A new look at the universe: After a quarter-century of planning, the most powerful telescope headed into space launched on Saturday, Nat Geo’s Nadia Drake reports. Over the next few weeks, NASA’s James West Space Telescope must complete a series of complex maneuvers for the mission to succeed.
Remembering Desmond Tutu: Bells rang at noon today at St. George’s Anglican Cathedral in Cape Town to honor the Nobel-winning Anglican archbishop who worked to defeat South Africa’s apartheid system. Tutu, who died Sunday at age 90, later chaired the nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and championed LGBTQ+ rights in the nation. Former President Barack Obama hailed him as a moral compass and a champion against injustice, adding: “He never lost his impish sense of humor and willingness to find humanity in his adversaries.”
The misunderstood volcano: For volcanologist Arianna Soldati, an erupting volcano is more than an agent of destruction. “Scooping up hot lava,” as the Nat Geo Explorer puts it in our latest explainer video, is a way to discover the innards of our world and what gives it life. Watch here.
R.I.P. Thomas Lovejoy and E.O. Wilson: The weekend took away two biologists who, separately, pioneered and developed the concept of biological diversity. Lovejoy, a Nat Geo Explorer at Large who died Saturday at age 80, spent more than 50 years working in the Amazon rainforest, founding the nonprofit Amazon Biodiversity Center and bringing worldwide attention to the threats of tropical deforestation. He came up with the term “biological diversity” in 1980—and published the first estimate of global extinction rates, Nat Geo reports. Lovejoy was an “unyielding champion for our planet,” said Jill Tiefenthaler, National Geographic Society CEO, in a statement. Wilson, who died Sunday at age 92, was a two-time Pulitzer winner who studied the evolution of behavior. He explored how natural selection and other forces could produce something as extraordinarily complex as an ant colony—and “championed this kind of research as a way of making sense of all behavior—including our own,” the New York Times reported.
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