The inner solar system is a lot calmer than it was 4 billion years ago, during what’s known as the heavy bombardment period. Over the course of that violent stretch, which lasted about 500 million years, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the moon were regularly pounded by asteroids, meteors, and other cosmic ordnance, many of the objects as big as the six-mile-wide rock that wiped out the dinosaurs. Things have gotten a lot quieter since then, but that’s not to say everything has gone entirely still. Earth still lives inside a shooting gallery, with thousands of objects—totaling about 48.5 tons per year, according to NASA—entering the atmosphere.

Yesterday, one of those space boulders exploded in the skies over Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina at 11:51 a.m EDT, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). The brilliant flash, which was accompanied by a sonic boom that many mistook for an earthquake, resulted in hundreds of calls and posts to the American Meteor Society (AMS), NASA’s recommended organization for reporting meteoric fireballs. In Henry County, Ga., one house was struck by debris that broke through the roof and landed inside the residence. There were no reported injuries.

“The Henry County Emergency Management Agency [EMA] passed along to us that a citizen reported that a ‘rock’ fell through their ceiling around the time of the reports of the ‘earthquake,’” the NWS said in a Facebook post. “Henry County EMA also reported that the object broke through the roof, then the ceiling, before cracking the laminate on the floor and stopping.”

The possibility of something tumbling from the skies this week was not entirely unexpected. Yesterday’s event occurred during the ongoing Bootid meteor shower, which happens once every 6.37 years, when Earth passes through the remnants of the tail of Comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke. The Bootid is just one of dozens of known showers the AMS lists on its website. Many of those events produce only a fine mist of meteor fragments, visible only at night in dark conditions away from city lights, and commonly called shooting stars.

Yesterday’s rock was of a decidedly greater caliber, one big enough to be classified as a bolide, a meteor with enough mass to cause a bright flash and a sonic boom as it slams into the atmosphere, but too small for most of it to reach the ground without being incinerated first. To qualify as a bolide, an incoming meteor must reach the brightness of Venus, which, like the moon, is often visible in the daytime sky. A few dozen bolides occur each year, according to NASA.

The most explosive recent bolide event occurred over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013, when an object estimated to have measured about 65 ft., detonated in the atmosphere, injuring nearly 1,500 people and damaging 7,200 buildings. Modern history’s biggest bolide also struck Russia, in the celebrated Tunguska event of 1908, when a 350-ft. meteor flattened 830 sq. mi. of forest land.

Lesser meteoric fireworks are much, much more common than bolides. According to the AMS, several thousand small fireballs erupt in the atmosphere every day, but “the vast majority of these,” the organization says, “occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, and a good many are masked by daylight.”

Notwithstanding the Henry County house that got hit by the recent bolide, the odds of any one spot—or any one person—being struck by space debris are vanishingly small. Barely 5% of objects that enter the atmosphere survive the fires of entry and reach the surface. Roughly 70% of that surface is ocean and much of the rest is desert or other sparsely inhabited terrain. Finally, most of the meteorites that do strike the planet are, by the time of impact, micrometeorites—too small to do any damage at all. In all of known human history, in fact, there is only one person who is believed to have been killed by a meteorite—an Indian bus driver who was struck while walking on the campus of an engineering college in the state of Tamil Nadu on Feb. 6, 2016. That effectively puts your odds of meeting the same fate as one in the total number of human beings who have walked the Earth since the dawn of homo sapiens roughly 300,000 years ago. 

That’s not to say there haven’t been close calls. On May 1, 1860, a horse was killed by a meteorite strike in Concord, Ohio. In 1954, an Alabama woman—whose picture was published and story was told in the Dec. 13, 1954 issue of LIFE magazine—sustained severe bruising to her hand and side when a 10 lb. meteorite crashed through her roof while she lay napping on her sofa. Put yesterday’s event in the category of lightning strikes or shark bites—theoretically possible, highly improbable, one more thing you can take off your worry list.

Air conditioning is one of our great guilty pleasures. When your town is suffocating under a 100-degree heat dome, there’s nothing like the sweet relief that comes from returning home, cranking up the AC, and leaving behind the sweltering outdoor atmosphere for the cooler, crisper indoor one. As the first major heat wave of 2025 bakes the Northeast, South, and Midwest, nearly 150 million Americans are discovering that fact anew.

But air conditioning comes at a high price. The two billion units operating worldwide are responsible for 7% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations Environment Program—a figure that is expected to double by 2030 and triple by 2050, when more than five billion units are projected to be in use. This will drive a climate spiral, with increased carbon output pushing global temperatures even higher, leading to still more air conditioning use and still higher temperatures and on and on.

“Air conditioning is becoming a lifeline in this overheated world,” says Ankit Kalanki, a cooling expert at RMI, a research and public policy group originally known as the Rocky Mountain Institute. “It’s no longer a luxury. We rely on air conditioning for comfort, to feel productive, to feel safe and healthy, and this is an invisible driver of electricity demand and emissions.”

That fact leaves a lot of people feeling guilty over their own AC use. Our grandparents got by with fans, light clothing, drawn shades and cold drinks; even in the face of climate change, couldn’t we do the same for at least routine summer heat?

“The feeling of guilt comes from a sense of responsibility to do something,” says Fionnuala Walravens, senior campaigner at the Environmental Investigation Agency, a green advocacy group. “We ask ourselves ‘What can we change?’”

Read more: The Most Efficient Way to Run Your AC During a Heat Wave

AC guilt is only a piece of the larger phenomenon of climate guilt, the responsibility and even shame many people feel if they aren’t recycling perfectly, composting regularly, driving minimally, and keeping energy consumption as low as possible. “There are often a lot of emotions that are connected,” says Wendy Greenspun, a clinical psychologist who is affiliated with Climate Psychology Alliance North America, an educational nonprofit. “There is sadness, anger, anxiety, fear—lots of different emotions that I put under the umbrella of climate distress. Guilt may be one of those.”

Managing all of those emotions—and taking all of the green steps to ameliorate them—can be a considerable lift, and almost no one can claim to be a perfect climate citizen. But when it comes to air conditioning there are plenty of coping measures—ways to keep your use of cooling in check while at the same time accepting that in an increasingly sweltering world, air conditioning is a daily essential. 

