

She didn’t think much more about it until she later saw videos and pictures of it on social media.

More than 100 people from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Canada reported the sighting to the International Meteor Organization. The group tracks what are called "fireballs" — what people often call shooting stars.

But this was no meteor. It turns out Sorensen saw Starlink satellite #3322 – from Elon Musk’s internet service company – burning up as it reentered the earth’s atmosphere.

Bob King, an amateur astronomer in Duluth known as “Astro Bob,” explained that meteors move much faster across the night sky than satellites.

"It's kind of over and done with in just a few seconds,” said King, who didn’t see the falling satellite but saw videos of it online “that went on for seconds and seconds. And that's typical of a re-entering satellite, it moves more slowly through the atmosphere as it's coming in,” King explained.

The bright green color is produced by copper, said King. “Like the wiring inside the electronics. And when that gets heated to a certain temperature, it just basically becomes a plasma and it glows bright green."

These sightings are still rare. But they’re becoming more common. There are now more than 9,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. This week, the SpaceX subsidiary launched 27 more satellites. The company has deployed more than 3,000 this year alone. And their life span is only about five years, so every day, one or two falls back to earth.

And that's just a tiny portion of the total amount of space debris orbiting around the earth.

"There's a lot of stuff up there,” said John Crassidis, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Buffalo, New York, who studies so called “space junk.”

Crassidis says there are more than 40,000 objects of softball size or bigger orbiting around the earth.

But “it's the smaller stuff that we're more worried about, between one centimeter and 10 centimeters. It's estimated there could be up to 1.4 million of those objects,” he said.

Those objects are traveling at 17,500 miles per hour to stay in orbit. If they moved any slower they'd get pulled back to earth by gravity. That means something as small as a Cheerio can cause a lot of damage to active satellites or spacecraft. In fact, just last month, 3 Chinese astronauts had to delay their return to earth after their spacecraft was damaged by space junk.

And the amount of debris is constantly growing, because more countries and companies are launching satellites. Amazon has a new satellite internet venture dubbed Leo, with plans to launch more than 3,000 satellites.

Satellites are designed to burn up upon reentering the atmosphere, but on rare occasions, a piece of space debris can penetrate the atmosphere all the way through to the ground. That happened last year, for example, when a battery from the International Space Station smashed into a home in Florida.

But Crassidis advises not to lose sleep over it. “You're got a much bigger chance of getting struck by lightning than you do getting hit by a piece of space debris.”

His bigger concern is that as the amount of space debris grows, the risk of collisions in space may someday be so great that it won't be worth the risk of launching more satellites, or sending astronauts into space.

That’s a theory known as the Kessler Syndrome. Crassidis worries that if action isn’t taken to reduce the amount of space debris accumulating, it could become a reality in the next century.

"If we want to go to the moon and Mars, we have to navigate through that debris field, right? So we're putting our astronauts in much more danger too,” he said.

There's also a much more immediate concern for anyone who loves to observe the night sky: light pollution.

"If you're an astrophotographer and you're taking pictures at night, it’s virtually impossible anymore to not record multiple satellite trails in your images,” said “Astro Bob” King. It’s a phenomenon he calls the "mechanized sky."

King admits he'd love to see an exciting fireball like the one created by the falling Starlink satellite last Saturday. But he says the price we pay is a loss of the pristine night sky.

Satellites “are so commonplace,” King said. “They distract from the experience of being under the stars.”

For many people, digging for dinosaur bones was a game of pretend in the sandbox as a kid, or maybe an interactive exhibit at a museum. But it’s reality for paleontologists right here in Minnesota.

Winona State University is now home to a 66-million-old dinosaur fossil of the Edmontosaurus. But it’s not just any fossil, it’s a “dinosaur mummy,” meaning it could have preserved skin and other soft tissues. It’s one of less than a dozen worldwide.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of find,” said Winona State geoscience professor and paleontologist Lee Beatty.

The Edmontosaurus is estimated to have been 20-25 feet long when it was alive during the Cretaceous Period, the last period before dinosaurs went extinct. It’s about the same size as Tyrannosaurus Rex. Researchers believe the Edmontosaurus was a duck-billed herbivore and lived in the end of the age of dinosaurs.

