Nobody will be giving out any medals now that Blue Origin’s eleventh crewed space flight is in the books. The brief suborbital sojourn lifted off April 14, at 8:30 a.m. CDT and landed just 11 minutes later. There was certainly news coverage but not the kind of global audience that has attended other crewed space launches. That’s not the way it was on May 5, 1961, when NASA astronaut Alan Shepard flew a similar flight profile—a popgun trajectory above the atmosphere and a landing just a few hundred miles down range—becoming the first American in space. Shepard earned instant celebrity, visiting President John Kennedy at the White House three days later to receive NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal. Since then, more than 700 people have flown to space, crossing the 50-mile altitude line that was originally considered the boundary between the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial. (In the 1960s, the bar was raised a little bit, to 100 km, or 62 miles, establishing the so-called Kármán line, after the Hungarian-American physicist and engineer Theodore von Kármán.) Blue Origin alone has so far lofted 58 people above the Kármán line over the course of 11 flights since 2021. But this most recent flight, the company said, was special—thanks to the composition of the crew. Aboard the New Shepard spacecraft were six people, including pop star Katy Perry; television personality Gayle King; journalist Lauren Sánchez, who is also engaged to Jeff Bezos, founder of both Amazon and Blue Origin; filmmaker Kerianne Flynn; bioastronautics researcher and advocate for sexual violence survivors—and a TIME Woman of the Year—Amanda Nguyen; and former NASA rocket scientist and CEO of the engineering firm STEMboard, Aisha Bowe. Female astronauts have become commonplace enough that the fact that the crew was composed entirely of women didn't immediately cause a sensation. But the fact is, this was the first time since the Soviet Union’s Valentina Tereshkova flew to orbit alone aboard the Vostok 6 spacecraft in 1963 that no men at all have been aboard a crewed ship. "These women are so badass…they have such amazing life stories, all that they've accomplished," King said on CBS Mornings. "This was never my dream. It was never my dream. And somebody said, ‘Maybe you need to have new dreams, Gayle.’" “If you had told me that I would be part of the first ever all-female crew in space, I would have believed you,” Perry posted on Facebook. “Nothing was beyond my imagination as a child. I can show all of the youngest & most vulnerable among us to reach for the stars, literally and figuratively. I am honored to be among this diverse group of celestial sisters.” In an email blast inviting journalists to cover the launch, Blue Origin referred to the mission’s “epic crew.” But was this really news—or was there at least a whiff of condescension in making a fuss about the fact that a group of women are flying without a man to keep them company? Tereshkova’s flight was 62 years ago. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space 42 years ago. Eileen Collins became the first female shuttle commander 26 years ago. Peggy Whitson became the first female commander of the International Space Station (ISS) 18 years ago. As for NASA’s current record holder for longest cumulative time in space? Whitson again, at 675 days. In 2019, NASA made much hay when astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch performed the first all-female spacewalk and by then the whole idea of marking these moments started to seem old. “Oh I could tell you tales from bygone days of the male engineers’ original ideas of clothing and hygiene products for women astronauts,” wrote retired five-time shuttle astronaut Marsha Ivins for TIME in 2019. “[B]ut we are talking the late ’70s, early ‘80s. By the time I flew in space in the ‘90s, those things had changed; they’d evolved, emerged, progressed and been accommodated for. By then a crew member was just a crew member. The same is true today…Not a big deal. So why the continued insistence on making it a big deal?” Ivins felt much the same about the Blue Origin flight. “​​It was in the mid-1990s … that someone came up with the media stunt to fly an all women shuttle flight,” she wrote in an email to TIME. “It was floated to the women in the office and we all said, ‘oh HELL no!’ Personally I found the whole concept insulting. We were always part of a crew, working together to ensure the success of a mission, gender had exactly zero to do with it.” Not that career astronauts see no merit at all in the flights Blue Origin makes. “Space tourist flights like Blue Origin’s New Shepard are positive in so many ways,” writes retired astronaut and former ISS commander Terry Virts in an email. “They support the burgeoning commercial space industry, and they allow more humans to see our beautiful planet from outer space and experience the amazing sensation of weightlessness.” The key nouns here are “tourists” and “humans,” not “men” or “women” or, significantly, “astronauts.” Passengers aboard a New Shepard ship pay for the privilege of flying, and while Blue Origin does not go public with what a ticket costs, the company does require that a refundable $150,000 deposit accompany an initial application to go aloft. All the same, it does take at least a little courage and a bit of grit to make a New Shepard flight. The rocket reaches a velocity of over 2,200 mph, or close to Mach 3, on the way up, plunges back through the atmosphere like a cannonball after a few minutes of weightlessness, and depends on a parachute to bring the passengers home safely—not the kind of chances every traveler would want to take. But that risk applies to everyone equally—with the physics of the flight not giving a fig about who’s in the seat. “The fact that this is an all-female crew is basically irrelevant,” says John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University and the former director of the school’s Space Policy Institute before the launch. “Women are just as capable as men, and in fact there is very little piloting involved. I see this as a way of attracting future business to what is basically adventure travel.” If there is an example of space diversity that does warrant celebration, it’s in the upcoming plans for NASA’s Artemis astronauts to return to the moon. Artemis II, scheduled for a translunar mission late in 2026, includes crewmembers Christina Koch and Victor Glover, who will become the first woman and the first Black person to make a lunar trip. The Apollo moon missions were arguably the greatest exploration exercises in human history and women and people of color were entirely excluded from them. That is a true wrong that the nation is setting out to right—and well it should.

The moon is not about to change its size. Almost since its formation more than four billion years ago, it has maintained a mean diameter of 2,159.2 miles. That’s less than the distance from Los Angeles to New York. As NASA puts it, if the Earth were the size of a nickel, the moon would be about the size of a coffee bean. But that doesn’t mean the moon can’t look bigger or smaller—and this Saturday, April 12, it will be comparatively tiny, amounting to what sky watchers call a micromoon. Here’s what you need to know. On any given night, the moon can appear to change its size—sometimes dramatically. Thanks to the so-called moon illusion, it may appear especially large—sometimes huge—when it is low in the sky, hugging the horizon, and then appearing to shrink steadily as it climbs in the sky. But your eyes and, significantly, your brain, are lying. To prove it, simply stretch your arm out, close one eye, and hold your index finger up. Your fingernail and the moon will appear about the same size, regardless of how big or small the moon looks. What’s going on is a trick of the mind; at the horizon, you make an unconscious comparison between the size of the moon and the size of objects like houses and trees, with the moon appearing to dwarf them. High overhead the moon is the one that gets dwarfed by the emptiness of the sky. Your mind thus concludes that it has shrunk. The micromoon is something else. On average, the moon is 238,855 miles from Earth, but that figure changes. The moon’s orbit around the Earth is elliptical, with a low point, or perigee, of about 224,000 miles, and a high point, or apogee, of 251,650 miles. When we see the moon at perigee, closer to Earth, it naturally looks bigger—creating the phenomenon known as a supermoon, when the lunar disk appears 7% larger and 15% brighter than it typically does. At apogee—which is where the moon will be this weekend—it will appear 14% smaller and 30% dimmer, creating the illusion of the micromoon. This micromoon will also be known as a pink moon, though that has nothing to do with its color. (That’s unlike the blood moon, which occurs during a lunar eclipse, when the Earth’s shadow falls on the moon, and the blue wavelengths of sunlight streaming past our planet are scattered by the atmosphere while the red wavelengths pass through, tinting the moon.) The pink moon is just a nickname for the full moon that occurs in April, as a nod to the flowers that bloom in the season. The pink micromoon will begin rising at dusk this Saturday, reaching its greatest illumination at 8:22 PM EDT. Space enthusiasts will be looking upward then, just as they do for a supermoon. But not everyone gets so excited. As no-less an authority than astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted back in 2017: “If last month’s Full Moon were a 16.0 inch pizza, then this month’s ‘Super’ Moon would be 16.1 inches. I’m just saying.” By that measure, the micromoon will be a 13.76-inch pie. Enjoy it all the same.