The most significant—if most expensive—step you can take to reduce the carbon footprint of your air conditioner is to scrap any model you bought 15 years ago or earlier and upgrade to a new one. In 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned the sale of new AC units (either central AC or window models) that use Freon—also known as R-22—as a coolant. Freon, which can leak from home units and often has to be replaced and topped off by a service person, has a so-called global warming potential (GWP) of nearly 2,000—meaning it packs 2,000 times the planet-heating punch of an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. New units now use Puron Advance—also known as R-454B—which has a GWP of just 465. That’s still considerably more than CO2 (which, by definition, has a GWP of 1), but a whole lot less than R-22.

“Industry is transitioning to alternatives that have a much lower environmental footprint,” says Kalanki. “There is a lot of promise when it comes to what kind of refrigerants can provide similar cooling without impacting performance.”

Disposing of old units is a bit more complex than just tossing them in a town dump. Many state or local laws require that refrigerant first be drained by an EPA-certified technician, after which the AC can be recycled or carted off by local curbside pickup programs. 

Kalanki also recommends buying what are known as smart air conditioners, units that connect to WiFi and can monitor energy use and be controlled remotely via phone. Smart AC’s make it possible to pre-cool your home, turning the unit on when you’re away to lower the temperature before you return, allowing you to shut the AC off—or at least turn it down—during peak evening use when air conditioners are commonly operating at their maximum. That can make a big difference to the larger world as air conditioners currently account for 40% to 60% of peak demand on the grid in the summer. Keeping your electricity use low in those hours also saves money, as energy companies often charge more for power consumed in that window; curbing consumption at such times can also help avoid grid crashes or blackouts.

 “A smartly designed unit,” says Kalanki, “can sense and measure how much of an energy load is required to cool a space. You can really reduce energy consumption significantly.”

Architects and designers of apartments and single family homes have a role to play too. Better insulation, for example, can not only keep out the cold in winter, but keep in the cool during summer. Shades and awnings to screen out the sun can help too, as can painting roofs white—instead of the common black tar seen in cities—which reflects away the heat and light that black roofs absorb. “There are a host of these passive strategies that can be used when buildings are designed,” says Kalanki.

Buying, renting, or renovating a home with a mind toward these efficiencies, as well as installing new, upgraded AC units and heat pumps can not only reduce your carbon load, but reduce your emotional load—bringing down some of the guilt that comes with gobbling too much power in the summer months when energy use spikes. 

A few other simple adaptations can help as well. Businesses like law firms and banks can relax their suit and tie rules during the summer, says Walravens, lightening the load on office air conditioners that have to make the environment cool enough for people wearing dark layers in triple-digit temperatures. Adjusting our own internal thermostats can help too. As of 2022, 88% of American homes had air conditioning, compared to fewer than 10% of European homes, according to MIT Technology Review. And we drive our units hard. One TIME analysis from 2022 found that U.S. residences are kept at around 74° F even when no one is home, and 70° F when the family returns. 

“We have to change our mindset a little,” says Walravens. “The reality is we can survive and be productive at higher temperatures. That may at first seem a little bit daunting, but it’s going to use a lot less energy and cause a lot less guilt.”

Of course, you didn’t cause the climate crisis all by yourself and you can’t remotely fix it alone either. The best you can do is play your small part and let go of the sense that you’re to blame.

“We as individuals can be change agents,” says Michaela Barnett, a civil engineer and the owner of KnoxFill, a bulk sales business that seeks to limit the use of single-use containers. “We can reconceptualize the way that we think about our individual actions for change and the way we’re living in line with our values. But we should also give ourselves grace and patience, not bearing all of the weight either, because that’s not productive.”

There is all manner of geopolitical and military fallout likely to come from the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear enrichment sites on June 21. What worries a lot of people more, however, is the literal fallout—the radioactive contamination that could be released when massive, bunker-buster munitions are dropped on facilities said to contain more than 400 kg (880 lbs.) of enriched uranium. Demolishing the sites, so the thinking goes, could have the same effect as detonating a so-called dirty bomb—a piece of non-fissile ordnance that spreads dangerous radioactive material across a large footprint of land and expanse of sky.

But that fear is unfounded, say experts. “The attack on the enrichment sites in Iran doesn’t pose the same hazard as an accident with a functioning nuclear reactor,” says Simon Middleburgh, professor of Nuclear Engineering at the Nuclear Futures Institute at Bangor University, U.K. Any contamination is likely to be local, Middleburgh explains, because enrichment doesn’t involve fission, which is what presents the real peril when handling radioactive materials. 

But that’s not to say there is no danger at all. While radioactive poisoning may be held in check, chemical poisoning—toxic exposure to gasses produced during nuclear enrichment—is another matter.

“No increase in off-site radiation levels was reported,” said Rafael Mariono Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in a June 23 statement about the state of the attack sites. “[T]he main concern is chemical toxicity.” However much contamination has been released, Grossi added, the U.S. and Israel must choose any future targets carefully, especially taking pains to steer wide of Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, the Middle East’s first civilian nuclear reactor.

Read more: What Conflict in the Middle East Means for Climate Change

“I want to make it absolutely and completely clear,” Grossi warned, “[in] case of an attack on [the plant], a direct hit could result in a very high release of radioactivity to the environment.” Damage to the power grid serving the reactor could also cause its core to melt down, leading to a release of high amounts of radiation that would necessitate evacuation or protective sheltering—measures that the IAEA said would have to be taken over distances of hundreds of miles. 

Here’s what else you—and the Iranian people in the nuclear crosshairs—need to know.

For all the mortal mischief a nuclear weapons facility could whip up, there is very little radiation risk associated with the job of enriching uranium-235 up to the level of 90% purity needed to produce a bomb. By itself, the enriched U-235 isotope is something of “a damp squib,” says Paddy Regan, a nuclear physics professor at the U.K.’s University of Surrey. “Uranium itself is not particularly radioactive.” Iran’s 400 kg of U-235, he says, “would be much more dangerous if it fell on you.” That’s partly due to U-235’s long half-life, which measures 700 million years—the time it takes half of the material to decay away. At the sites of the U.S. attack, Regan says, “the bombing will do much more damage to the people in the locality than the poisoning.”

