 Illustration by Kate Steiner By Charles Bonkowsky
On October 20, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe will make its first attempt at retrieving pieces of an asteroid for study. The spacecraft will touch down over 200 million miles from Earth on the small, diamond-shaped asteroid named Bennu, landing for no more than a few seconds to collect loose particles of rock and dust from the surface before jetting away. If successful, it will become the first U.S. mission to retrieve samples from an asteroid and only the third in history, behind two Japanese probes, Hayabusa and Hayabusa 2.
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 By Hannah Prensky
In the summer of 2019, patients agglomerated in emergency rooms gasping for breath, facing lung failure, and suffering through signs of severe lung tissue damage and scarring. These patients were not victims of chemical attacks, nor were they elderly life-long smokers—rather, they were young people with vapes. In October 2019, a 17-year-old boy from the Bronx became the first teenager to die from a vaping-related illness; later that month, a teenager in Montana died of a vaping-related lung disease. This national outbreak has affected over 2,000 patients and killed more than 39 people in the last year alone. In fact, vaping illnesses had grown into such a rampant epidemic that the Governor’s Office of New York declared in fall 2019 that the state would outlaw the sale of all flavored vaping products. |