Climate change is bad news for a lot of reasons—the droughts, the floods, the heat, the hurricanes. And then, too, there’s all the sneezing. If you suffer from hay fever—or allergic rhinitis (AR)—and have found your symptoms growing worse in recent years, you’re not alone. Increasingly, health care professionals are concluding that as global heat increases so too do allergy symptoms. In industrialized countries, hay fever diagnoses are rising by 2% to 3% per year, costing billions of dollars in health care and lost productivity. Spring pollen season, which typically begins in late February or early March and ends in early summer, is now arriving as much as 20 days early in North America. Now, a new study in the journal The Laryngoscope has taken a deep dive into the research surrounding the link and has found that not only is it a real phenomenon, it’s been going on at least since the turn of the millennium. The study is what’s known as a scoping review of the literature, one that takes the measure of the body of papers published on a particular topic in a particular time frame and seeks to come away with an idea of what the emerging consensus is on the science. To do this, the authors of the current work sought to survey all of the available studies that addressed the link between climate change and allergies. More specifically, they zoomed in to focus on studies published from 2000 to 2023 that explored the precise climatological mechanisms that would cause global warming to exacerbate hay fever symptoms and which also measured how a warming world affects the length and severity of hay fever season. Only 30 met these exacting standards. “We were very specific in our inclusion and exclusion criteria,” says Alisha Pershad, a third-year medical student at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and the corresponding author of the new study. “By minimizing variability in our included studies, we were able to improve the strength of our conclusions.” Those conclusions revealed a lot. A little over half of the studies Pershad and her colleagues looked at reported longer pollen seasons or higher pollen concentrations—or both—linked to climate change. One projected that pollen emissions in the U.S, would increase by 16% to 40% by the turn of the century and that the average length of pollen season would increase by 19 days beyond the already-observed 20-day increase. Five of the studies found that that lengthening will continue to occur at the beginning of the season. In Europe, projections showed a probable increase in Ambrosia—or ragweed pollen—also linked to rising temperatures. Individual studies deepened the link between climate and hay fever. One 2021 paper out of Australia reported that daily maximum temperature, higher carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, and the grass pollen index were all higher from 2016 to 2020 than they were from 1994 to 1999, pointing to a causal link running straight from CO2 to pollen. A European study from 2017 modeled projected increased growth in allergenic plants from 2041 to 2060 and predicted that the population of people allergic to ragweed would increase from 33 million to 77 million across the continent in that same time window, as plant coverage encroached into more and more communities. Meanwhile, a 2025 study from China found that pediatric outpatient visits for AR were on the rise, consistent with an increase in peak pollen concentrations. As one 2025 study not covered in the current paper pointed out, children are “particularly vulnerable to these airborne particles due to their higher ventilation per unit of body weight, more frequent mouth breathing, and outdoor activities.” The papers in the survey also looked at the mechanism that links climate change to increases in hay fever. A pair of studies both in the wild and in the lab showed that greater humidity and higher levels of carbon dioxide—which is a known growth and reproductive stimulator of plants—increase the dispersal of allergenic pollen, while an increase in precipitation effectively washes out the air, bringing pollen levels down. Another study focused specifically on the mold allergen Aspergillus and found that it thrives under present carbon dioxide concentrations compared to lower pre-industrial levels. Not everyone suffers equally from the current trends. As with so many other things, race, income, age, and zip code play a role in the severity and epidemiology of hay fever symptoms, with Black and Hispanic communities, seniors, and lower-income populations being hit worse. Cities, with lower concentrations of trees, weeds, and flowering plants, nonetheless are associated with worsening hay fever symptoms too, due to higher temperatures and the griddle effect of concrete and asphalt, producing the urban heat island phenomenon. “Communities historically impacted by environmental inequities such as red-lining tend to live in regions that experience warmer daytime temperatures,” says Pershad. Allergenic mold discriminates demographically too. “[Mold] is especially a concern for lower income communities that may not have the resources to address the water damage to their home as quickly as necessary to avoid mold growth,” Pershad adds. “Global warming is exacerbating weather extremes such as hurricanes and flooding, which increase the risk of mold growth, a common environmental allergen.” Health care providers are tracking these changes. One 2022 study out of Italy found that 56% of pulmonologists agree that pollen season appears to start earlier and last longer, 45% have observed an increase in their AR patient population, and 61% are seeing an increase in cases among children particularly. Fully 97% of doctors surveyed reported that they wanted to learn more about the impact of climate change on hay fever incidence. “Physicians are uniquely positioned to witness the impact of allergic rhinitis on patient outcomes and can adapt their practice as climate change intensifies,” said Pershad in a statement accompanying the release of the study. “As trusted voices in the community, they should leverage their frontline experience to advocate for meaningful change in addressing the climate crisis.”

Romulus and Remus are doing what puppies do: chasing, tussling, nipping, nuzzling. But there’s something very un-puppylike about the snowy white 6-month olds—their size, for starters. At their young age they already measure nearly 4 ft. long, tip the scales at 80 lb., and could grow to 6 ft. and 150 lb. Then there’s their behavior: the angelic exuberance puppies exhibit in the presence of humans—trotting up for hugs, belly rubs, kisses—is completely absent. They keep their distance, retreating if a person approaches. Even one of the handlers who raised them from birth can get only so close before Romulus and Remus flinch and retreat. This isn’t domestic canine behavior, this is wild lupine behavior: the pups are wolves. Not only that, they’re dire wolves—which means they have cause to be lonely. The dire wolf once roamed an American range that extended as far south as Venezuela and as far north as Canada, but not a single one has been seen in over 10,000 years, when the species went extinct. Plenty of dire wolf remains have been discovered across the Americas, however, and that presented an opportunity for a company named Colossal Biosciences. Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished. TIME met the males (Khaleesi was not present due to her young age) at a fenced field in a U.S. wildlife facility on March 24, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes. Subscribe Apr 7, 2025 6:20 PM IST The Return of the Dire Wolf Science animals Photographs by Robert Clark for TIME Story by Jeffrey Kluger Romulus and Remus are doing what puppies do: chasing, tussling, nipping, nuzzling. But there’s something very un-puppylike about the snowy white 6-month olds—their size, for starters. At their young age they already measure nearly 4 ft. long, tip the scales at 80 lb., and could grow to 6 ft. and 150 lb. Then there’s their behavior: the angelic exuberance puppies exhibit in the presence of humans—trotting up for hugs, belly rubs, kisses—is completely absent. They keep their distance, retreating if a person approaches. Even one of the handlers who raised them from birth can get only so close before Romulus and Remus flinch and retreat. This isn’t domestic canine behavior, this is wild lupine behavior: the pups are wolves. Not only that, they’re dire wolves—which means they have cause to be lonely. Advertisement 00:13 03:00 Read More The dire wolf once roamed an American range that extended as far south as Venezuela and as far north as Canada, but not a single one has been seen in over 10,000 years, when the species went extinct. Plenty of dire wolf remains have been discovered across the Americas, however, and that presented an opportunity for a company named Colossal Biosciences. Dire Wolf Time Magazine cover Photograph by Robert Clark for TIME Buy a copy of the Dire Wolf issue here Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished. TIME met the males (Khaleesi was not present due to her young age) at a fenced field in a U.S. wildlife facility on March 24, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes. Advertisement Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang Branded Content Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang By China Daily The dire wolf isn’t the only animal that Colossal, which was founded in 2021 and currently employs 130 scientists, wants to bring back. Also on their de-extinction wish list is the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Already, in March, the company surprised the science community with the news that it had copied mammoth DNA to create a woolly mouse, a chimeric critter with the long, golden coat and the accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth. If all this seems to smack of P.T. Barnum, the company has a reply. Colossal claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves. What they learn restoring the mammoth, they say, could help them engineer more robust elephants that can better survive the climatic ravages of a warming world. Bring back the thylacine and you might help preserve the related marsupial known as the quoll. Techniques learned restoring the dire wolf can similarly be used to support the endangered red wolf. “We are an evolutionary force at this point,” says Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, speaking of humanity as a whole. “We are deciding what the future of these species will be.” The Center for Biological Diversity suggests that 30% of the planet’s genetic diversity will be lost by 2050, and Shapiro and Colossal CEO Ben Lamm insist that genetic engineering is a vital tool to reverse this. Company executives often frame the technology not just as a moral good, but a moral imperative—a way for humans, who have driven so many species to the brink of extinction, to get square with nature. “If we want a future that is both bionumerous and filled with people,” Shapiro says, “we should be giving ourselves the opportunity to see what our big brains can do to reverse some of the bad things that we’ve done to the world already.” The woolly mouse, to a minor extent, and the dire wolves, to a scientifically seismic one, are first steps in that direction. But not everyone agrees. Scientific history is rife with examples of newly introduced species becoming invasive species—the doctrine of unintended consequences biting humans when we played too cute with other animals. An exotic pet escapes and multiplies, decimating native species. A toad brought in to kill off beetles ends up killing off the marsupials that eat the toads. And genetic engineering is still a nascent field. Nearly 30 years after Dolly the sheep was cloned, the technology still produces problems in cloned animals, such as large birth size, organ defects, premature aging, and immune-system problems. What’s more, cloning can be hard on the surrogate mother that gestates the cloned embryo. “There’s a risk of death. There’s a risk of side effects that are severe,” says Robert Klitzman, professor of psychiatry and director of the bioethics master's program at Columbia