Adds James Smith, professor of environmental science at the University of Portsmouth, “I’ve worked for a long time at Chernobyl and there’s lots of uranium from the nuclear fuel in the environment there. There’s something like six tons of it dispersed as small fuel particles. But it’s not the uranium we worry about.”

Far more dangerous than U-235 are the elemental products given off when nuclear fuel goes through fission—especially iodine, strontium, and cesium. “These are the things that uranium splits into when it’s working in a reactor or a bomb,” says Smith. “Those fission products are much more densely radioactive than uranium.”

An enrichment plant—which does not produce fission—poses other dangers beyond U-235’s relatively low radiation load. Those more-worrisome materials are the toxic gasses that are generated as a byproduct of the enrichment process. “When uranium is mined it’s milled into a substance called yellow cake,” says Jeffrey Lewis, professor and director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Project at Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif. “This is kind of a powder. You want to enrich that material in a centrifuge, and to do that you have to transform it into a gas.”

Actually, it’s transformed into multiple gasses, including uranium hexafluoride, uranyl fluoride, and hydrogen fluoride—all of which are highly corrosive and toxic when inhaled or ingested. The IAEA warns that these byproducts have likely been dispersed throughout the damaged Iranian facilities and may have escaped into the outdoor environment as well.

Read more: A New Middle East Is Unfolding Before Our Eyes

The best guess the IAEA has advanced at the moment is that if the gasses have indeed escaped, they have remained local, but the group cannot say so for sure. “When a bomb hits a site you can get a plume of dust and gas and debris,” says Smith. That could be carried on the wind well beyond the initial point of bunker-buster impact.

The fog of war makes it difficult to ascertain exactly how badly the targeted sites have been hit and just how much radiation or chemical toxicity may have spread. The IAEA relies in part on Iran itself to report these measures; after Israel bombed the enrichment plants but before U.S. planes dropped their much heavier ordnance, the Iranians claimed there was no increase in off-site radiation levels. It’s uncertain, however, how much of that was true and how much was just all-is-well spin.

For now, the IAEA plans to maintain a presence in Iran and resume inspection of the enrichment sites, as required by the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), of which Iran is a signatory “as soon as safety and security conditions allow,” according to the June 23 statement. Even before the American strikes, however, Iran was threatening to withdraw from the NPT, and now, battered on one side by what it considers aggression by the Israelis and on the other by the Americans, Tehran may be ill-inclined to play the good global citizen.

The Trump Administration, meantime, is keeping its military options open, signalling that the weekend strike was a one-off, while at the same time retaining the option of future attacks. “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,” President Donald Trump said in his Saturday night address, after the bombings. “If they do not, future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier.”

At present, the damage to the targeted sites seems relatively contained. Whether conditions will remain that way is impossible to say. If the truce announced late on June 23 holds, the differences among the parties could be settled without further military action.

A heat dome is building over the U.S. and Canada this week, bringing triple-digit temperatures to millions of people. The extreme heat comes as forecasts predict that most of the U.S. will face a hotter than average summer this year. 

Extreme heat is only becoming more common. In the United States, heat waves now occur three times as often as they did in the 1960s, and one study, published in 2022 in the journal Copernicus, found that climate change is making heat domes 150 times more likely.

Is climate change going to make heat domes worse? The answer, experts say, is a resounding yes. 

“I think that’s one of the easier things to answer,” says Bill Gallus, professor of meteorology at Iowa State University. “There’s so many things that are complicated and we can’t say for sure what climate change is going to do, such as how many hurricanes or tornadoes we get, but, it is likely that we will have more heat domes, and probably hotter temperatures in the heat domes.” 

What is a heat dome? 

A heat dome occurs when a high pressure system stalls, trapping hot air in place. 

Heat domes and heat waves occur simultaneously, however when a heat wave passes through, it tends to only last for a few days. A heat dome, in comparison, tends to stick around—anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. “[With heat waves] you can at least look forward to, within a pretty short period of time, the weather’s going to change. You get cooler,” says Gallus. “When you get a heat dome, it can stay put for a longer period of time.” 

Read More: What to Know About Heat Domes—and How Long They Last

How is climate changing impacting heat domes?

As our climate warms, we are likely to experience heat domes more often. “Heat domes are a common weather phenomena that we’ve seen for a long time, but we are seeing now, with the warming of the climate, that the number of heat domes is probably slightly increasing, but [also] the intensity of them, the heat in itself within them, is increasing,” says Gordon McBean, professor emeritus at Western University. 

There are two reasons for that. Greenhouse gases are warming the planet by trapping heat in the atmosphere—which contributes to the areas of high pressure that make up heat domes. Secondly, Arctic regions are warming faster than the areas closer to the equator. This difference is weakening the jet stream that helps influence temperatures we feel on the ground—slowing it down and leading to more lingering, high pressure systems, and high temperatures. “We believe that when the jet stream is weaker, it’s more likely to take this roller coaster-like pattern across the planet,” says Gallus. (The changing jet stream is also impacting our winters, setting the stage for severe weather storms and polar vortexes.)

Can anything be done to prevent worsening heat domes? 

Many regions around the world have begun to adopt heat-mitigating strategies to adapt to high temperatures—whether it be planting trees for shade or painting homes with heat-reflective paint. But to really address the cause of heat domes and ever-rising temperatures, experts emphasize that countries need to be lowering emissions around the world. 

“The atmosphere is going to be warming, and we have to start reducing our greenhouse gas emissions,” says McBean. 

Still, if we flipped a switch tomorrow and stopped all emissions, the atmosphere would still take decades to recover, says Gallus. “Even if we suddenly stopped burning fossil fuels and we weren’t adding any more greenhouse gasses, we’ve really warmed the atmosphere, so we’re going to have to pay the consequences.”

It’s both easy and hard to miss plastic grocery bags—easy because they’re strong, light, free, and they can double as little trash bags once you’ve got them home and emptied out your groceries, and the bags’ single-use purpose has been served; hard because the blasted things get everywhere. Discarded on trash piles, they get caught in the wind and tangled up in powerlines, collect around curbs and in gutters, and ultimately make their way out to the coasts, where they litter shorelines and even blow out to sea, entangling and suffocating marine life and leaching toxic chemicals into the water. Plastic bags and other plastic waste also discourage tourism in littered areas and reduce waterfront property values. According to one 2022 study, plastic waste costs the world $100 billion per year in damage to marine real estate and ecosystems.