The fossil was discovered in July 2024 by Winona State geoscience graduate Adam Schroeder, who now runs public dinosaur digs in the Badlands of North Dakota — specifically Hell Creek Formation, where many dinosaurs are found. Schroeder brought on Beatty, his former professor.

The excavation began in summer of 2025. The team uncovered the fossil by hand, using shovels and jackhammers.

At the end of the summer, the fossil measuring 12 feet long and 7 feet wide was encased in a massive plaster jacket to preserve it. Once transported to Winona State, a window was removed to get the fossil inside.

The fossil’s arrival at the university is only the beginning.

“This is when the really delicate work is going to start, because we want to see, once we start removing rock away from it, how much of that skin that we found hints of at the site, how much of that is going to be preserved inside that block of rock,” explained Beatty.

The meticulous process to remove all the rock from the bone could take up to five years. But the end result could unveil scientific discoveries.

“It's really going to help give us a more complete picture of what these animals were like when they were alive,” said Beatty. “And on top of that starts to give us a sense of what kind of processes are going on that preserve the remains after they die.”

Students and community members will get to take part in the preparation process of the bones. Eventually the university’s geoscience department will put the dinosaur on display for the public.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation with Minnesota Now host Nina Moini and Lee Beatty.

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

Once upon a time, a drink or two at a holiday party went down the hatch with no problems. Now, it's a recipe for misery the next morning.

Sound familiar? Dr. Monica Christmas of the University of Chicago Medicine says it's a common lament as people enter middle age.

"You are not alone," Christmas says. "I am in that age range too and absolutely, [drinks] need to be spread out or it's all going to go straight to my head and I will need to sleep half the day away the next day."

There are physiological explanations for why our ability to tolerate alcohol wanes with age. For one thing, studies show the liver enzymes that break down alcohol become less efficient.

"That means that our bodies metabolize alcohol a little bit differently," she says. "We also lose more muscle as we get older, and that muscle is replaced by fatty tissue."

That's important, because muscle stores water and that water dilutes alcohol in our blood, says Johannes Thrul, an alcohol and substance abuse researcher and associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He says having less muscle mass means alcohol will hang around in our bodies longer.

"What this means is that the same drink that previously maybe felt just fine now leads to a higher blood alcohol level," Thrul says. "You feel the effects for longer."

These changes happen to both men and women as they enter middle age. But for women in perimenopause, alcohol can exacerbate the symptoms that come with hormonal fluctuations — like mood swings and irritability, says Christmas, who directs the Menopause Program and Center for Women's Integrated Health at the University of Chicago.

"Alcohol already is known to be a depressant," she says. "It can all also increase baseline anxiety symptoms. Alcohol can disrupt sleep too. If you're already experiencing all of those symptoms, it's just that much more compounded."

While worse hangovers as you age might not seem like a good thing, think of it as your body nudging you in the right direction. Cutting back is a good idea, says Dr. Ken Koncilja, a geriatrician with the Cleveland Clinic, because the risks of drinking alcohol increase with age. That includes an increased risk of cancer, liver disease, worsened high blood pressure, memory problems and cognitive decline.

"Alcohol use can cause dementia," he says. It can also interfere with many medications and lead to balance problems and more falls.

Koncilja says he makes it a point to discuss the benefits of cutting back with his patients.

"These conversations about alcohol use — being proactive in people with people in their 50s and 60s — has a huge impact on their health and wellbeing when they're in their 80s and 90s," he says.

Johannes Thrul of Johns Hopkins says many people don't realize that alcohol is classified as a Group 1 carcinogen — in the same category as tobacco and asbestos. "Every drink you have essentially increases your cancer risk for multiple types of cancer," he says.

Thrul says while the healthiest option is to not drink at all, even small changes to cut back can offer health benefits. For example, during holiday parties, he says try alternating alcoholic drinks with mocktails or other non-alcoholic options. And make sure to drink plenty of water to help your body metabolize the alcohol you do imbibe.

"Why don't you just give it a try and see how it feels?" Thrul says. "Because you might be surprised how good it actually is when you sleep better, you have less anxiety the next day."

He says your body will thank you.

Copyright 2025, NPR

University of Minnesota researchers say they’ve discovered several naturally occurring parasitic fungi that could be weaponized against emerald ash borers, the invasive beetles responsible for killing millions of ash trees across Minnesota and the eastern United States.