University. “There’s a lot of suffering involved in that. There are going to be miscarriages.” Still, Colossal’s scientists believe they are on to something powerful. Matt James, the company’s chief animal officer—who once worked as senior director of animal care at the Dallas Zoo and Zoo Miami, where he managed the welfare of 7,000 animals representing 500 species—felt the significance of the science when Romulus and Remus were just 5 or 6 weeks old. The staff was weighing the little pups, and one of the veterinary techs began singing a song from The Little Mermaid. When she reached a point at which she vocalized first up, then down, Romulus and Remus turned her way and began howling in response. “For me,” James says, “it was sort of a shocking, chilling moment.” These pups were the first to produce a howl that hadn’t been heard on earth in over 10,000 years. It takes surprisingly few genetic changes to spell the difference between a living species and an extinct one. Like other canids, a wolf has about 19,000 genes. (Humans and mice have about 30,000.) Creating the dire wolves called for making just 20 edits in 14 genes in the common gray wolf, but those tweaks gave rise to a host of differences, including Romulus’ and Remus’ white coat, larger size, more powerful shoulders, wider head, larger teeth and jaws, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining. The dire wolf genome analyzed to determine what those changes were was extracted from two ancient samples—one a 13,000-year-old tooth found in Sheridan Pit, Ohio, the other a 72,000-year-old ear bone unearthed in American Falls, Idaho. The samples were lent by the museums that house them. The lab work that happened next was painstaking. Cloning typically requires snipping a tissue sample from a donor animal and then isolating a single cell. The nucleus of that cell—which contains all of the animal’s DNA—is then extracted and inserted into an ovum whose own nucleus has been removed. That ovum is allowed to develop into an embryo and then implanted in a surrogate mother’s womb. The baby that results from that is an exact genetic duplicate of the original donor animal. This is the way the first cloned animal, Dolly, was created in 1996. Since then, pigs, cats, deer, horses, mice, goats, gray wolves, and more than 1,500 dogs have been cloned using the same technology. Colossal’s dire wolf work took a less invasive approach, isolating cells not from a tissue sample of a donor gray wolf, but from its blood. The cells they selected are known as endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of blood vessels. The scientists then rewrote the 14 key genes in the cell’s nucleus to match those of the dire wolf; no ancient dire wolf DNA was actually spliced into the gray wolf’s genome. The edited nucleus was then transferred into a denucleated ovum. The scientists produced 45 engineered ova, which were allowed to develop into embryos in the lab. Those embryos were inserted into the wombs of two surrogate hound mixes, chosen mostly for their overall health and, not insignificantly, their size, since they’d be giving birth to large pups. In each mother, one embryo took hold and proceeded to a full-term pregnancy. (No dogs experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth.) On Oct. 1, 2024, the surrogates birthed Romulus and Remus. A few months later, Colossal repeated the procedure with another clutch of embryos and another surrogate mother. On Jan. 30, 2025, that dog gave birth to Khaleesi. During their pregnancies, the mama hounds were kept at Colossal’s animal-care facility, where they were regularly monitored and given weekly ultrasounds by staff scientists and veterinarians. All three wolves were born by planned cesarean section to minimize the risk of birthing complications. A four-person team performed the surgery and lifted out the pups; four more attendants cleaned and swaddled the newborns while the surgical team looked after the mother as she emerged from anesthesia. “We elected to put both pups with the surrogate who was displaying the best maternal instincts,” says James. “That reintroduction occurred just about two or so hours after birth, and she immediately began caring for them and allowing them to nurse.” The pups fed from the surrogate for just a few days, after which the Colossal team removed them and bottle-fed them because the surrogate was actually becoming too attentive—disrupting the pups’ regular sleeping and feeding schedules. They were weaned at eight weeks and have been living the lives of healthy young dire wolves since then. “The idea that we could just take a vial of blood, isolate EPCs, culture them, and clone from them, and they have a pretty high cloning efficiency, we think it’s a game changer,” says George Church, Colossal co-founder, and professor of genetics at both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The less invasive cell-sampling process will make the procedure easier on animals, and the fact that Colossal’s methods worked on this early go-round boosts company confidence that they are on track for much broader de-extinction and rewilding. Since their births, the dire wolves have lived on a 2,000-acre ecological preserve at a location in the U.S. that Colossal also keeps secret to protect the animals; the grounds are much larger than the relatively small enclosure TIME visited. The 2,000 acres are surrounded by a 10-ft. fence and include a smaller six-acre site with a veterinary clinic, an extreme-weather shelter, and natural dens where the wolves can satisfy their innate desire for a secure retreat. A staff of veterinarians looks out for the animals around the clock. The wolves are fed a diet of beef, horse, and deer meat as well as liver and other offal, along with puppy chow to provide vital nutrients. When they were just weaned, the meat was served pureed, which is similar to the partially digested meat a mother will regurgitate to feed her young. Now the food is presented whole so the wolves can tear it apart as they would if they had hunted it down. So far they have not actually killed any small, live prey that may have ventured into their enclosure. “We have not seen them attempt to hunt any live prey, and we do not provide live prey,” says Paige McNickle, Colossal’s manager of animal husbandry. “But if I were a deer I would stay away from their preserve.” “I think they are the luckiest animals ever,” says Shapiro. “They will live their entire life on this protected ecological reserve, where they have all sorts of space. These animals were hand reared. They’re not capable of living in the wild, and we want to study them for their lives and understand how these edits might have modified things that we can’t predict. They’re not going to be able to get a splinter without us finding out.” So far nothing worrisome or unexpected has turned up in the wolves. The effort to produce a woolly mammoth is on something of a tight schedule. The woolly mice gestated fast, popping out into the world after a pregnancy of 20 days. The wolf pups took just 65 days to bake. Asian elephants—the extinct woolly mammoth’s closest surviving kin—require 22 months, the longest gestation period of any mammal. And this genetic transformation will involve even more than the one that created the wolves. “We were originally talking about editing about 65 genes,” says Lamm. “We’re now talking about 85 different genes, and some of those will have multiple [functions] like cold tolerance—which includes additional subcutaneous fat layers and their shaggy coat.” As with the dire wolves, no ancient mammoth DNA will be spliced into the elephant’s genome; the elephant genes will simply be rewritten to match the mammoth’s. The company says it has so far edited 25 of those genes, and is “on track for our embryos to be ready for implantation by the end of 2026,” to meet its goal of a calf being born in 2028. No matter how the resulting woolly baby might look, Colossal admits that in some respects it will be a mammoth in name only. “They’re elephant surrogates that have some mammoth DNA to make them re-create core characteristics belonging to mammoths,” says Shapiro. But that might be a distinction without a difference. If it looks like a mammoth and behaves like a mammoth and, if given the opportunity to breed with another engineered elephant with mammoth-mimicking DNA, produces a baby mammoth, it’s hard to say that the species hasn’t been brought back from the dead. “Our mammoths and dire wolves are mammoths and dire wolves by that definition,” says Shapiro. “They have the key traits that make that lineage of organisms distinct." The question then becomes what to do with the mammoth you’ve made once it’s at large in the world—a question that bedevils all of Colossal’s work. Shapiro might not be wrong when she says Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are lucky wolves, at least in terms of the round-the-clock care, feeding, and love they will receive throughout their lives, but those lives will also be limited. Subscribe Apr 7, 2025 6:20 PM IST The Return of the Dire Wolf Science animals Photographs by Robert Clark for TIME Story by Jeffrey Kluger Romulus and Remus are doing what puppies do: chasing, tussling, nipping, nuzzling. But there’s something very un-puppylike about the snowy white 6-month olds—their size, for starters. At their young age they already measure nearly 4 ft. long, tip the scales at 80 lb., and could grow to 6 ft. and 150 lb. Then there’s their behavior: the angelic exuberance puppies exhibit in the presence of humans—trotting up for hugs, belly rubs, kisses—is completely absent. They keep their distance, retreating if a person approaches. Even one of the handlers who raised them from birth can get only so close before Romulus and Remus flinch and retreat. This isn’t domestic canine behavior, this is wild lupine behavior: the pups are wolves. Not only that, they’re dire wolves—which means they have cause to be lonely. Advertisement 00:13 03:00 Read More The dire wolf once roamed an American range that extended as far south as Venezuela and as far north as Canada, but not a single one has been seen in over 10,000 years, when the species went extinct. Plenty of dire wolf remains have been discovered across the Americas, however, and that presented an opportunity for a company named Colossal Biosciences. Dire Wolf Time Magazine cover Photograph by Robert Clark for TIME Buy a copy of the Dire Wolf issue here Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished. TIME met the males (Khaleesi was not present due to her young age) at a fenced field in a U.S. wildlife facility on March 24, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes. Advertisement Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang Branded Content Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang By China Daily The dire wolf isn’t the only animal that Colossal, which was founded in 2021 and currently employs 130 scientists, wants to bring back. Also on their de-extinction wish list is the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Already, in March, the company surprised the science community with the news that it had copied mammoth DNA to create a woolly mouse, a chimeric critter with the long, golden coat and the accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth. If all this seems to smack of P.T. Barnum, the company has a reply. Colossal claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves. What they learn restoring the mammoth, they say, could help them engineer more robust elephants that can better survive the climatic ravages of a warming world. Bring back the thylacine and you might help preserve the related marsupial known as the quoll. Techniques learned restoring the dire wolf can similarly be used to support the endangered red wolf. Advertisement “We are an evolutionary force at this point,” says Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, speaking of humanity as a whole. “We are deciding what the future of these species will be.” The Center for Biological Diversity suggests that 30% of the planet’s genetic diversity will be lost by 2050, and Shapiro and Colossal CEO Ben Lamm insist that genetic engineering is a vital tool to reverse this. Company