Lawmakers have responded. Since 2010, more than 100 countries have implemented partial or total bans or fees on plastic shopping bags at either the national or subnational level. In the U.S., 611 state or local policies were enacted from 2008 to 2023—the overwhelming majority, 91%, imposed at the city or township level. 

Are plastic bag bans successful?

How effective are the measures, especially in the places the bags do the greatest harm—along the coasts? A new paper in Science asked that question, and the happy answer the researchers came up with?Very effective—in some cases slashing the number of plastic bags scattered on shorelines by close to 50%. With such environmental measures as recycling and biofuels often not living up to their hype, regulating plastic bags appears to count as a bright green win.

“I was surprised to see how effective plastic bag policies have been in reducing plastic bag shoreline litter,” says Kimberly Oremus, associate professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy at the University of Delaware, and co-author of the Science paper. “While they don’t eliminate the problem, they do help mitigate it. What makes me hopeful is the growing number and geographic spread of these policies in the U.S.”

The new study, which was led by environmental economist Anna Papp, an incoming postdoctoral scholar at MIT, reviewed the makeup of debris collected during 45,067 shoreline cleanups from January 2016 to December 2017, comparing the results of those locales that lay within jurisdictions that had implemented plastic bag restrictions to those that hadn’t. In the areas that did have bans or restrictions in place, there were  between 25% to 47% fewer bags than in unregulated areas. What’s more, there were 30% to 37% fewer reports of entangled animals in those areas.

How do plastic bag bans work?

The regulations on bags that were implemented in the so-called treated areas were all one of three types: outright bans on plastic bags; partial bans permitting thicker, reusable bags that do not travel as easily on the wind; and fees—essentially taxes—on plastic bags, paid as part of the grocery bill at checkout lines. Of the three, the partial bans were least effective at removing plastic bags from the coastal waste stream. Fees, surprisingly, were more effective than outright bans; the authors don’t have a definitive explanation for that, but they do have some ideas.

“One hypothesis,” says Oremus, “is that in at least some cases, the revenue from fees is being used to further reduce litter. Another hypothesis is that plastic bag fees are applied to more retailers than plastic bag bans. [Also], many full bans include exemptions for certain retailers or bag types, such as allowing plastic takeout bags at restaurants for food safety. Our final hypothesis is that fees could have higher compliance rates than a full ban.”

Whatever happens in the various jurisdictions does not stay in those jurisdictions. The researchers reported what they termed both negative and positive spillover from place to place, with some areas with regulations in effect nonetheless accumulating bags that blew in from unregulated districts, and some unregulated places turning out to be at least a little bit cleaner if they shared a border with a regulated community. On the whole, greater consistency throughout a larger geographic footprint is achieved by statewide bans, rather than patchwork county or township bans.

“Statewide regulations cover the largest number of people and cleanups in our time period,” says Papp. ”The robustness of their effects may be due to their more comprehensive geographical coverage, minimizing concerns related to spillovers, such as consumers bringing plastic bags from unregulated to regulated areas.”

What more can be done to reduce plastic waste?

Papp and Oremus see a need for continued plastic restrictions not just in the U.S., but elsewhere. One 2022 survey from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that they cite in their paper, for example, found that parts of Africa have 12 times more uncollected or mismanaged plastic waste than the U.S., all of which needs to be controlled or eliminated. Toward that end, report Papp and Oremus, 175 countries are now in talks to create the first global plastics treaty. The need for such a pact is pressing. Over 460 million metric tons of plastics are produced worldwide every year, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and over 20 million metric tons of that winds up discarded in the environment. That waste figure is set to triple by 2060, projects the OECD.

“Plastic bags are just one of the many types of plastic waste in the environment,” says Papp, “so, bag regulations are far from a complete solution. More-comprehensive solutions that address the production or supply of plastics are likely needed.”

A SpaceX rocket exploded on Wednesday night during testing, in what the company has called “a major anomaly.” No injuries have been reported.

“A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted for,” the company said in a statement posted to X. 

The incident occurred on the test stand at about 11 p.m. CT, while the rocket was preparing for its tenth flight test at the company’s South Texas headquarters in Starbase. 

The company has said that there are no hazards to residents in surrounding communities, but urged individuals to avoid approaching the zone of the accident while they work with local officials to ensure the area is safe. 

The accident marks the latest in a string of setbacks for the company’s Starship rockets. In January, one rocket broke apart near the Carribean, releasing a stream of smoke and debris in its wake. The company then lost contact with another rocket in March during a test flight, which broke apart over Florida. Another rocket, launched in Texas, spun out of control before landing in the Indian Ocean. 

The company has been in the spotlight lately following a very public spat between CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump earlier this month. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump threatened to pull government contracts for Musk’s projects.

Read More: What the Trump-Musk Feud Means for SpaceX and NASA

“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!” Trump said in a post on June 5. 

Later that evening, Musk responded: “In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately.” He deleted the tweet that same night. 

It wasn’t until an X user called for peace that Musk backed down: “This is a shame this back and forth. You are both better than this. Cool off and take a step back for a couple days.” Minutes later, Musk responded, “Good advice. OK, we won’t decommission Dragon.”

Space X has long had a working relationship with the federal government. At the end of last year, the company said it had $22 billion in government contracts, and in April the U.S. Space Force awarded the company a $5.9 billion contract, making it the leading provider of launch services for Pentagon satellites, according to Ars Technica. 

Does ChatGPT harm critical thinking abilities? A new study from researchers at MIT’s Media Lab has returned some concerning results.

The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.

The paper suggests that the usage of LLMs could actually harm learning, especially for younger users. The paper has not yet been peer reviewed, and its sample size is relatively small. But its paper’s main author Nataliya Kosmyna felt it was important to release the findings to elevate concerns that as society increasingly relies upon LLMs for immediate convenience, long-term brain development may be sacrificed in the process.

“What really motivated me to put it out now before waiting for a full peer review is that I am afraid in 6-8 months, there will be some policymaker who decides, ‘let’s do GPT kindergarten.’ I think that would be absolutely bad and detrimental,” she says. “Developing brains are at the highest risk.”

