A massive flash of light illuminated the skies above Illinois and Wisconsin on Sunday. It blazed a Northeasterly path bright enough for folks to spot from New York to Minnesota before falling into Lake Michigan. You're probably picturing a steaming rock, hissing briefly as it hit the chilly surface of the Great Lake. But you'd be wrong. “That was completely made up in Hollywood,” says Mike Hankey, Operations Manager and meteorite hunter at the American Meteor Society. “It's literally cold when you first touch it.” He would know—he's been tracking down meteorites for years with the AMS and has found many a meteorite chunk. “Everyone always writes in saying they know they've found a meteorite because it was hot,” he says. “Nope, definitely not.”
Korabl-Sputnik 1, called Sputnik 4 in the West, wasn't one of the Soviet Union's greatest triumphs of the early space age. Following a successful mission, a flawed retrofire burn kept the spacecraft aloft until its orbit decayed, splrinkling radioactive metallic debris over Wisconsin.
Why is a Wisconsin scientist using science fiction-like stories to talk about global warming? According to Quest, the public broadcasting science series, the goal of “Yahara 2070” is to get local communities in the Yahara watershed, a 386 square-mile (1,000 square-kilometer) area surrounding Madison, into constructive discussions about adapting to the effects of climate disruption. Rather than do it solely via the usual high-level scientific lingo, however, limnologist (fresh water scientist) Steve Carpenter worked with a writer and an illustrator to create four human-scale visions of the region's future, based on the best current scientific data and trends, as well as interviews and workshops with people living in the watershed.