Scientists found the fungi on Minnesota as wood samples, then cultivated them in the lab for closer study.

“We were seeing that a lot of the fungi that we were growing out of these ash trees were insect killers,” said Colin Peters, a graduate student and lead author of the research study. “We wanted to know: Can we use these or leverage the power of these fungi against the emerald ash borer itself?”

Turns out, they can.

Peters said that all of the 10 Minnesota fungi species they studied were all able to infect emerald ash borers, but four species — three native to the state — showed the most promise by consistently reducing the beetles’ lifespan. In some cases, fungi could be seen sprouting from the bodies of dead ash borers.

Now researchers are developing field tests they hope will spread the fungi to beetles in the wild using “autodissemination.” Imagine a trap designed to attract emerald ash borers where they could be exposed to the fungi and then spread it to other beetles.

According to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the state’s forests have more than 1 billion ash trees. In some cities, they make up 20 percent of the canopy.

Dead trees are only part of the problem, researchers say. Ash tree die-offs can lead to a habitat changing over to grass, cattails and shrubs, threatening plants and animals that rely on forests.

"With a billion ash trees in Minnesota, we need to explore all possible methods to try and control this devastating pest,” said Robert Blanchette, a professor in the U’s Department of Plant Pathology and a co-author of the study, which was published recently in the journal Forests.

“Laboratory studies show that biological control of the beetle using fungi is possible and the next step is to figure out how to get this to work under field conditions," he added.

While no single treatment or technique will revert the ecosystem back to before the emerald ash borer’s arrival from East Asia, Peters said the study shows natural forest management practices can help keep the invasive bug in check.

“It shows that potentially, in the future, there's a world where we are applying less chemicals to the landscape, and instead leveraging the power of these relationships between organisms already happening on the landscape,” he said.

Chronic wasting disease was first detected in the state’s wild deer populations about 15 years ago. Since then, the disease remains an enigma for many Minnesotans, and most are still unfamiliar with the basics of how the disease works or what role they can play in stopping its spread. A new video game soon to be piloted in high schools across the state aims to answer those questions.

CWD is a neurological disease in deer, elk and moose that slowly destroys their nervous system. It’s not caused by a virus or bacteria but a misfolded protein that’s gone awry called a prion. Moose, elk and deer can get it by coming in contact with an infected animal’s body fluids physically or environmentally.

Once CWD enters its host, it binds to proteins already inside its body. Since those proteins occur naturally within the host animal, its immune systems doesn’t respond because it doesn’t sense anything is wrong.

There is no cure for the disease. It always leads to death within about two years of contracting it. 

Scientists from the University of Minnesota wanted to educate the public on those fronts. A group from the Minnesota Center for Prion Research and Outreach came up with the idea for a video game.

Thomas Seiler from the University of Minnesota’s Research and Outreach is the game’s creator. He said the concept for it came to him last fall.

“The game grew out of answering a question that comes up at just about every outreach event we do, which is, ‘What is my role? What can I do?'“ he said. “So, I had the idea of providing those answers through a role-playing video game.”

That video game is called “Cofactor.”  It’s a text-based game with a narrative that changes based on a player’s decisions. The name “Cofactor” refers to the relationship in biochemistry between enzymes and their helper molecules, or cofactors, they need to function.

Seiler recently demonstrated the game for a class at the School of Environmental Studies in Apple Valley. Seiler introduced the students to the game’s mechanics. Playing as a group they took on the role of a single hunter.

After choosing the name Trash Boat, the students began their journey as a bow hunter stalking their prey through some woods near Winona. They eventually spotted their first deer. Using an overhead projector to read the game’s text to the class, the University’s other presenter, Marc Schwabenlander, described what they were seeing.

“A six-point buck steps into the clearing, every ounce of your attention focuses,” he said. “So now this deer comes in when we’re hunting, we have six choices that we could make.”

Some of the choices include observing the deer, passing it up or even taking a nap. The students decided partly as a joke to click on the option to sing to the deer. Schwabenlander read what happens next.

 “With head raised to the empty tree canopy, your lungs chill as you draw an enormous breath and begin belting Walk the Moons, 2014, hit and karaoke mainstay, ‘Shut Up and Dance,’ with passionate feeling of course,” he said.

The deer in the game didn’t react to the singing. A loss of fear of humans is a sign the animal could be infected with CWD.