Read more: A Psychiatrist Posed As a Teen With Therapy Chatbots. The Conversations Were Alarming

Generating ideas

The MIT Media Lab has recently devoted significant resources to studying different impacts of generative AI tools. Studies from earlier this year, for example, found that generally, the more time users spend talking to ChatGPT, the lonelier they feel.

Kosmyna, who has been a full-time research scientist at the MIT Media Lab since 2021, wanted to specifically explore the impacts of using AI for schoolwork, because more and more students are using AI. So she and her colleagues instructed subjects to write 20-minute essays based on SAT prompts, including about the ethics of philanthropy and the pitfalls of having too many choices.

The group that wrote essays using ChatGPT all delivered extremely similar essays that lacked original thought, relying on the same expressions and ideas. Two English teachers who assessed the essays called them largely “soulless.” The EEGs revealed low executive control and attentional engagement. And by their third essay, many of the writers simply gave the prompt to ChatGPT and had it do almost all of the work. “It was more like, ‘just give me the essay, refine this sentence, edit it, and I’m done,’” Kosmyna says. 

The brain-only group, conversely, showed the highest neural connectivity, especially in alpha, theta and delta bands, which are associated with creativity ideation, memory load, and semantic processing. Researchers found this group was more engaged and curious, and claimed ownership and expressed higher satisfaction with their essays. 

The third group, which used Google Search, also expressed high satisfaction and active brain function. The difference here is notable because many people now search for information within AI chatbots as opposed to Google Search. 

After writing the three essays, the subjects were then asked to re-write one of their previous efforts—but the ChatGPT group had to do so without the tool, while the brain-only group could now use ChatGPT. The first group remembered little of their own essays, and showed weaker alpha and theta brain waves, which likely reflected a bypassing of deep memory processes. “The task was executed, and you could say that it was efficient and convenient,” Kosmyna says. “But as we show in the paper, you basically didn’t integrate any of it into your memory networks.”

The second group, in contrast, performed well, exhibiting a significant increase in brain connectivity across all EEG frequency bands. This gives rise to the hope that AI, if used properly, could enhance learning as opposed to diminishing it.

Read more: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

Post publication

This is the first pre-review paper that Kosmyna has ever released. Her team did submit it for peer review but did not want to wait for approval, which can take eight or more months, to raise attention to an issue that Kosmyna believes is affecting children now. “Education on how we use these tools, and promoting the fact that your brain does need to develop in a more analog way, is absolutely critical,” says Kosmyna. “We need to have active legislation in sync and more importantly, be testing these tools before we implement them.”

Psychiatrist Dr. Zishan Khan, who treats children and adolescents, says that he sees many kids who rely heavily on AI for their schoolwork. “From a psychiatric standpoint, I see that overreliance on these LLMs can have unintended psychological and cognitive consequences, especially for young people whose brains are still developing,” he says. “These neural connections that help you in accessing information, the memory of facts, and the ability to be resilient: all that is going to weaken.”

Ironically, upon the paper’s release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper.

Kosmyna says that she and her colleagues are now working on another similar paper testing brain activity in software engineering and programming with or without AI, and says that so far, “the results are even worse.” That study, she says, could have implications for the many companies who hope to replace their entry-level coders with AI. Even if efficiency goes up, an increasing reliance on AI could potentially reduce critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving across the remaining workforce, she argues.

Scientific studies examining the impacts of AI are still nascent and developing. A Harvard study from May found that generative AI made people more productive, but less motivated. Also last month, MIT distanced itself from another paper written by a doctoral student in its economic program, which suggested that AI could substantially improve worker productivity. 

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. Last year in collaboration with Wharton online, the company released guidance for educators to leverage generative AI in teaching. Last year in collaboration with Wharton online, the company released guidance for educators to leverage generative AI in teaching.

Correction, June 23

The original version of this story mischaracterized the way ChatGPT was described in the study. The paper did not leave out which version was used; due to a typo by its authors that will be fixed in forthcoming editions, it erroneously mentioned GPT-4o in one instance. This paragraph has been removed.

The odds were in your favor if you were one of the 242 people who boarded Air India flight 171 in Ahmedabad, India, bound for London on June 12. The plane you were flying was a Boeing 787 Dreamliner which has been in service since 2011 without a fatal crash. More than 1,100 Dreamliners are in use worldwide, carrying more than 875 million passengers over the last decade, according to Boeing. Your particular 787, delivered to Air India in 2014, had amassed 41,000 hours of flying time and just under 8,000 takeoffs and landings, according to Cirium, an aviation industry analytics firm.

But none of that would have helped you. Just after takeoff, when the plane was barely 625 ft. in the air, it lost altitude and plunged into a residential area, killing all but one of the passengers and crew on board. The cause of the crash is as yet unknown. 

“Our deepest condolences go out to the loved ones of the passengers and crew on board Air India Flight 171, as well as everyone affected in Ahmedabad,” said Boeing president and CEO Kelly Ortberg in a statement. “I have spoken with Air India Chairman N. Chandrasekaran to offer our full support, and a Boeing team stands ready to support the investigation led by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau.”

That investigation is likely to go deeper than just Flight 171, ranging back over the 14 years the 787s have been flying—years that, it turns out, have seen numerous complaints, concerns, and whistleblower reports over the safety of the widebody jet. All of them are getting a second look today.

The problems began in early 2013, when fires broke out aboard two Dreamliners owned by Japanese airlines. One plane had just landed at Boston’s Logan Airport, the other was just leaving Japan and had to turn around and land. Both blazes were traced to overheating of the planes’ lithium-ion batteries that power the electrical system. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) quickly stepped in, grounding the worldwide fleet of Dreamliners and temporarily halting the delivery of new ones to airlines that had placed orders for them. In April of 2013, the FAA accepted Boeing’s fixes, which involved better insulation for the batteries and a stainless steel box that would house the batteries and prevent smoke or flames from escaping into the plane if a fire did start. The Dreamliners were cleared to fly and the company was cleared to resume deliveries within weeks of the FAA’s decision.