executives often frame the technology not just as a moral good, but a moral imperative—a way for humans, who have driven so many species to the brink of extinction, to get square with nature. “If we want a future that is both bionumerous and filled with people,” Shapiro says, “we should be giving ourselves the opportunity to see what our big brains can do to reverse some of the bad things that we’ve done to the world already.” Advertisement The woolly mouse, to a minor extent, and the dire wolves, to a scientifically seismic one, are first steps in that direction. But not everyone agrees. Scientific history is rife with examples of newly introduced species becoming invasive species—the doctrine of unintended consequences biting humans when we played too cute with other animals. An exotic pet escapes and multiplies, decimating native species. A toad brought in to kill off beetles ends up killing off the marsupials that eat the toads. And genetic engineering is still a nascent field. Nearly 30 years after Dolly the sheep was cloned, the technology still produces problems in cloned animals, such as large birth size, organ defects, premature aging, and immune-system problems. What’s more, cloning can be hard on the surrogate mother that gestates the cloned embryo. “There’s a risk of death. There’s a risk of side effects that are severe,” says Robert Klitzman, professor of psychiatry and director of the bioethics master's program at Columbia University. “There’s a lot of suffering involved in that. There are going to be miscarriages.” Advertisement Still, Colossal’s scientists believe they are on to something powerful. Matt James, the company’s chief animal officer—who once worked as senior director of animal care at the Dallas Zoo and Zoo Miami, where he managed the welfare of 7,000 animals representing 500 species—felt the significance of the science when Romulus and Remus were just 5 or 6 weeks old. The staff was weighing the little pups, and one of the veterinary techs began singing a song from The Little Mermaid. When she reached a point at which she vocalized first up, then down, Romulus and Remus turned her way and began howling in response. “For me,” James says, “it was sort of a shocking, chilling moment.” These pups were the first to produce a howl that hadn’t been heard on earth in over 10,000 years. It takes surprisingly few genetic changes to spell the difference between a living species and an extinct one. Like other canids, a wolf has about 19,000 genes. (Humans and mice have about 30,000.) Creating the dire wolves called for making just 20 edits in 14 genes in the common gray wolf, but those tweaks gave rise to a host of differences, including Romulus’ and Remus’ white coat, larger size, more powerful shoulders, wider head, larger teeth and jaws, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining. Advertisement The dire wolf genome analyzed to determine what those changes were was extracted from two ancient samples—one a 13,000-year-old tooth found in Sheridan Pit, Ohio, the other a 72,000-year-old ear bone unearthed in American Falls, Idaho. The samples were lent by the museums that house them. The lab work that happened next was painstaking. Dire wolf petrous bone ancient DNA sampling Dire wolf petrous bone ancient DNA sampling. Courtesy Colossal Biosciences 3D rendering of dire wolf LCORL gene 3D rendering of dire wolf LCORL gene. Courtesy Colossal Biosciences Advertisement Cloning typically requires snipping a tissue sample from a donor animal and then isolating a single cell. The nucleus of that cell—which contains all of the animal’s DNA—is then extracted and inserted into an ovum whose own nucleus has been removed. That ovum is allowed to develop into an embryo and then implanted in a surrogate mother’s womb. The baby that results from that is an exact genetic duplicate of the original donor animal. This is the way the first cloned animal, Dolly, was created in 1996. Since then, pigs, cats, deer, horses, mice, goats, gray wolves, and more than 1,500 dogs have been cloned using the same technology. Colossal’s dire wolf work took a less invasive approach, isolating cells not from a tissue sample of a donor gray wolf, but from its blood. The cells they selected are known as endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of blood vessels. The scientists then rewrote the 14 key genes in the cell’s nucleus to match those of the dire wolf; no ancient dire wolf DNA was actually spliced into the gray wolf’s genome. The edited nucleus was then transferred into a denucleated ovum. The scientists produced 45 engineered ova, which were allowed to develop into embryos in the lab. Those embryos were inserted into the wombs of two surrogate hound mixes, chosen mostly for their overall health and, not insignificantly, their size, since they’d be giving birth to large pups. In each mother, one embryo took hold and proceeded to a full-term pregnancy. (No dogs experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth.) On Oct. 1, 2024, the surrogates birthed Romulus and Remus. A few months later, Colossal repeated the procedure with another clutch of embryos and another surrogate mother. On Jan. 30, 2025, that dog gave birth to Khaleesi. Advertisement Read more: The Science Behind the Return of the Dire Wolf During their pregnancies, the mama hounds were kept at Colossal’s animal-care facility, where they were regularly monitored and given weekly ultrasounds by staff scientists and veterinarians. All three wolves were born by planned cesarean section to minimize the risk of birthing complications. A four-person team performed the surgery and lifted out the pups; four more attendants cleaned and swaddled the newborns while the surgical team looked after the mother as she emerged from anesthesia. “We elected to put both pups with the surrogate who was displaying the best maternal instincts,” says James. “That reintroduction occurred just about two or so hours after birth, and she immediately began caring for them and allowing them to nurse.” The pups fed from the surrogate for just a few days, after which the Colossal team removed them and bottle-fed them because the surrogate was actually becoming too attentive—disrupting the pups’ regular sleeping and feeding schedules. They were weaned at eight weeks and have been living the lives of healthy young dire wolves since then. Advertisement “The idea that we could just take a vial of blood, isolate EPCs, culture them, and clone from them, and they have a pretty high cloning efficiency, we think it’s a game changer,” says George Church, Colossal co-founder, and professor of genetics at both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The less invasive cell-sampling process will make the procedure easier on animals, and the fact that Colossal’s methods worked on this early go-round boosts company confidence that they are on track for much broader de-extinction and rewilding. Since their births, the dire wolves have lived on a 2,000-acre ecological preserve at a location in the U.S. that Colossal also keeps secret to protect the animals; the grounds are much larger than the relatively small enclosure TIME visited. The 2,000 acres are surrounded by a 10-ft. fence and include a smaller six-acre site with a veterinary clinic, an extreme-weather shelter, and natural dens where the wolves can satisfy their innate desire for a secure retreat. A staff of veterinarians looks out for the animals around the clock. Advertisement The wolves are fed a diet of beef, horse, and deer meat as well as liver and other offal, along with puppy chow to provide vital nutrients. When they were just weaned, the meat was served pureed, which is similar to the partially digested meat a mother will regurgitate to feed her young. Now the food is presented whole so the wolves can tear it apart as they would if they had hunted it down. So far they have not actually killed any small, live prey that may have ventured into their enclosure. “We have not seen them attempt to hunt any live prey, and we do not provide live prey,” says Paige McNickle, Colossal’s manager of animal husbandry. “But if I were a deer I would stay away from their preserve.” “I think they are the luckiest animals ever,” says Shapiro. “They will live their entire life on this protected ecological reserve, where they have all sorts of space. These animals were hand reared. They’re not capable of living in the wild, and we want to study them for their lives and understand how these edits might have modified things that we can’t predict. They’re not going to be able to get a splinter without us finding out.” So far nothing worrisome or unexpected has turned up in the wolves. Advertisement The effort to produce a woolly mammoth is on something of a tight schedule. The woolly mice gestated fast, popping out into the world after a pregnancy of 20 days. The wolf pups took just 65 days to bake. Asian elephants—the extinct woolly mammoth’s closest surviving kin—require 22 months, the longest gestation period of any mammal. And this genetic transformation will involve even more than the one that created the wolves. “We were originally talking about editing about 65 genes,” says Lamm. “We’re now talking about 85 different genes, and some of those will have multiple [functions] like cold tolerance—which includes additional subcutaneous fat layers and their shaggy coat.” As with the dire wolves, no ancient mammoth DNA will be spliced into the elephant’s genome; the elephant genes will simply be rewritten to match the mammoth’s. The company says it has so far edited 25 of those genes, and is “on track for our embryos to be ready for implantation by the end of 2026,” to meet its goal of a calf being born in 2028. Advertisement No matter how the resulting woolly baby might look, Colossal admits that in some respects it will be a mammoth in name only. “They’re elephant surrogates that have some mammoth DNA to make them re-create core characteristics belonging to mammoths,” says Shapiro. But that might be a distinction without a difference. If it looks like a mammoth and behaves like a mammoth and, if given the opportunity to breed with another engineered elephant with mammoth-mimicking DNA, produces a baby mammoth, it’s hard to say that the species hasn’t been brought back from the dead. “Our mammoths and dire wolves are mammoths and dire wolves by that definition,” says Shapiro. “They have the key traits that make that lineage of organisms distinct." The question then becomes what to do with the mammoth you’ve made once it’s at large in the world—a question that bedevils all of Colossal’s work. Shapiro might not be wrong when she says Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are lucky wolves, at least in terms of the round-the-clock care, feeding, and love they will receive throughout their lives, but those lives will also be limited. Advertisement Dire wolf Remus at 2 months old Remus at 2 months old. John Davidson—Courtesy Colossal Biosciences Remus at 5 months old Remus at 5 months old, currently at 80 lb. with an expected weight of 150 lb. when fully grown. Andrew Zuckerman—Courtesy Colossal Biosciences Wolf packs can, on occasion, be as small as two members, but typically include 15 or more. What’s more, the animals’ hunting territory can range anywhere from 50 to 1,000 sq. mi. Against that, Colossal’s three dire wolves spending their entire lives in a 2,000-acre preserve could be awfully lonely and claustrophobic—not at all the way wild dire wolves would live their lives. Already, Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are exhibiting behaviors that would serve them well in the wild but do little for them in semicaptivity. They began howling when they were just 2 weeks old, and early on began stalking—hunting leaves or anything that moved. They also exhibited wolflike caution, running to hide in dark places if they were surprised or alarmed. “From day one they have always behaved like wolves and have rarely shown doglike behavior,” says McNickle. So far, the wolves have never menaced any humans, but a risk does exist. Colossal is thus being careful. “Our protocols ensure that people are never in a situation where the wolves might be frightened or become aggressive toward their caretakers,” she