As promised, Donald Trump has given Elon Musk a job in (or at least adjacent to) his second administration, in a brand-new extragovernmental organization named for a meme turned cryptocurrency: the Department of Government Efficiency, a.k.a. DOGE.
Like many pet owners, my partner and I have a long list of nonsensical nicknames for our 10-year-old tabby, Ace: sugarplum, booboo, Angela Merkel, sharp claw, clompers, night fury, poof ball. But we reserve one nickname for a very specific time each month, when Ace is more restless than usual in the daytime hours, skulking around from room to room instead of snoozing on a blanket.
Over the past month, as meteorologists warned millions of Americans to protect themselves from impending major hurricanes, they were forced to contemplate another, unexpected danger. Threatening messages spilled into forecasters’ inboxes. Meteorologists, those messages said, are in cahoots with the government to create hurricanes out of thin air and steer the storms toward specific places and people. They should suffer for it.
Updated at 9:27 p.m. on October 9, 2024
After several days of whirling across the Gulf of Mexico, blowing at up to 180 miles per hour, Hurricane Milton made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast tonight as the terrible embodiment of a historically destructive season. Milton inflated at a near-record pace, growing from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 behemoth in half a day, to become one of the most intense hurricanes in recorded history.
A week after Hurricane Helene ripped through the American Southeast, it has careened into a terrible category of natural disasters: By some measures, it is now the third-deadliest storm to make landfall in the United States, after Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Katrina. More than 200 people have now been reported dead.
A week after Hurricane Helene ripped through the American Southeast, it has careened into a terrible category of natural disasters: By some measures, it is now the third-deadliest storm to make landfall in the United States, after Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Katrina. More than 200 people have now been reported dead.
Since Starlink first beamed down to Brazil two years ago, hundreds of communities in the Amazon that were previously off the grid found themselves connected to the rest of the world. Here was the purest promise of SpaceX’s satellite internet—to provide connectivity in even the most remote places on Earth—fulfilled. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, received a medal from the Brazilian government.
When the astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams launched to the International Space Station on June 5, they flew on a Boeing spacecraft and wore the company’s bright-blue spacesuits. On the way home, eight months after their scheduled return, they will likely ride in a SpaceX vehicle, dressed in sleek white suits designed with the aesthetic sensibilities of that company’s CEO and chief engineer in mind. Elon Musk to the rescue.
Imagine that you’re traveling for work this summer, somewhere far from home. The flight over is a little turbulent, but you’re excited to be away for a week or so. Then your return journey gets delayed. The airline puts you up in a nice hotel but can’t decide on a new departure date. Your employer booked the tickets, so you can’t do much about the situation. You start running out of clean clothes, and everyone back home starts wondering when you’re coming back.
Yesterday, NASA announced that one of its Mars rovers had sampled a very, very intriguing rock. At first glance, the rock looks much like the rest of the red planet—rugged, sepia-toned, dry. But it’s arguably the most exciting one that robotic space explorers have ever come across. The rock, NASA said in a press release, “possesses qualities that fit the definition of a possible indicator of ancient life.”
Of course it would happen like this.
Before Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams took off for the International Space Station in early June, NASA removed some of their suitcases from their Boeing-made spacecraft. The ISS was in urgent need of a new pump for the system that recycles urine into water, so the personal items had to go. There’s no laundry on the ISS, but no matter.
Hurricane Beryl is an unprecedented storm. It’s been nearly 174 years since certain parts of the Caribbean have experienced a storm this brutal. Over just a few days, Beryl has ripped through the region, leaving devastation on the islands in its path. The doors and roofs have been torn off homes. Trees have been snapped in half and branches thrown into the street. Cows have been killed in the fields where they grazed.
Water gave every living thing on Earth the gift of existence. And yet, of late, it seems determined to wipe us out. The Atlantic hurricane season, widely predicted to be a fierce one, is here, and early this morning the first named storm, Alberto, made landfall in northeastern Mexico and drenched everything in its path.
And in Florida last week, it was as if the heavens had turned on the tap and simply left it running.
Updated at 4:38 p.m. ET on May 21, 2024
In the Martian lowlands, one rocky crater is dotted with small holes, winding from the floor to the rim like breadcrumbs. Their clean and cylindrical appearance is distinctly unnatural, suggesting the work of aliens—which it is. For three years, a robot from Earth has been collecting samples of rock and soil into six-inch-long tubes, whirring and crackling on the otherwise quiet planet.
After a deluge of record-breaking rainfall this week, citizens of the United Arab Emirates and Oman are still trying to return to regular life. The storms forced schools, offices, and businesses to close, transformed the tarmac of Dubai’s international airport into a rippling sea, and killed more than 20 people across both nations. The downpour seemed almost apocalyptic: On Tuesday, the UAE received the amount of rain that usually falls in an entire year.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Cosmically speaking, the alignment of Earth, the sun, and the moon is ordinary. But from our corner of the universe, the occurrence produces something wondrous: a total solar eclipse. On April 8, the moon will pass between the sun and Earth, casting a shadow along a narrow strip of the country, from Texas to Maine.
