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The small wonders of the solar system
In today’s newsletter, solving Mexico’s seaweed problem; staring at the sun; how COVID affects the brain; the alphabet soup of government agencies
This article is an adaptation of our weekly Science newsletter that was originally sent out on August 25, 2021. Want this in your inbox? Sign up here.
By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE executive editor
It was the year that Pokémon first aired on American TV, Cher dominated the radio with obvious auto-tune, and (appropriately enough) both Armageddon and Deep Impact were among the 10 highest-grossing films. Arguably, 1998 was also the year that the world got hooked on news reports about potentially hazardous asteroids.
These days the internet is awash in stories about big space rocks sailing near Earth—some coming even closer to us than the moon. Since you’re here calmly reading this newsletter, you know that most of these interlopers don’t ever get close enough to cause significant damage to the planet. It’s tempting to roll my eyes sometimes at the alarmist-sounding headlines. But there