says. Whether later dire wolves Colossal might create can ever live beyond the preserve is open to question. Rick McIntyre, a retired wolf researcher with the U.S. National Park Service and a Colossal adviser, warns that dire wolves vanished in the first place because they were specialized hunters, preying on huge animals like the mammoth and the 3,500-lb. Ice Age bison. When those beasts died out, so did dire wolves. “My guess is that they specialized in dealing with the very large megafauna of the Ice Age, whereas I would say that gray wolves are a bit more of a generalist,” says McIntyre. “We see gray wolves catch voles, ground squirrels, marmots, all the way up to the 2,000-lb. bull bison. A general principle in wildlife is that it’s good to be flexible. The more that you specialize, that can hurt you in the long run.” The mammoth creates even greater challenges. Elephants are exceedingly intelligent, exceedingly social creatures, gathering in herds of up to 25 individuals. Sometimes, those groups combine in much larger clans of up to 1,000 animals around a vital resource like a watering hole. In the wild, the animals will travel up to 40 miles a day in search of food and water—and that’s only average. Sometimes their daily wanderings may cover 125 miles. No one knows if mammoths would exhibit the same social and exploratory needs, but if they do, confining one or even a few individuals to an enclosure like the dire wolves’ would amount to a sort of near-solitary confinement. “I really feel that bringing back one or even five woolly mammoths is not a good idea,” says Stephen Latham, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University. “A single woolly mammoth is not a woolly mammoth leading a woolly mammoth life with a woolly mammoth herd.” Just as important as Colossal’s mission to restore extinct species is its efforts to stop endangered ones from winking out entirely. At the same time the company’s scientists are bringing back the dire wolf, for example, they are attempting to save the red wolf. Once common across the U.S. Southeast, red wolves began dying out because of habitat loss and predator-control programs that targeted the animal for elimination. In the 1960s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service introduced a captive-breeding program to save the species and preserve the role it plays in the larger ecosystem: keeping populations of deer in check, which prevents them from overgrazing, as well as controlling populations of smaller prey like raccoons and opossums, which menace native birds. Ultimately, the program produced 250 individuals, released mainly in North Carolina, but today fewer than 20 survive, most of the others having been claimed by poaching and car strikes. Colossal aims to turn that around. Along with its news about the dire wolves, the company also announced that it had cloned four red wolves—a small but important step in fortifying the species as a whole. With so few individuals remaining, the species suffers from what is known as a “genetic bottleneck,” a lack of diversity in the genome that can lead to infertility and inherited birth defects. What is needed is a way to refresh the gene line with new DNA, and science may have a way. In the days before advanced genomics, conservationists identified all species—including the red wolf—principally by their phenotype, or appearance. Plenty of wolves that did not fit the right size or color for the red wolf might have been carrying what researchers refer to as “ghost alleles”—or red wolf gene variations that did not show up in the wolves’ color, size, or shape. Recently, Bridgett vonHoldt, a Colossal scientific adviser and an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, and Kristin Brzeski, an associate professor of wildlife science and conservation at Michigan Tech, discovered populations of canids along the coasts of Louisiana and Texas whose DNA included both coyote genes and red wolf ghost alleles. The four red wolves the Colossal scientists created used that natural genetic reservoir to produce what they call the first Ghost Wolf, with an eye to eventually fortifying the red wolf species with more such young carrying a variety of genes. The cloned red wolves now live in a separate fenced area within the same 2,000-acre preserve as the dire wolves. Like Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, they will spend their lives there and not be rewilded. But later red wolves might be, as Colossal learns more about the clones’ health and fitness. The company says it’s in advanced discussions with the state of North Carolina about “conservation tools that can be used to help rescue the red wolf and accelerate its recovery.” “It’s the lost genetics of the world’s most endangered wolf,” says James. “And we now have the opportunity to use our cloning and genetic-engineering tools to be able to confer that genetic diversity back into the recovery of the species.” Similar science might work to save the northern quoll, a small, carnivorous marsupial native to Australia. Quolls are threatened by the cane toad, which was introduced to Australia in 1935 in an attempt to control beetle pests that were devouring sugarcane roots. The experiment failed, with the toads showing no particular appetite for the target insects, all the while doing a fine job of feasting on other insect prey, and becoming an invasive species themselves. Quolls, in turn, prey on the toads—but often lose their lives in the process because of a toxin that the toads carry on their skin, pushing the little marsupial to the edge of extinction. Through their work trying to bring back the extinct thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, one member of the marsupial family that includes the quoll, Colossal scientists have identified a single change in a single nucleotide—a basic building block of DNA and RNA—that could confer a 5,000-fold resistance to the cane toad neurotoxin. “We as humanity introduced this cane toad species. We as humanity are now inadvertently killing off the quoll as well as other marsupials,” says Lamm. “This one change can make these super quolls that can love eating cane toads. Those are the types of wins that we can get using these genetic technologies.” So far, Colossal has mostly successes on its tote board. No animals have yet been rewilded, but though the woolly mouse and dire wolves are the first edited animals that have come from the labs, both represent progress. Still, scientists not affiliated with the company stress that genetic engineering is head-crackingly complex, and all manner of unintended downstream consequences can occur when you start mucking around in the engine room of the cells. “There’s a phenomenon called pleiotropy in which one gene has an effect on more than one trait,” says Alison van Eenennaam, professor of animal biotechnology and genetics at the University of California, Davis. “That’s true for many, many, many genes. There could be some genes they’re targeting for specific traits that have effects that are not compatible with survival.” Even if Colossal gets the gene editing right, the business of gestating the desired young could present other obstacles. Cloning of livestock still results in more misses than hits. “You get high rates of perinatal and pregnancy loss,” says van Eenennaam. Then, too, there’s always the possibility that a precious handful of de-extincted animals could run riot in the modern world. The cane toad’s transition from pest eater to invasive species is a reminder of how quickly human intrusion into wild processes can spin out of control. Bioethicist Latham points to mosquito control as one more concerning example. “There are a number of efforts to genetically modify mosquitoes so that they will have mass die-outs or so that they won't be able to carry particular diseases like dengue or malaria,” he says. “I worry about our losing control of some of those efforts, because mosquitoes—even though they carry diseases that are bad for people—occupy a niche in ecology, in that they’re eaten by certain kinds of birds.” There’s precedent for this kind of genetic hegemony beyond the cane toad. Asian carp, introduced into the U.S. in the 1970s by the aquaculture industry, are overwhelming the Great Lakes, crowding out other species. Burmese pythons, imported to the U.S. as exotic pets, have established a similar invasive niche in the Everglades, released there by owners who tired of caring for them. Colossal scientists are pressing ahead nonetheless, and the company is already thriving in an adaptive niche of its own—not just as a scientific enterprise, but as a formidable business. It has reached decacorn status, currently valued at $10.2 billion, and while it may not be easy to monetize a mammoth or a dodo or a dire wolf pup, Lamm sees plenty of commercial potential in the technologies his scientific team is developing. Colossal has spun off two new companies so far. One, called Breaking, uses engineered microbes and enzymes to break down plastic waste. The other, Form Bio, provides AI and computational biology platforms for drug development. And none of that touches Colossal’s core expertise in cellular and genetic engineering, which has uncounted applications in the biomed domain, including treating and preventing diseases. “Those genome-engineering technologies alone are worth tens of billions of dollars,” says Lamm. Colossal does not have the field to itself—even if it is currently the most conspicuous player. Revive & Restore, a California-based conservation organization, provides funding for projects worldwide involving de-extinction, increasing biodiversity, and saving endangered species. Another group, Rewilding Europe, is providing support to scientists working to preserve and restore species across the European continent, including the bearded vulture, the Iberian lynx, the marbled polecat, the imperial eagle, and the auroch—the extinct ancestor of domestic cattle. But they are small compared with Colossal. In 2024, Rewilding Europe disbursed 20 million euros to support rewilding efforts across Europe. Revive & Restore, founded in 2012, has so far raised $40 million to support similar conservation efforts. Lamm sees both groups as partners rather than competitors in the shared goal of conservation. Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, of course, are going about their young lives unaware of the groundbreaking science behind their births and the promise they represent. During TIME’s visit, Romulus and Remus gamboled about their enclosure, gnawing on bark they had found on the ground while keeping a discreet distance from the gawking humans. “They have different personalities,” says McNickle. “Romulus was a very brave pup and the first to go exploring on his own even when he was just a few days old. Remus was much more reserved and would follow Romulus’ cues. As they are growing up, Remus has become the more confident of the two and the first to explore new things and new areas.” Whether the existing dire wolves or others Colossal might produce will be allowed to mate and spawn a next generation of wolves naturally is not yet known. Handlers can monitor the female estrous cycles and separate the animals at key times or employ contraceptive implants that keep the wolves from producing young until it is determined whether they have any abnormalities that could be passed on. The MHA Nation tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) have expressed a desire to have dire wolves live on their lands in North Dakota, a possibility Colossal is studying. If the company succeeds in its mission to save existing animals from extinction and restore ones that walked the world well before the rise of the humans, Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi will be long remembered. One species, our own, is increasingly crowding out the millions of others that call the planet home, and Colossal is working to claim the power to reverse that—at least a little. “I think of that famous Teddy Roosevelt quote,” says James, paraphrasing the 26th President. “In the moment of any choice, the first thing to do is the right thing. The next thing to do is the wrong thing. The worst thing to do is nothing at all.”