The next incident occurred in 2019 when, as The New York Times reported in an exposé at the time, John Barnett, a former quality manager who retired in 2017, revealed that he had filed a whistleblower complaint, alleging sloppy work around the wires that connect the planes’ flight control systems, with metal shavings being left behind when bolts were fastened. The risk existed that the shavings would penetrate the wires’ insulation, leading to consequences that Barnett called “catastrophic.” 

Barnett also alleged that damaged or substandard parts were being installed in 787s, including a dented hydraulic tube that a senior manager retrieved from a bin of what was supposed to contain scrap. The FAA inspected several 787s that were said to be free of the shavings Barnett reported and found that they were indeed there, reported the Times. The FAA then ordered that Boeing correct the problems before the planes were delivered to customers. 

In retirement, Barnett sued Boeing, alleging that the company had denigrated his character and blocked his career advancement during his employment—charges Boeing denies. In March of 2024, he was in North Charleston, S.C., the site of the plant where he was employed, working on his case, when he was found dead in his truck from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

“Boeing may not have pulled the trigger,” Barnett’s family said in a wrongful death lawsuit it filed, “but Boeing’s conduct was the clear cause.”

The company sidestepped the charge: “We are saddened by John Barnett’s death and send our condolences to his family,” Boeing said in a statement.

Last year turned out to be a bad one for Boeing and the Dreamliner for reasons other than Barnett’s death. In January another whistleblower, engineer Sam Salehpour, came forward, reporting that sections of the fuselage of the Dreamliner were improperly connected, with gaps that could cause the plane to break apart during flight. When the sections wouldn’t fit, Salehpour claimed, workers would resort to brute force.

“I literally saw people jumping on the pieces of the airplane to get them to align,” Salehpour said in Capitol Hill testimony. “By jumping up and down, you’re deforming parts so that the holes align temporarily. I called it the Tarzan effect.”

In a statement on its website, Boeing defended the integrity of the Dreamliner: “For the in-service fleet, based on comprehensive analysis no safety issues have been identified related to composite gap management and our engineers are completing exhaustive analysis to determine any long-term inspection and maintenance required, with oversight from the FAA.”

Nonetheless, in May, the FAA acted again, announcing that Boeing had been ordered to reinspect “all 787 airplanes still within the production system and must also create a plan to address the in-service fleet.” That was not the first time the government had taken action on the problem of unacceptable gaps in the Dreamliner’s fuselage. From May 2021 to August 2022, the FAA halted the delivery of new Dreamliners to airline customers while the problem was addressed. Deliveries did resume but, as Salehpour testified, so did the shoddy work on the factory floor.

In March 2024, meantime, a LATAM Airlines flight from Sydney to Auckland suddenly plunged 400 ft. when the pilot’s seat in the 787 lurched forward unexpectedly. The captain recovered but 10 passengers and three members of the cabin crew were injured. 

For now, the 1,100 Dreamliners criss-crossing the skies are still flying. That could change pending the results of the Air India investigation. Even a temporary loss of the plane—which is a workhorse for long-haul flights—could be a hardship for both the airlines and the flying public. But as the grieving families of the passengers aboard the Air India flight could attest, loss of life is much worse.

If you’re trying to find someone to blame for climate change, don’t look at me. When it comes to having a small carbon footprint, I’m practically wearing pointe shoes. I last owned a car in 1979, when I moved to New York City and sold my Datsun B210—neither the company nor the vehicle even exists anymore. There I have spent the past decades getting around almost entirely by mass transit. That doesn’t mean my environmental hands are entirely clean, however—or that I don’t feel guilty for my lapses. I fly whenever I have to, I recycle only indifferently, I have not even considered making the greenest choice for my diet: going vegan.

I’m by no means alone in my sustainability shortcomings or in feeling guilty over them. A 2021 poll in The Lancet found that 50.2% of people surveyed experience guilt over their contribution to the state of the environment as a whole and climate change in particular. Among young people, the numbers are even greater. According to the branding and social impact consultancy BBMG, 61% of those under 30 said they feel guilty about the harm they’re helping to inflict on the planet. The guilt may not be entirely misplaced—especially among higher income people in developed countries.

“If I have the privilege of benefiting from all of the ways that this modern, Western, eurocentric life has allowed us to have certain benefits, I’m also part of the problem because I engage in certain practices,” says Wendy Greenspun, a clinical psychologist who is affiliated with Climate Psychology Alliance North America, an educational nonprofit. And while feelings of guilt may be higher among younger people, according to the BBMG poll, older adults are by no means spared their particular blame. “In the older generation, [guilt is] one of the primary climate-related emotions that are going on, because it’s like, what have we done to protect future generations, our own children and grandchildren?” says Greenspun.

Read more: Climate Anxiety Is Taking Its Toll on Young People

So just how lousy should we feel—and what can we do to get over it?

Why do I feel climate guilt but others don’t?

If about half of the people The Lancet polled feel guilty, that also means that many others don’t. Certainly that ostensibly blameless cohort is not made up entirely of people who have returned to the land, raise their own crops, own no car, and take no plane trips. So how do they dodge the negative feelings associated with modern living? One way is climate denial. If you have convinced yourself that human activity does not cause climate change, you get a free moral pass to live as you choose. One 2023 study in the Journal of Business Ethics researched this question, particularly as it pertains to air travel decisions.

“The more people feel responsible for pollution and environmental problems,” says Barbara Culiberg, associate professor of marketing at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and the lead author of the paper, “the more they feel guilty about the impact their air travel has on the planet.”

This, the researchers found, can have a direct cause-and-effect relationship on decisions to fly or not to fly. Indeed, according to a study the authors cite, 40% of Europeans polled reported that giving up flying would be the easiest sacrifice they could make to try to heal the planet—likely because it is not something that affects their lives every day, the way curbing driving or giving up meat would.

By any measure, climate denialism is a poor way to duck culpability for humanity’s environmental messes. It defies basic truths of science and contaminates rational debate with fallacious—and disproven—arguments. But it has served the fossil fuel industry well—and that’s not the only tool Big Oil has used to try and distract society from the main drivers of rising emissions. In 2004, BP coined the term “carbon footprint” as part of a global marketing campaign, even creating a carbon footprint calculator to make people aware of their own contribution to greenhouse emissions. The idea was promoted as a way for each of us to keep our own house clean, but it allowed Big Oil to stay dirty.