The students clicked on the options to virtually shoot the deer, field dress it and send the meat to the butcher. They were also given the choice to collect the animal’s lymph nodes to have it tested for CWD.

After voting to test the lymph nodes, the students were met with a series of photographs vaguely resembling each other. Then they were asked to pick which one to send in for testing.

They identified the right sample and eventually the results confirmed that the deer was positive for CWD.

On their second playthrough the students clicked on many options that were considered “bad choices.” They decided to eat some very questionable deer meat. Schwabenlander told them their fate.

“Well, you’re the first documented case of chronic wasting disease crossing over in humans,” he said. “Bummer.” 

While there have been no reported cases of that happening in real life, it is a possibility. 

After the students hunted their final deer without issue the game ended.

Before leaving class, a student named Joe said the CWD game was informative.

“But it also had some humor to like, keep you attent to it,” he said. “And it goes to show that education can be fun if you put in the effort and the work.”

One of the class’s teachers, Sarah Oppelt Santelli, said she loved how immersive the game was for students.

“They were both entertained and educated and pulled along with the mystery of the game, figuring out how to make the right choices, and what happens when they make sort of strange choices,” she said. “It was really fun to see how much they learned.” 

Following their presentation the University of Minnesota’s, Seiler said society is at a place where there are divergent ideas about the role of science in managing disease. 

“If you approach it in a less threatening way, where you can encourage some people to maybe entertain another perspective for a short period of time by playing a different role, then I think you’ve gone a long way to doing good science education,” he said. 

Schwabenlander said one of the most important aspects of the game is alerting young people to the risks of CWD, because if the disease is left unchecked it will eventually decimate deer populations, impact wildlife ecosystems and possibly infect humans. 

“The game’s goal is also ultimately to teach people about chronic wasting disease, to really to help manage the disease,” he said. “Because the reality is, in order for it to be managed well, people need to be educated about it to understand it.”

The U of M’s prion research center will release “Cofactor” to 25 pilot schools next month. After seeking funding, researchers hope to add the game to teaching curriculums across the state.

A telescope in Chile has captured a stunning new picture of a grand and graceful cosmic butterfly.

The National Science Foundation’s NoirLab released the picture Wednesday.

Snapped last month by the Gemini South telescope, the aptly named Butterfly Nebula is 2,500 to 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. A single light-year is 6 trillion miles.

At the heart of this bipolar nebula is a white dwarf star that cast aside its outer layers of gas long ago. The discarded gas forms the butterflylike wings billowing from the aging star, whose heat causes the gas to glow.

Schoolchildren in Chile chose this astronomical target to celebrate 25 years of operation by the International Gemini Observatory.

About 250 miles above the Earth, NASA astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) will enjoy an off-duty day for Thanksgiving, along with a group meal that features some celebratory foods.

"This is my second Thanksgiving in space, so I highly recommend it," said Mike Fincke, in a video message beamed down from the outpost.

This fall, NASA included a "Holiday Bulk Overwrapped Bag," or BOB, on a resupply mission that went up to the station. The bag contained festive items like clams, oysters, crab meat, quail, and smoked salmon.

"Our ground teams and the food lab at NASA have taken such great care of us," said Zena Cardman, who noted that they'll also have traditional fare like turkey and mashed potatoes, all packaged up in ways that won't cause a mess in microgravity. "We've even got some lobster, which is amazing. So I think it's going to be a really, really delicious meal."

Fincke displayed a can of cranberry sauce, which happened to come from the Russian space agency.

"It's kind of neat to have that up here because that's one of my favorite parts," he said. "I'm going to miss my family, of course. But I'm up here with my space family and it's really awesome."

Cardman and Fincke, along with fellow NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, will share their holiday meal with three Russian cosmonauts and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui.

"We don't have Thanksgiving in Japan, but here, on ISS, everybody respects each other's culture," said Yui, who added that he was looking forward to the dinner.

And if all goes as planned, more guests will arrive in time for the meal, because a Soyuz rocket with three new crew members for the station, including NASA astronaut Chris Williams, is scheduled to blast off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:27 am Eastern time on Thursday.

Copyright 2025, NPR

America has a food waste problem.

In a country famed for its large portion sizes, Americans toss out some 30-40 percent of the food produced.