SpaceX has once again launched the most powerful rocket in history into the sky, and this time, the mission seems to have passed most of its key milestones. Starship took off without a hitch this morning, separated from its booster, and cruised through space for a while before SpaceX lost contact with it. Instead of splashing down in the ocean as planned, Starship seems to have been destroyed during reentry in Earth’s atmosphere.
Even after nearly three months of winter, the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere are disturbingly warm. Last summer’s unprecedented temperatures—remember the “hot tub” waters off the coast of Florida?—have simmered down to a sea-surface average around 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the North Atlantic, but even that is unprecedented for this time of year. The alarming trend stretches around the world: 41 percent of the global ocean experienced heat waves in January.
The second liftoff of Starship, SpaceX’s giant new rocket-and-spaceship system, went beautifully this morning, the fire of the engines matching the orange glow of the sunrise in South Texas. The spaceship soared over the Gulf Coast, with all 33 engines in the rocket booster pulsing. High in the sky, the vehicles separated seamlessly—through a technique that SpaceX debuted during this flight—and employees let out wild cheers.
From our perspective down here, on the surface of our planet, the stars are tiny, gleaming specks in an inky-dark universe. Occasionally they appear to twinkle, when the air in our atmosphere bends the incoming light. Through telescopes, they are balls of light, their glow distorted by the lens. And up close, the best star in the universe—our sun—is an orangey sphere of flame.But stars can be so much more than that, as telescopes, especially the very good ones, can reveal.
Updated at 5:29 p.m. on August 31, 2023Earlier this week, mission control commanded the International Space Station to turn its cameras toward the Gulf of Mexico. Giant white clouds, gleaming against the blue of the planet’s oceans and the blackness of space beyond, indicated the arrival of Hurricane Idalia, hovering menacingly off the coast of Florida.
The astronauts arrived at the Mars base one by one, dressed in faded orange spacesuits. After they walked through a pressurized chamber and removed their helmets, they were blasted in the face with some sort of decontaminating mist. When the cyclist Lance Armstrong walked in, one of his comrades was in awe. “The fact that we have an astronaut is so crazy,” Ariel Winter, an actor who appeared on Modern Family, told another contestant, who was visibly confused.
In 1967, the physicist John Wheeler was giving a lecture about a mysterious and startling phenomenon in deep space that the field was just beginning to understand. But it didn’t have a great name to match. Wheeler and his audience were equally tired of hearing “gravitationally completely collapsed object” over and over, so someone threw out an idea for a different name. A few weeks later, at another conference, Wheeler debuted the suggestion: black hole.
Earlier today, three witnesses came before Congress to testify about their experiences with unidentified flying objects. A former Navy pilot spoke of the mysterious objects that he has seen with his own eyes and through radar, and how frequently pilots encounter them in the air. A retired Navy commander described the time he pulled his jet up to a Tic Tac–shaped object hovering over the ocean, then watched it suddenly speed up and vanish.
Earth, in most renderings, is a smooth sphere with a glossy complexion—a blue marble, as pictures snapped from space have shown us. Earth scientists know that’s not exactly true. Earth, in fact, is an ellipsoid, a little bit squashed at the poles and fat around the equator, not to mention speckled with mountain ranges. And then you have the geoid people—the ones who think of Earth less as an imperfect sphere and more as a lumpy potato.C. K.
The dreadful saga of the missing Titanic submersible is finally drawing to a close. On Sunday, the vessel, called the Titan, was supposed to take five people on an hours-long, 12,500-foot-deep journey to the wreckage of the Titanic, which rests at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, less than two hours into the tour, the submersible lost contact with its support ship. At a press conference this afternoon, the U.S.
The submersible craft’s journey to the bottom of the ocean and back was supposed to take about eight hours. Two and a half hours for the descent, a few hours to explore the century-old wreckage of the Titanic, and then another two and a half hours to return to the surface.But the sub and its five passengers have now been missing in the Atlantic Ocean for three days. In that period, it has had no communication with the rest of the world.
If ever a headline has demanded a wide-eyed, scrambling-to-click reaction, it might be this one: “Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-human Origin.”A website called The Debrief—which says it specializes in “frontier science” and describes itself as self-funded—reported this week that a former intelligence official named David Grusch said that the U.S.
If you asked Americans to name a space mission, any space mission, I suspect very few would pick Apollo 8. The 1968 mission, the first to circle the moon, gets overshadowed by Apollo 11 (“One small step for man”; you know the rest) and Apollo 13 (of Tom Hanks fame). The astronauts didn’t venture from their spaceship, nor did they touch the lunar surface. But in its own, quiet way, that mission was an existential milestone.
Updated at 5:30 p.m. ET on March 29, 2023.Several years ago, astronomers pointed a telescope at another star and discovered something remarkable: seven planets, each one about the same size as Earth. The planets were quite close to their small star—all seven of their orbits would fit inside Mercury’s.