So is the solution to simply shift blame from the individual back onto the industrial sector, particularly agribusiness and the fossil fuel companies?

“If people feel others are responsible, they feel less guilty,” says Culiberg. That may be a fair enough calculation to make, but Culiberg—while not encouraging people to suffer guilt—does believe that doing so lets us all off a bit easy. “Anyone can point fingers at the fossil fuel companies and say they are responsible,” she says. “But this position will not solve the problem of climate change. As long as we drive our cars and fly across the globe, the fossil fuel companies will be in business, and we are thus contributing to the problem.”

Is guilt ever a positive thing?

For an emotion that feels so bad, guilt can do a lot of good—indeed, it’s one of our most adaptive traits, helping us abide by the social contract that binds us to behave well and cause no harm to others. When it comes to climate change, this can spur people to take action. 

“There can be an upside to guilt,” says Greenspun. “If we care about something and feel bad about the harms we are complicit with, it does often spur us to take mitigative action.”

“It’s OK to feel a little bit of guilt, if that means we’re going to channel that feeling into action,” says Michaela Barnett, a civil engineer and the owner of KnoxFill, a bulk sales business that seeks to limit the use of single-use containers. “When guilt is not effective is when it consumes and paralyzes us.”

Read more: How To Encourage More People to Talk About Climate Change

That happens more than we might think. As Barnett wrote in a 2023 article for Behavioral Scientist, unresolved environmental guilt can lead people into a spiral of hoarding recyclables, worrying over the finer points of organic certifications, upending their diet, eschewing most toiletries, and even agonizing over whether its ethical to have children, adding one more little body to the global weight of humanity.

Personalizing the environmental problem this way can be a very good thing from industry’s point of view—taking the heat off the big companies and putting it on consumers instead. 

Once the idea of a carbon footprint entered the zeitgeist, for example, “people became very stuck on this idea that it’s my personal responsibility,” says Greenspun. “That is really misguided. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all try to do our part, and that can be helpful in alleviating some level of guilt, but it also takes the responsibility away from the larger corporations that are really responsible.”

So what steps should we take?

By all means recycle. Drive less. Rethink your meat-centric diet. None of that does any harm, and all of it—in its own small, retail way—can help nudge the carbon needle the tiniest bit. It may also ease the guilt a little. But don’t stop there. 

It’s important to think about individual action in the context of inspiring collective change. No single one of us has anywhere near the power to shape the world that industry does, but we’re not limited to our solo efforts either. Barnett urges people to try to act in more system-wide ways. Don’t just compost your food, set up a composting pilot program in your community. Don’t just quit using single-use soda bottles, encourage your workplace to install a seltzer dispenser onsite. Campaign for environmentally friendly lawmakers; organize Earth Day demonstrations. Barnett founded KnoxFill after trying to focus “on living as perfectly as I could and yelling at my husband anytime he brought single-use plastics into our home, that wasn’t really sustainable.” Her company now serves 7,000 customers, all of whom come to shop for products as diverse as turmeric, laundry detergent, and sunscreen, filling up reusable containers from bins or tubs, and returning the next week with the same containers for different products.

“The supply chain is circular,” Barnett says. 

These kinds of actions ease the burden on both your conscience and the planet. You alone are not responsible for Earth’s increasingly sickly state, and you alone are not responsible for healing it. But in concert with both individuals and industry, you can help.

History does not record if Sally Ride rolled her eyes when she got a look at the plans for the first toiletry kit NASA put together for its female astronauts—but she’d have been within her rights to do so. The space agency certainly knew how to pack for men, providing them more or less the basics—deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrush, razor. The women would get the essentials too, but there would be more: lipstick, blush, eyeliner, and, critically, up to 100 tampons—because who-all knew just how many the average woman would need during the average week in space?

That first toiletry kit was planned before June 18, 1983, when Ride went aloft on the shuttle Challenger, becoming the first American woman in space, breaking the gender barrier the Soviets had broken with cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, just over 20 years to the day earlier. The tampon nonsense was not the only indignity NASA’s female astronauts in general and Ride in particular had to endure. Her story is chronicled in the evocative new documentary Sally, a 2025 winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Alfred P. Sloan feature film prize.

Among the memorable moments Ride experienced was the pre-flight press conference during which a TIME magazine correspondent raised his hand and asked, “Dr. Ride, a couple of fast questions, sir…ma’am.” There was, too, the reporter who pointedly asked Ride “Do you weep?” when confronted with a particularly knotty problem during training. There was the bouquet of flowers Ride was handed after the shuttle landed, intended as a gift to America’s first space heroine—a gift Ride politely refused to accept, sparking all manner of criticism in the mainstream press.

More important than all of that, though, was the private—exceedingly private—side to Ride, most notably her 27-year relationship with her life partner Tam O’Shaughnessy, a marriage-in-all-but-name that wasn’t revealed until Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012 at age 61, and O’Shaughnessy told the world in the obituary she wrote to mark her mate’s passing. Not long before Ride died, O’Shaughnessy gently broached how—and whether—she should reveal their more-than quarter century secret.

“I asked Sally about that. I said, you know, ‘I’m kind of worried. I don’t know what I’m going to write, you know, how I’m going to navigate this,’” O’Shaughnessy recalled in a recent conversation with TIME, ahead of the release of the film. “And she said, ‘You decide. Whatever you decide will be the right thing to do.’”

The film, written, produced, and directed by Cristina Costantini, premiers on the National Geographic channel on June 16, and becomes available for streaming on Disney+ and Hulu on June 17. As it reveals, Sally and Tam made a lot of right—and tough—choices in the time they had together, and Ride did much the same when it came to the professional trajectory that took her to space. There is no minimizing just how alien the notion of female astronauts was at the start, at least in the U.S. The film includes a clip of Gordon Cooper, one of NASA’s original seven astronauts, being interviewed in the early 1960s. “Is there any room in the space program for a woman?” the reporter asked. “Well,” Cooper answered without a trace of a smile, “we could have used a woman and flown her instead of the chimpanzee.”