"We think of U.S. households wasting about a third of all their food that could be eaten," said Ted Jaenicke, a professor of agricultural economics at Pennsylvania State University who studies food waste and consumer purchasing behaviors.

"Visually, that's buying three bags of groceries at the supermarket and putting one in the trash on your way out the door."

Experts say the holiday season compounds the problem.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, 200 million pounds of turkey meat is tossed each Thanksgiving – the biggest day of food waste of the year.

Much of that discarded food winds up in the country's landfills, where food waste represents nearly a quarter of the solid waste at those facilities.

Environmental impact

"If [food] ends up in a landfill, instead of being eaten or composted, then it is a really big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions," Jaenicke said.

"Food waste in a landfill decomposes into methane. And methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide."

The EPA says that methane is some 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

"If food waste were its own country, then it would be the third largest greenhouse gas-emitter in the world," Jaenicke said.

In addition to the amount of food that consumers throw out, another significant contributor to the country's food waste problem happens at the production level.

Sometimes that is due to Americans' pickiness when it comes to cosmetic standards for produce, but it also happens as a result of environmental factors that might leave crops damaged or destroyed.

A recent report from the American Farm Bureau Federation on Thanksgiving prices noted that produce items like sweet potatoes were up 37 percent, which the lobbying group attributed in part to hurricane damage to North Carolina's farms.

The effect is a vicious cycle: As wasted food goes into landfills and breaks down into powerful methane gas, it contributes to the kind of adverse weather events known to create additional waste at the production level.

Compost is key

One way to address the problem of wasted food winding up in landfills is to instead reroute the product to be composted.

That is what New York City hopes to do with its newly expanded Staten Island Compost Facility.

There, massive heaps of food waste are churned into usable compost that residents can collect for free and businesses for a fee.

"Compost is awesome," said NYC Deputy Commissioner of Solid Waste Management Jennifer McDonnell.

"It works really well. We make it here in New York City. We can use it here in New York City. So it's an example of the circular economy, and we need all of that material coming in on the front end to make our products."

Composting is a natural recycling process that relies on microorganisms to feed on organic materials – like food scraps – and convert it into plant fertilizer.

The Staten Island compost facility sits atop a retired landfill dominated by scores of seagulls taking advantage of the steam billowing out of the masses of product in various stages of compost.

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McDonnell said that landfills like the one formerly operated at the Staten Island facility are part of why America deals so poorly with its food waste.

"There's limited capacity," she said of landfills.

"The coolest thing about a facility like this is you never use up its capacity. It's always taking in new stuff and producing products. It's a manufacturing facility. It's not an end-of-the road facility."

Challenges of composting on a massive scale

New York is one of a handful of cities looking to address the problem of solid waste rotting away in landfills through a municipal composting program.

Its city council last year mandated residents begin separating their food and lawn waste from inorganic trash – a historic move by the nation's most populous city.

"That's groundbreaking. I think we have a lot of potential over time to continue growing," McDonnell said.

While participation has not yet reached 10 percent, the city has said it would begin issuing fines for noncompliance in an effort to boost resident engagement.

But there are structural challenges to getting these types of programs off the ground. First, there's infrastructure. It's expensive to find and manage the facilities needed to compost on a massive scale.

McDonnell says another issue is education and participation.

"We've studied other jurisdictions, other municipalities, and usually when they start a program like this, it takes about ten years to mature to get to a participation rate," she said.

To help, the city is constantly providing guidance about the proper way to dispose of food scraps and other organic waste, including the city's Trash Academy, which bills itself as "the crash course for a sustainable city."

Still, even if not every New Yorker buys in, McDonnell said, modest increases in proper waste practices could have big implications for the amount of food that winds up in a landfill.

"In our culture, where we produce so much waste from just existing, we have to be thoughtful about how to have a long term sustainable approach to properly managing all those things," McDonnell said.

"Food waste and yard waste make up about 30-35 percent of all the waste generated in a typical New York City household. So if you carve off that third and recover, it can make a big dent."

Copyright 2025, NPR

PFAS, often called "forever chemicals," have turned up almost everywhere in Minnesota — in water, soil, fish and wildlife.

Now, scientists want to know how much PFAS are in the air and how the chemicals are moving through the environment. They're using a simple and natural tool: pine needles.