Nature gave the world the dire wolf 2.6 million years ago, and then, through the hard hand of extinction, took it away—some 10,000 to 13,000 years ago when the last of the species died out. Now, the dire wolf is back, brought bounding into the 21st century by Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based biotech company. On April 8, Colossal announced it had used both cloning and gene-editing based on two ancient samples of dire wolf DNA to birth three pups, the six-month-old males Romulus and Remus and the two-month-old female Khaleesi. “Our team took DNA from a 13,000 year old tooth and a 72,000 year old skull and made healthy dire wolf puppies,” said Colossal CEO Ben Lamm in a statement that accompanied the announcement of the births. “It was once said, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Today, our team gets to unveil some of the magic they are working on.” So what, exactly, does that work involve? Traditional cloning—the kind that famously resulted in Dolly the sheep in 1996, and has since been used to create clones of pigs, cats, deer, horses, mice, goats, gray wolves, dogs and more—is a relatively straightforward, if invasive, process. First, a single cell is taken from a tissue sample of the animal to be cloned. That cell’s nucleus—which contains the individual’s entire genetic code—is then extracted and inserted into a donor ovum from the same species whose own nucleus has been removed. The ovum carrying the new genetic material is allowed to develop into an embryo and then transferred into the womb of a surrogate, which ultimately gives birth to an exact duplicate of the animal from which the donor cell was taken. Colossal says its dire wolf work had key differences. Scientists first analyzed the genome of the dire wolves contained in the ancient tooth and skull. Comparing those genomes to that of the gray wolf—the dire wolf’s closest living relative—they identified 20 differences in 14 genes that account for the dire wolf’s distinguishing characteristics, including its greater size, white coat, wider head, larger teeth, more powerful shoulders, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining. Next, they harvested endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which form the lining of bloodvessels, from the bloodstreams of living gray wolves—a less invasive procedure than taking a tissue sample—and edited the 14 genes in their nuclei to express those 20 dire wolf traits. This is trickier than it seems, since genes often have multiple effects, not all of them good. For example, as the company explains in its press release, the dire wolf has three genes that code for its light coat, but in gray wolves they can lead to deafness and blindness. The Colossal team thus engineered two other genes that shut down black and red pigmentation, leading to the dire wolf’s characteristic light color without causing any harm in the edited gray wolf genome. Once this was finished, the edited nuclei were next extracted from the cells and inserted into denucleated gray wolf ova. The ova were left to grow into embryos and 45 were transferred into the wombs of two domestic hound mixes. One embryo in each surrogate mother took hold, and after 65 days of gestation, Rolulus and Remus were born. A few months later, the procedure was repeated with a third surrogate who ultimately gave birth to Khaleesi. All three births were conducted by scheduled cesarean section to minimize the chances of injury during delivery. No surrogate dogs had a miscarriage or stillbirth during the process. Colossal plans to use similar techniques to bring back the Ice Age woolly mammoth in 2028, editing living cell nuclei from Asian elephants—the mammoth’s closest living kin—to express mammoth traits preserved in nearly 60 sets of Ice Age remains. In early March, the company announced that it had successfully tested its methods in laboratory mice, producing 38 woolly mouse pups which bear the mammoth’s signature shaggy coat. Now it says it’s on track to have a surrogate elephant pregnancy in 2026 (elephants take nearly two years to gestate). Other work in Colossal’s labs involves not bringing back extinct animals but attempting to save endangered ones. Endangered species can suffer from several issues, including a lack of genetic diversity—known as a “genetic bottleneck.” The relatively few animals left repeatedly mate with one another, and the inbreeding results in birth defects, sterility, and health problems proliferating through the species. Colossal has targeted some species with these problems, and is working to genetically edit more diversity into their populations. One such project involves the all-but vanished pink pigeon. The pink pigeon species is indigenous to the island nation of Mauritius and once thrived there, until it lost its habitat as more and more of the island was given over to sugar plantations. Humanity’s introduction of rats and cats—which attack pigeon nests—drove the bird’s numbers down to just ten individuals. With the help of captive breeding programs, more than 650 pigeons were hatched and raised and released back on Mauritius. But with so few birds from which the captive population was bred, the species is experiencing high levels of infertility because of the genetic bottleneck. To get around that, the scientists first tap into the fertilized egg of a pink pigeon and extract what are known as primordial germ cells (PGCs)—the cells that eventually become sperm and egg. In the lab, scientists then genetically edit the PGC genome to introduce greater genetic diversity—though at the moment Colossal is still studying the pink pigeon alleles and doesn’t yet know what traits that more-diverse coding will produce. Then, using the fertilized egg of a common chicken—which is far more plentiful than a pink pigeon egg—they inject the PGCs into the embryo. Once there, the cells travel to the gonads and create an embryo that, after it hatches, grows, and reaches sexual maturity, will produce not chicken chicks, but pigeon chicks. Eventually, those pigeons would be released into the wild population, producing genetically diverse young and helping to fortify the species. None of this is easy and none of it comes cheap—though with a valuation of $10.2 billion, Colossal has the resources to pursue the science without too much concern about the price. And the company is not going it alone. It is partnering with conservation organizations such the American Wolf Foundation, The Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, Save the Elephants, and Conservation Nation. The company worked with the indigenous MHA Nation tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) on the dire wolf project, and the tribes have expressed a desire to have dire wolves live on their lands in North Dakota. Colossal also says it's in advanced negotiations with the government of North Carolina to use its conservation strategies to help strengthen the endangered red wolf population there. The company also believes that the new EPC cloning technique will allow them to save blood samples of existing species in a biobank as a hedge against their ever becoming endangered in the future. Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, the most conspicuous of the animals to emerge from Colossal’s labs, will surely not be the last.

