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R.I.P. Michael Collins: The Apollo 11 astronaut, who died Wednesday at age 90, was often called the loneliest man in the world for remaining in lunar orbit while his two colleagues made history on the moon. But Collins argued it gave him time alone with the spaceship that carried him 60 miles from the lunar surface. “Please, another black coffee while I finish this tube of my favorite, the cream-of-chicken soup,” Collins wrote in 2019 of his lunar orbiting experience for Nat Geo. “And the thermostat, 76˚F. Good, very comfy here.” Before splashdown, Collins scrawled this: “Spacecraft 107, alias Apollo 11, alias ‘Columbia,’ the finest ship to come down the line, God bless her.” After NASA, Collins was a director of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum and a longtime member of the National Geographic Society's board of trustees.
Busy as a ... well, these beavers got to work and shut down a Canadian town’s internet service for 36 hours. Turns out, the beavers used that wiring to help build a dam, CBS News reports. Hat tip to Nat Geo’s Dina Fine Maron for the item.
A monarch memorial: Some see butterflies as a sign of the presence of a lost loved one. So when a grieving Massachusetts father built a backyard garden, he raised butterflies in his late daughter’s garden. Now, he’s sending milkweed seeds from Keri’s garden to anyone in the country who wants them. This project is a way of keeping his daughter—and endangered monarch butterflies—alive, he tells the Boston Globe.
Safari gone wrong: For eight years, the NRA chief’s slaughter of an elephant in Botswana’s Okavango Delta was hidden. Now footage obtained by the New Yorker and The Trace shows what happened when guides tracked down an elephant for Wayne LaPierre. “After LaPierre’s first shot wounded the elephant, guides brought him a short distance from the animal, which was lying on its side, immobilized. Firing from point-blank range, LaPierre shot the animal three times in the wrong place,” Mike Spies writes. Another person in the party fired the shot to kill the suffering animal. His clumsiness with the gun, Spies says, undermines the image he’s cultivated as an exemplar of American gun culture.
Follow-up: In unanimous votes, Florida’s House and Senate passed a bill to protect interconnected habitats for wide-ranging wildlife, including the endangered Florida panther. The Florida Wildlife Corridor Act calls for $300 million in state conservation land acquisition in the fast-developing state, but it awaits the governor’s signature and final state budget agreements. Among the bill’s champions is photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Carlton Ward, Jr., founder of the Path of the Panther initiative.
Related: How America’s most endangered cat could help save Florida
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