It turns out that coniferous needles make surprisingly good natural air monitors. They have a waxy surface that contaminants easily stick to.

"We often find PFAS in soil or fish or water in remote areas where there's no obvious local source,” said Summer Streets, a research scientist at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. "Where is that PFAS coming from? It's probably coming from an atmospheric deposition."

Understanding PFAS in the air is key to knowing how the chemicals move around in the environment and how they end up in lakes, rivers and fish, Streets said.

“That air pathway is really important for moving PFAS all around the environment — not just in Minnesota, but globally,” she said.

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are used in many different consumer and industrial products, from nonstick cookware and waterproof clothing to carpets and cosmetics.

They don't break down in the environment. Long-term exposure to some PFAS has been linked to health problems including kidney and thyroid issues, low birth weight, reduced fertility and cancer.

Scientists have studied PFAS in water, soil and fish. But they know little about how much are in the air.

Traditional air monitoring equipment is expensive and would be difficult to deploy statewide, especially in remote areas, Streets said. Then she heard about a North Carolina State University study that used pine needles.

“I thought, ‘Wouldn't this be cool? Can we do this statewide?’” Streets said.

For the North Carolina study, published in 2022, researchers collected pine needles from several locations around Chemours, a PFAS-manufacturing facility that polluted the drinking water of thousands of residents in the Cape Fear region. They also collected samples near an airport where firefighting foam containing PFAS was used.

Kaylie Donelson, an environmental chemist, was the lead author of that study while she was a graduate student at NCSU. She said the pine needle testing provided a “fingerprint” showing the evolution of forever chemicals over decades.

“We could see PFAS pop up over time, and then, as they were phased out of use, we could watch them go back down,” Donelson said. “We could see the PFAS that were specific to the airport versus near the manufacturing plant, and kind of see how far those traveled.”

Donelson said her study was relatively limited, so she’s enthusiastic that Minnesota’s research project will be statewide.

“There's a lot of sources of PFAS that we know about,” Donelson said. “But I do think others could potentially be found through sampling the state.”

Streets recruited volunteers who already help monitor water quality to collect pine needles in all 87 Minnesota counties. They also recorded the GPS coordinates and a description of each location.

In the lab, scientists will test the needles for 75 different PFAS compounds, far more than they typically screen for in drinking water. 

"We should be able to kind of lay that out on a map and look for hot spots, possibly,” Streets said. “If we're seeing an area where certain PFAS are very elevated, does that mean there might be a source there that we could track down and work with?"

That's valuable information as the state tries to reduce the amount of PFAS getting into the environment, she said.

Researchers also will compare the new samples with old pine needles stored at the Bell Museum in St. Paul, collected long before forever chemicals were invented.

"When did we see certain PFAS arrive on the scene? When was the first time we started really seeing PFAS out in the wider environment, away from manufacturing?” Streets asked. “There's all sorts of interesting things that we can learn from that."

Another benefit to the study, Streets said, is that the volunteers now understand more about PFAS and can help spread that knowledge.

That includes Abby Wacker and her 9-year-old son, George, who collected pine needles from a tree at her parents’ home in Cokato, about 50 miles west of the Twin Cities.

"We had to just pull off the very ends off of each branch,” Wacker said. “And then we went all the way around the tree at eye level to fill a bag.”

They wore plastic gloves, so any PFAS on their skin wouldn’t taint the samples. Their clothing had been washed multiple times to avoid contamination.

Wacker, a registered nurse who works for a local public health department, said she hopes their work helps scientists better understand PFAS in the air and pinpoint places where their exposure to people can be reduced.

“Citizen science projects are so cool, because it gives us all an opportunity to participate in different projects that help better our health,” she said. “But also help us become more in-tune with nature and what's going on in our natural environment.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has made an unprecedented change to its website — reversing messaging that debunked any links between vaccines and autism. 

The CDC site now says that “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” It has also removed scientific reviews of vaccines from its website. 

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said his sources at the CDC tell him the new directives come from vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Health and Human Services department. The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Kennedy’s role in the decision.

“What Secretary Kennedy has done is an attempt to basically reduce the use of vaccines, if not eliminate in many cases,” said Osterholm, who also directs the Vaccine Integrity Project. “He does that by creating doubt in the minds of the public.” 

Osterholm said there is no link to autism and vaccines and that there have been many well-done studies over the years and in multiple countries that prove this conclusively. 