It wasn’t until 1976, a decade and a half after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, that NASA opened up its astronaut selection process to women and people of color. More than 8,000 hopefuls applied; in 1978, NASA selected 35 of them to become astronauts, including three Black people, one Asian American, and six women. Ride was among them, as was Judith Resnik, who would lose her life when the shuttle Challenger exploded at the start of its tenth mission in January 1986. There was a great deal of  handicapping inside and outside of NASA as to which woman would fly first—much the way there was among the men in the run-up to Shepard’s flight in 1961—and Ride and Resnik were considered the leading candidates. Ultimately, as Sally recounts, Ride was chosen because she struck NASA mission planners as slightly less distracted by the celebrity attending being number one, focusing more on the mission and less on the history she would make. 

“She loved physics and she loved space exploration,” says O’Shaughnessy, “and with those things she could be intense, driven.”

Ride loved O’Shaughnessy too—though it was a devotion that was a long time in the making. The two met when Ride was 13 and O’Shaughnessy was 12 and they were standing in line to check in to play in a tennis tournament in Southern California, where they both grew up. Ride repeatedly rose restlessly to her tiptoes, and O’Shaughnessy said, “‘You’re walking on your toes like a ballet dancer,’” she recalls in the film. “That kind of started our friendship. Sally was kind of quiet, but she would talk for eight minutes straight on different players and how to beat ‘em, how to whup ‘em.”

The two grew quickly close, but went in different directions, with Ride studying physics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania for three semesters beginning in 1968 and later at UCLA for the summer semester before transferring to Stanford as a junior, and O’Shaughnessy becoming a professional tennis player from 1971 to 1974, ultimately playing in both the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. O’Shaughnessy accepted her sexuality early, openly, and enthusiastically.

“I was on the tennis circuit and there were a few queer women,” she told TIME. “But it was also just the atmosphere, even the straight women. No one really cared who you slept with…I was going to the gay bars in San Francisco and dancing with my friends.”

For Ride, things were different. When she was at Stanford she fell in love with her female roommate and the two were together for four years. But Ride insisted on keeping the relationship largely under wraps and that secrecy was a no-go for her partner. “She couldn’t stand being so closeted and decided to move on with her life,” says O’Shaughnessy.

Ride would later choose an opposite sex partner, marrying fellow astronaut Steve Hawley in 1982, a move that was more than just an accommodating pose for a public figure in a country not ready for same-sex marriage, but less than a true union of the heart. “They were really good friends,” O’Shaughnessy says. “They had a lot in common. He was an astronomer, Sally was a physicist. They had stuff to talk about. They were both so thrilled to be selected to be astronauts and they both liked sports, so I think they had a solid friendship.”

It wasn’t enough. The two divorced in 1987, but even before they did, Ride and O’Shaughnessy began drifting together as more than just friends. At the time, O’Shaughnessy was living in Atlanta, after retiring from the tennis circuit; Ride, who was living in Houston, would visit her frequently.

“I never thought we would become romantic,” O’Shaughnessy says, “but it just turned that way one afternoon in the spring of 1985. When she would come to town, we would typically go for runs and long walks and just spend time together. Back at my place one day, we were just talking. I had an old cocker spaniel named Annie, I leaned over to pet her, and the next thing I knew, Sally’s hand was on my lower back. And it felt unusual. I turned to look at her and I could tell she was in love with me.”

As O’Shaughnessy recalls in the film, she said, “Oh boy, we’re in trouble.” Ride responded, “We don’t have to be. We don’t have to do this.” Then they kissed. 

Ride would ultimately fly twice in space, going aloft the second time in 1984, once again aboard the shuttle Challenger. After that snake-bit ship came to tragic ruin, exploding 73 seconds into its last flight and claiming the lives of all seven crewmembers, Ride and Neil Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11 and the first man on the moon, served on the commission that investigated the causes of the accident. Ride left NASA in 1987, accepting a fellowship at Stanford and later became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. In 1989, O’Shaughnessy moved out west to live with her. It would not be until 2013, a year after Ride’s death, that California would permanently legalize gay marriage, and it would not be until 2015 that the Supreme Court would do the same nationwide. That was alright with Ride, who, as with her relationship with her college roommate, continued to believe that her love for O’Shaughnessy should remain a quiet and relatively private thing. But all that began to change in 2011.

It was early that year that Ride first showed signs of illness—poor appetite and yellowing cheeks. Her doctor diagnosed pancreatic cancer. “The doctor never said what stage. He never said the worst stage. We thought she was going to get better, and we were trying everything,” O’Shaughnessy recalls. “She was doing acupuncture, we were meditating, we became vegans. And then one day, we’re at the oncologist, and he said, ‘It’s time for hospice.’ And Sally and I were, like, shocked.”

Not long before Ride died, the couple grew concerned that O’Shaughnessy would not be allowed to visit her in the hospital, help make critical care decisions, or share property because they were not married—and could not be in California. So they went for the next best thing, registering as certified domestic partners, which afforded them the necessary rights.

“It’s the worst phrase,” says O’Shaughnessy. “We used to call each other certified domestic hens, because it’s such a bad term.”

Whatever name they went by, they would not get to enjoy their newly legalized status for long. Ride passed on July 23, 2012, just 17 months after she was diagnosed. At first NASA planned no formal memorial or celebration of Ride’s life. Then, the next month, Armstrong died and a memorial was held at the Washington National Cathedral, with 1,500 people in attendance.

“I got mad,” O’Shaughnessy says. She called then-Senator Barbara Mikulski (D, Md.) who chaired the Senate Committee on Appropriations and oversaw NASA’s budget. Mikulski called then-NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, who at first offered up a relatively intimate affair for 300 people at the National Air and Space Museum. O’Shaughnessy pressed, and ultimately won approval for a far more prepossessing event at the Kennedy Center in 2013.

Today, Ride’s legacy lives on in Sally Ride Science, a nonprofit founded by Ride and O’Shaughnessy in 2001 to inspire girls to become scientifically literate and to draw girls and women into the STEM fields. It lives on too in astronaut Peggy Whitson, who now holds the U.S. record for most time spent in space, at 675 days over four missions. It lives on in Christina Koch, who will become the first woman to travel to the moon, when she flies aboard Artemis II on its circumlunar journey in 2026. It lives on in NASA’s current 46-person astronaut corps, of whom 19 are women. Ride flew high, Ride flew fast, and Ride flew first—doing service to both science and human equity in the process. Sally powerfully tells her tale.