Imagine Jupiter and its little asteroids as cosmic Halloween decor on the solar system’s front stoop. The planet itself—swirly, stormy, the largest in the solar system—is the pumpkin, while the tiny asteroids that accompany it are kind of like funky-shaped gourds, one cluster in front and the other behind. The pumpkin and these gourds have been on display like this for billions of years, strung together by a quirk of gravity, tracing the same loop around the sun.

A desert planet. An empire spanning the galaxy. A young boy burdened to be its savior. The 1965 novel Dune’s influence on Star Wars is obvious, but Frank Herbert’s work has echoed throughout all of modern science-fiction storytelling.

About a year before Christine Mallinson gave birth to her first child, she and her husband agreed that all of their children would take her last name. The decision came down to family cohesion: The couple wanted their children—they eventually had two—to share a last name with the only cousin near their kids in age, who was Mallinson’s niece.

When I asked him about his film adaptation of Dune, the writer-director Denis Villeneuve quickly held up his prized copy of Frank Herbert’s book, a French-translation paperback with a particularly striking cover that he’s owned since he was 13. “I keep the book beside me as I’m working,” Villeneuve told me cheerfully over Zoom. “I made this movie for myself. Being a hard-core Dune fan, the first audience member I wanted to please was myself.

Yet another climate provision may be out of the Democrats’ signature spending bill. On Monday, The New York Times and Reuters reported that Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, one of two pivotal Democratic votes, wants to remove the bill’s tax on methane leaks from oil and gas operations. (A spokesperson for Senator Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware whose committee oversees that proposal, denied the reports on Twitter.

Some good news finally—finally—appears to be on the horizon for roughly 28 million of the United States’ youngest residents. On the heels of an advisory meeting convened yesterday, the FDA is likely on the cusp of green-lighting a kid-size dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for Americans ages 5 to 11, a move that’s been months in the making.