But the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, told MPR News that there’s still more investigation to be done. 

“Studies to date have not definitively ruled out potential associations,” said Emily Hilliard, press secretary for the Health and Human Services department in an email. “Some research suggesting possible biologic mechanisms has been ignored or dismissed by public health agencies, and HHS is committed to finding a definitive answer.”

Osterholm said he disagrees with this argument. He says he’s frustrated with HHS’s logic that they haven’t studied every vaccine. He noted the agency has already studied the only vaccines where there was even a suggestion of a possible autism link — the MMR vaccine to protect against measles, mumps, and rubella, and the Hepatitis B vaccine. 

Osterholm said those studies concluded there was no link and does not see it as necessary to study every other vaccine.

“[We] might as well add in milk and chocolate and any number of things, and say we haven't studied those either,” Osterholm said. “And the reason that's important is because there are no other signals. We've seen no evidence of any other activity of any other vaccine suggesting that autism is at increased risk.”

Osterholm compared the logic to linking eating ice cream and swimming in the ocean. Even though both happen more in the summer, it doesn’t mean that eating ice cream causes shark attacks. 

Osterholm said he’s worried about the public losing faith in vaccines. 

“It will mean kids will not get vaccinated,” Osterholm said. “We'll see increases in these serious, life threatening infectious diseases, and it's all going to come back to the doubt created by a single individual.”

Although the CDC’s updated guidance is a stunning reversal, Osterholm said he wasn’t surprised. He predicted last year that Kennedy would take this approach if elected Secretary. 

Under Kennedy’s leadership, Osterholm said he no longer trusts what comes out of the CDC, which has undergone a wave of layoffs and high-profile departures. CIDRAP News, a nonprofit newsroom affiliated with the university’s infectious disease research center, found that many doctors and public health experts share this view. 

“And that's unfortunate because there are still people working there who are highly trained, competent professionals, who themselves do not agree with the positions Secretary Kennedy has put forward — those people you can trust,” Osterholm said. 

Osterholm said CDC directives do not appear to be coming from people trained in public health but from individuals in the Trump administration. 

“Those are the ones that are making these statements,” he said. 

It was 2012 when Love Dalén, a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University, first laid eyes upon a special specimen on a lab table in eastern Siberia.

"Our Russian collaborators said, 'Come here into this room,'" he recalls. "We walked in and there's this dead mammoth lying there. It doesn't look like it died yesterday, but you can't believe your eyes because it's so well preserved. It's a kind of holy hell moment when you see this."

The animal had been found thawing out of a permafrost cliff near the Siberian coastline — not quite the entire body of a juvenile mammoth that lived during the last Ice Age some 39,000 years ago.

It had remained buried and frozen for millennia. Now, in a paper published in the journal Cell, Dalén and his colleagues report that they managed to extract something remarkable from that ancient mammoth — RNA, the molecule that translates genes into proteins and which tends to degrade rapidly.

The results offer a glimpse into what was happening inside this ancient mammoth's cells when it died.

The molecules that maketh a mammoth

The Russians named the animal — which they believed to be a female based on visual inspection — Yuka.

"It does have deep scratch marks on its hindquarters," says Dalén. "It either was attacked by cave lions while it was alive, probably chasing it down, or maybe cave lions were scavenging on it after it had died."

Over the years, various researchers had studied and sequenced Yuka's DNA, "which is kind of a recipe for how to make a mammoth," explains Dalén. (That DNA contains genes, which carry instructions for building specific proteins.)

But he and his collaborators wondered about the mammoth's RNA — the flurry of little messenger molecules that translate that recipe into the building and operating of an actual mammoth.

"The RNA molecules instruct the cells how and when to make proteins," says Dalén.

Most every cell in an organism's body has the same DNA. And yet — depending on where they are and what they do in the body — those cells can look and behave differently from one another. "What makes these cells different is the RNA activity in them, which genes are turned on and off," he says. "That is what separates liver cells from muscle cells and so on."

"The whole set of RNAs contained in a cell at a given time point is very much dynamic [and] can also quickly change in response to many factors, like stress, daytime, feeding, sleep, contaminants, infections, etc," says Emilio Mármol Sánchez, a geneticist at the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics at the University of Copenhagen.

Dalén, Sánchez, and their team figured that if they could get RNA out of that ancient mammoth, they'd have a snapshot of the genes that were in use around the moment when it died.

The only problem was that RNA doesn't usually hang around for very long. RNA tends to survive mere minutes or hours — generally not millennia.

"It felt like a very high-risk project," says Dalén. "It seemed like a completely crazy thing to try to do."

Still, there have been a smattering of studies that have turned up ancient RNA. "So we knew that there was a chance, if we had some really well-preserved samples, to get this to work," he says.

RNA reveal party

Dalén and his colleagues collected tissue samples from ten different mammoths, including Yuka, and painstakingly worked to extract RNA. The resulting fragments were all very short, either because they were small to begin with or because, despite being frozen, they had broken down with time.

Then came the challenging task of piecing those segments together, validating that they really were mammoth RNA. "The big bulk of the work is on the computational side to make sense of all these gigabytes of data," says Dalén.

On the other end of that analysis was something unmistakable, he says — woolly mammoth RNA.

Most of it was too fragmented to know what it was or where it came from, but three of the mammoths had sufficient material to analyze. That included Yuka, whose muscle had been sampled. The resulting RNA was related to slow-twitch muscle function and development. That was a reassuring confirmation but not surprising.

The team also found RNA that would have been produced in response to some kind of stress.

"That would be consistent with an animal being chased down by cave lions, but of course there could also be other explanations," says Dalén. "If you get stuck in mud, your muscles would be stressed out from trying to get out. So we can say that the muscles were stressed at the point of death, but we don't really know why."

In addition, some of Yuka's RNA came from a Y chromosome. A closer look at the animal's DNA confirmed it had one X and one Y chromosome.

"Genetically, Yuka was definitely a male," says Dalén. "In theory, Yuka could have developed as a female. But more likely those critical morphological parts were missing when they did the visual inspection, let's put it that way."

All told, Dalén says the results are a stunning proof of principle — that it's possible to know which genes were active in a now-extinct animal.

"You're actually seeing processes going on inside the cells right around the time it died," he says. "And these processes have then been frozen in time for 40,000 years."

Maanasa Raghavan, a paleogeneticist at the University of Chicago who didn't participate in the research, notes that the samples studied here were well-preserved and came from a fairly pristine environment. She's less certain whether the same techniques could be applied to specimens collected in temperate and tropical areas that are richly biodiverse but where preservation tends to be worse.

Still, Raghavan called the work "fabulous in terms of all sorts of technological barriers being shattered." She says future work with RNA in these and other mammoth specimens may offer insights into what drove the species to extinction.

María Ávila Arcos, an evolutionary genomicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who wasn't involved in the study, says the approach provides a new layer of insight into a species that vanished long ago.

"Having this information adds to our understanding how these creatures lived and how they adapted to their environment," she says.

She's excited by the results — and not just for mammoths. She says they point the way to the potential study of ancient RNA viruses.

"A lot of very important pathogens like Ebola, COVID, influenza — they have RNA genomes," says Ávila Arcos. "They mutate so rapidly. But if we want to understand their evolution or how these viruses have impacted populations in the past, we need to be able to recover the genetic material, which is RNA, from ancient samples."

In other words, Yuka's RNA has opened a window for us to consider its past, while allowing scientists to dream about all the discoveries that lie ahead.

Copyright 2025, NPR

The moon will look slightly bigger and brighter Wednesday night during the closest supermoon of the year.

The moon's orbit around the Earth isn't a perfect circle, so it gets nearer and farther as it swings around. A so-called supermoon happens when a full moon is closer to Earth in its orbit. That makes the moon look up to 14% bigger and 30% brighter than the faintest moon of the year, according to NASA.

November's supermoon is the second of three supermoons this year and also the closest: The moon will come within just under 222,000 miles (357,000 kilometers) of Earth.

Tides may be slightly higher during a supermoon because the moon is closer to Earth, said astronomer Lawrence Wasserman with Lowell Observatory. But the difference isn't very noticeable.

No special equipment is needed to view the supermoon if clear skies permit. But the change in the moon's size can be tough to discern with the naked eye.

“The difference is most obvious as a comparison between other images or observations,” said Shannon Schmoll, director of Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University, in an email.

Supermoons happen a few times a year. One in October made the moon look somewhat larger, and another in December will be the last of the year.