Severance, the extremely popular Apple TV+ series about office workers who undergo brain surgery so that their home selves have no knowledge or memory of their working selves, and vice versa, is often described as science fiction. That’s a reasonable characterization, since the simple outpatient brain surgery that splits a person between an “innie” at the office and an “outie” at home isn’t available to the rest of us. But while the science the show depicts goes well beyond anything that’s currently possible, many brain specialists and neurosurgeons are still fans. “I love Severance because it brings up such an important function that the brain takes care of without our even realizing it,” which is establishing our identity simply by being aware of ourselves, our experiences, and our own inner drama, says Dr. Jordina Rincon-Torroella, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University. We asked Rincon-Torroella and other brainiacs who watch or are familiar with Severance their thoughts about how brain surgery and all things neuro are depicted on the show. A clean—and pretty believable—depiction of brain surgery The first step in changing the brain is being able to physically get at the brain, and it’s here that Severance’s sci-fi first spills over into sci-fact. Although the term “brain surgery” might call to mind a sawed-open skull exposing a pink, pulsating mass, the surgery that the subjects undergo involves drilling a small hole—about the size of a dime—in the posterior crown of the skull and inserting a small chip in the brain tissue underneath. The procedure is quick, simple and, as these things go, relatively bloodless. That kind of minimally invasive surgery is not at all outside of the realm of what’s possible today. “We can treat tumors or areas of the brain that cause epilepsy by drilling a small bore hole in the skull and inserting a laser probe under MRI visualization,” says Dr. Hoomin Azmi, director of functional and restorative neurosurgery at Hackensack University Medical Center. “We can then watch the tumor being burnt away on the MRI.” The surgeons in Severance use no such sophisticated imaging, simply peering into the brain and hand-placing the chip—and getting it right every time. ”In terms of surgery [in the show], it’s obviously a bit of science fiction,” says Azmi. Read More: 9 Things You Should Do for Your Brain Health Every Day, According to Neurologists Some types of brain surgery don’t require opening the skull at all. Aneurysms—or bubbles in the wall of an artery—can be treated by threading a probe from an artery in the groin or the wrist up to the brain and closing off the affected area with a coil or a stent. “This has drastically changed outcomes and complications for patients,” says Azmi. “I think the days of doing brain surgery in the office are still far from us. But the trajectory of less invasive and safer brain surgery has been going on for several years.” Some procedures are less invasive still, making no physical contact with brain tissue at all. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) applies magnetic pulses to the scalp to treat symptoms of major depression. Focused ultrasound can be beamed through the skull and ablate, or surgically remove, tumors without any reliance on a drill or a scalpel. “It's also helping us ablate centers of the brain in patients who have essential tremor, or a tremor that cannot otherwise be controlled,” says Rincon-Torroella. A less-realistic depiction of memory control Severance takes more scientific liberties when it comes to the part of the brain in which the memory-manipulating chip is implanted. That region in the crown of the head is known as the parietal lobe, and while the parietal does a lot of jobs—especially processing sensory information such as touch, temperature, pain, and spatial awareness—it is not where memory lives. The ability to form short-term memories is governed by the hippocampi, two structures which lie deep within both brain hemispheres. But a host of other parts of the brain—including the fornix, basal ganglia, thalamus, amygdala, caudate nucleus, and prefrontal cortex—also play a role in consolidating and storing longer term memories. That’s an awful lot of neural real estate for a chip implanted in the parietal to cover. At a minimum, says Rincon-Torroella, a memory-altering chip would have to target the hippocampi, for their memory-forming function, and the amygdala, which governs emotions. “Memory and emotions are so attached to each other,” she says. “These would be the areas that I would attempt to approach if we would consider the idea of whether we could split an identity.” But turning off key brain regions might not be reversible. “You could, for example, knock out short-term memory if you turned off or severed both hippocampi and the fornices,” says Dr. Daniel Orringer, associate professor of neurosurgery at NYU Langone Health. “People would not be able to create these memories, but that’s a destructive thing.” Azmi does not believe the memory control Severance depicts is entirely out of the realm of possibility—just not in the foreseeable future. “We'll probably reach the day that perhaps we can select memories and deselect other memories,” he says. “I think that's many years away.” Even if it were possible to toggle back and forth between on and off in two or three brain regions, that would not, by itself, be sufficient to create the dual identities the characters in Severance exhibit. “Memory is so complex and involves many different areas of the brain,” says Dr. Howard Riina, vice chair of the department of neurosurgery at NYU Langone Health. “It’s also hemispheric; there are components of memory on the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain. A chip would have to have some kind of global effect from the one area where it’s implanted.” The potential of brain chips That may not be possible with existing technology, but implanted brain chips that work locally—in a single targeted region of the brain—are already in development. California-based Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company, is working to create computer chips that could be implanted in the brain and allow quadriplegics to control computers and other devices with their thoughts. BrainGate, a consortium of neurologists, engineers, computer scientists, and more, looks to implant not chips but electrodes in the brain, similarly allowing people with paralysis, ALS, or brainstem stroke to manipulate their environments, sometimes simply by thinking about using their paralyzed arm and hand to manipulate a computer cursor. Deep brain stimulation—in which electrodes connected to a pacemaker-like device are threaded to targeted regions of the brain—is already being used to control tremors related to Parkinson’s disease, as well as epilepsy, Tourette’s syndrome, dystonia, and more. “You have people that have injuries, they have strokes, they have trauma, they have cerebral palsy,” says Riina. “You might be able to augment these people, or even use different parts of the brain to compensate for the damaged area.” Augmenting, inhibiting, or otherwise manipulating consciousness and identity, including memory, would be a much heavier lift than treating a lesion, injury, or disease in an isolated region of the brain, and while Severance makes for good TV, it does not on the whole invoke rational science—at least not in the remotely foreseeable future.

The longest eight days Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams ever spent turned out to last more than nine months. On June 5, 2024, the two NASA astronauts launched aboard the maiden mission of Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft for what was supposed to be a short shakedown cruise to the International Space Station (ISS), before turning around and heading home after just over a week. A veteran of two long-duration station rotations, Williams had spent a cumulative 322 days in space before her June launch. While to all appearances she has always thrived in her off-planet work, she was excited about this planned quickie mission. “We want to go and get back as quickly as possible so they can turn our spacecraft around and also take all those lessons learned and incorporate them into the next Starliner,” she told TIME in a conversation before launch. But that was not to be. Thruster problems and helium leaks aboard Starliner led NASA to conclude that the spacecraft was not fit to carry the astronauts home. Instead the ship left the station and splashed down uncrewed, leaving Wilmore and Williams to join the station rotation, living and working aboard the ISS until a fresh SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft arrived to take them home. After much anticipation, that ship docked with the station on March 16 and the two astronauts climbed aboard for an ocean landing later today, March 18, a full 278 days after they were originally scheduled to depart the ISS. So what kind of emotional adjustment did Williams and Wilmore have to make as they went from overnight guests to long-term residents aboard the station? And what will the reacclimation to life on Earth be like after so much time away from home and family—and for that matter from sunshine, fresh air, and the simple fact of gravity? Ever since the first astronauts and cosmonauts went aloft, they’ve been having to make that through-the-looking-glass transition between terrestrial and extraterrestrial living, and the results have been sometimes comical, sometimes surreal. In 1965, astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell spent a then-record two weeks orbiting Earth in their Gemini VII spacecraft. Lovell recalls being belowdecks aboard the recovery vessel USS Wasp shortly after splashdown and being evaluated by a NASA psychologist. Lovell was drinking coffee and had a spoon in one hand. Meaning to put it down, he instead simply released it a foot above the table, leaving it to fall with a clatter. The psychologist looked at him curiously, and Lovell just shrugged. After a fortnight in zero-g he was accustomed to letting go of objects in mid-air and having them accommodatingly float where they were. In 1971, astronaut Dave Scott had a more otherworldly experience. The commander of Apollo 15, Scott walked on the moon, returned to Earth, and a few days later was feted by his neighbors at a welcome-home cookout. Standing in his back yard, wellwishers circulating, he looked up at the sky where a bright moon was shining. “A week ago,” he thought incredulously, “I was there.” Before Wilmore and Williams make the adjustment of returning to Earth, of course, they had to prepare themselves for leaving it in the first place, and that was a process they were at least partly denied. Training for a long-duration space mission is equal parts physical and mental and it’s that mental piece—saying goodbye to all earthly people and things for half a year or more—that they missed out on, instead training for just an eight-day mission. That comes at a price. In 2015, TIME visited Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to film the documentary series “A Year in Space,” about astronaut Scott Kelly’s near 12-month stay aboard the ISS. Just two days before Kelly launched from Baikonur, TIME spoke to astronaut Jeffrey Williams, part of the back-up crew, who would have flown in Kelly’s place if he were unable for some reason to go. He confessed that if that day, 48 hours before liftoff, Kelly was suddenly scratched from the flight, it would be a challenge for him to get up to speed mentally since there is simply no substitute for having fully and wholly prepared for the actual fact that he would be leaving Earth for a year. Retired astronaut Mike Massimino, a veteran of two shuttle missions, says that missing family was likely the hardest mental challenge Wilmore and Williams faced. “Although they love their jobs and are grateful for the opportunity, there still is the heart tug of being away from home for so long,” he says. Still, to all appearances at least, Wilmore and Williams quickly fit into the ISS life cycle—at least if NASA livestreams of the pair at work both inside the station and during spacewalks were any indication. “Suni has just oozed such joy for the past eight months,” says retired astronaut Marsha Ivins, a veteran of five space shuttle missions and a friend of both Wilmore and Williams. “It’s infectious to watch her.” “We came up prepared to stay long, even though we plan to stay short,” Wilmore said in a recent air-to-ground press conference. “That's what we do in human space flight.” “All career astronauts know the risks involved in human spaceflight, long or short duration, and they accept those risks when they strap into the rocket for launch,” says Ivins. “A large part of our training is to learn to deal with the unexpected, the off-nominal, the contingency scenarios, and still get the job done.” Coming home will present different challenges. “The toughest thing about returning to Earth after many months in space is adapting to gravity,” says retired astronaut Terri Virts, a veteran of two space flights, including one long-duration stay as ISS commander. “The grueling rehab program NASA put me through was key to my quick adaptation back to my planet. The first few days weren’t fun, but I was religious about doing my daily workouts and I was back to driving and normal daily life much more quickly than I expected.” The mental part—as Apollo 15 Commander Scott experienced—is critical too. “It’s important to get back in ‘Earth mode’ from a psychological perspective,” says Virts. “For me, it was like a light switch: one day I was living in space, and as soon as I got back to Houston, I was just back to my normal life. It’s really important to have goals and things to look forward to down here, as you may or may not get another chance to fly in space.” It’s way too early to say if Wilmore or Williams will fly again or whether their extended stay aboard the ISS will be their last trip off the Earth. Astronaut Peggy Whitson holds the U.S. record for most cumulative days in space, at 675. Williams is now in the number two spot at 608 days, and Wilmore has logged a very considerable 464. That might be more than enough for any mortal—astronaut or not. If Wilmore and Williams indeed step away from space, they will do so having distinguished themselves in, as Ivins puts it, the most off-nominal of missions. “Suni and Butch accepted the unexpected extension to their mission with such grace and humor,” she says. “Their demonstration of flexibility, adaptability, and optimistic versatility in folding seamlessly into the on-board crew is exactly what one should hope for from a career astronaut and makes me even more proud to call them my friends.”

When astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams embarked on Boeing’s Starliner capsule on June 5, 2024, they expected to be away from home for just over a week. Instead, they spent around 9 months in orbit on the International Space Station. But after over 286 days, their extended stay in space is finally coming to a close, as the two astronauts make their way back to Earth on a SpaceX capsule that’s set to splash down off the coast of Florida on Tuesday. Wilmore, 62, and Williams, 59, are both veteran NASA astronauts and retired U.S. Navy test pilots. Williams became an astronaut in 1998 and Wilmore in 2000. The two were the first crew aboard what was meant to be a quick test flight for the Starliner. But the vessel was plagued with problems that almost prevented it from making it to the ISS, including a helium leak and thruster malfunctions. NASA ordered the Boeing capsule to return unmanned in September, while Wilmore and Williams were left aboard the space station awaiting a safe flight home. At the end of January, President Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk blamed the Biden Administration for delaying the astronauts’ return—which former space station commander Andreas Morgensen called “a lie.” Musk claimed in posts on X that SpaceX offered to bring Williams and Wilmore home months earlier, but that it was denied for “political reasons.” (Former NASA officials said no offer was made to the space agency, and former NASA administrator Bill Nelson said the decision to wait until February for the stranded astronauts to return home rested on safety procedures). In August, NASA decided to bring them back on a SpaceX capsule. The Dragon-9 vessel launched in September but remained docked at the ISS while waiting for a relief crew. That relief mission saw hold-ups: the scheduled flight was meant to launch in February but was delayed due to battery work on the SpaceX capsule. A hydraulics issue delayed another launch attempt last Wednesday with a new SpaceX capsule. On Friday, NASA and SpaceX successfully launched the Crew-10 mission to orbit with four astronauts aboard a SpaceX capsule that arrived at the ISS on Saturday to relieve Wilmore and Williams. Such a long time spent in space can take a physical and mental toll, but Wilmore and Williams’ expedition isn’t the longest spaceflight. Five previous American astronauts—including the U.S. record-holder Frank Rubio as well as Peggy Whitson, who has spent the most cumulative days in space for an American astronaut—have spent more days in space on a single mission. And Russian cosmonauts hold the worldwide records for both consecutive and cumulative days in space. World’s longest single stay in space: Valery Polyakov Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov set the world record for the longest single spaceflight in history in 1995, spending 437 days, 17 hours, and 38 minutes in space and orbiting the Earth 7,075 times, according to the New Mexico Museum of Space History. Having studied astronautical medicine at Moscow’s Institute of Medical and Biological Problems, Polyakov became an asset to the study of the effects of space on the human body. At the age of 46, he launched to the Mir space station aboard Soyuz TM-6 on Aug. 29, 1988—16 years after becoming a Soviet cosmonaut in 1972. He was accompanied by fellow Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Lyakhov and Abdul Ahad Momand, Afghanistan’s first astronaut. While the rest of his crew returned to Earth just a week later, Polyakov stayed on to monitor the health of cosmonauts Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov, who endured the first year-long spaceflight. After Titov and Manarov returned to Earth in December 1988, Polyakov remained on Mir for another four months to await two new crewmembers. Polyakov ultimately returned to Earth in April 1989, marking more than 240 days in space, according to the Moscow Times. For his record-setting second mission, Polyakov was aboard Mir for 14 months, beginning on Jan. 8, 1994. Across 25 experiments and investigations, he studied the physical and cognitive functions of rotating crews from Russia, Kazakhstan, Germany, and the U.S. On March 22, 1995, Polyakov boarded the Soyuz TM-20 spacecraft, alongside Aleksandr Viktorenko and Yelena Kondakova, to return to Earth. U.S. longest single stay in space: Frank Rubio With 371 consecutive days spent in space, Salvadoran American astronaut Frank Rubio broke the record for the longest spaceflight by an American and the longest time spent aboard the International Space Station. He landed in Kazakhstan on the morning of Sept. 27, 2023, more than a year after leaving Earth. Rubio was launched into space on Sept. 21, 2022, aboard the Russian spacecraft Soyuz MS-22—his first mission since becoming a NASA astronaut in 2019. The mission was initially expected to take six months, but the spacecraft suffered a coolant leak, forcing the trip to be extended. Russia’s space agency sent an uncrewed Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft to bring home Rubio and his crewmates, Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin. Rubio’s time in space spanned 5,963 orbits of the Earth and more than 157 million miles. He beat the previous record for an American astronaut of 355 days set by Mark Vande Hei. World’s longest total time in space: Oleg Kononenko Another Russian cosmonaut holds the record for total time spent in space. Oleg Kononenko became the first person to log a total of 1000 days in space last June—an equivalent of 33 months. Kononenko broke the previous record of 878 cumulative days in orbit set by fellow cosmonaut Gennady Padalka. His time in space spanned 16 years, five ISS expeditions, and 16,000 orbits around the Earth. U.S. longest total time in space: Peggy Whitson Whitson, 65, has broken several records over the course of her astronautical career. In 2017, she broke the U.S. record for the longest cumulative time spent in space of 534 days set by NASA astronaut Jeff Williams, and has held the record since, accumulating 675 total days. She also holds the record for the longest cumulative and consecutive times spent in space for a woman of any nationality, and became the first female commander of the ISS in 2008—and the first woman to command it a second time in 2016. She has flown on three long-duration missions with NASA, and one flight with Axiom Space. Williams moves just behind Whitson notching a total of 608 cumulative days in space after her third spaceflight. (Wilmore, meanwhile, will have spent a total of 404 cumulative days in space across his three spaceflights.)

f you missed the blood moon total lunar eclipse on March 13 into March 14, you may have another chance to see an eclipse event later this month. On March 29, people in parts of the Northern Hemisphere will be able to see a partial solar eclipse. Though perhaps not as enticing as the April 2024 total solar eclipse—in which Americans had the opportunity to see the sun fully overtaken by the moon, casting parts of the country in darkness—the partial solar eclipse will allow some viewers to see the moon block up to 93% of the sun, according to Space.com. What is a partial solar eclipse? Similar to a total solar eclipse, during a partial solar eclipse, the moon passes between the sun and the Earth. But unlike a total eclipse, the three celestial bodies are not completely lined up, and thus the moon will only block parts of the sun to viewers on Earth. To those in the eclipse’s path, the sun appears somewhat like a crescent. Partial solar eclipses occur, on average, two times per year, according to the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco, California. When is the next partial solar eclipse? The next partial solar eclipse, the first of this year, will occur on March 29. According to NASA, the partial eclipse will have already started by sunrise in the Americas, while in western Europe and northwest Africa, it will begin mid-to-late morning. In eastern Europe and northern Asia, people can witness the eclipse in the afternoon and early evening. Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang Branded Content Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang By China Daily Where will the next partial solar eclipse be visible? The partial solar eclipse in March will cast a shadow across vast portions of the world, though different areas will be able to see different percentages of the sun covered. According to Timeanddate.com, while over 800 million people will be in the path of the eclipse, only 44,800 people will be able to see at least 90% of the sun be covered by the moon. Per NASA, viewers will see a partial solar eclipse in sections of North America, Europe, Africa, northern Asia, small parts of South America, throughout Greenland and Iceland, as well as parts of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans. Some of the spots whereby the eclipse will encounter the largest coverage include Halifax, Canada, where an estimated 83% of the sun will be covered at around 7 a.m. local time. In Portland, Maine, 64% of the sun will likely be covered at around 6 a.m. Meanwhile, in Nuuk, Greenland, 87% of the sun is set to be covered between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. Is it safe to look at a partial solar eclipse? Since the sun is never fully covered, viewers must always look at a partial solar eclipse while wearing protective glasses. Safe solar viewing glasses are different from normal sunglasses—they tend to be thousands of times darker. Without protective gear, looking directly at an eclipse can cause serious damage or scarring to the eyes. “Solar retinopathy is a photochemical injury to your retina,” Dr. Nicole Bajic, a surgical ophthalmologist at the Cleveland Clinic, previously told TIME via email. A good place to buy safe solar viewing glasses, that meet the standard necessary to safely view an eclipse event, is through the American Astronomical Society’s (AAS) trusted vendor list, Richard Fienberg, project manager at AAS’ Solar Eclipse Task Force, told TIME in 2024. “There are companies selling eclipse glasses under false pretenses. The two most likely false pretenses are the glasses have not actually been tested properly and shown to be safe, or the glasses are made in China but printed with information that says they're made in America,” he said. If you have old glasses from a previous eclipse event, Feinberg said that these may still be usable, but they should be checked for holes and tears to ensure they meet the safety standard. Viewers can also use an indirect viewing method, like a pinhole projector, in order to indirectly see the eclipse occur through shadows, but this must be done with care.

n the Americas alone more than one billion people in 35 countries could bear witness to the total lunar eclipse that played out overhead from late night Thursday to the early hours of Friday. Tens of millions more in New Zealand and parts of Africa, Europe, and Russia could take in the sky show too. The performance was the result of the orbit of the Earth carrying it between the sun and the moon in a perfect alignment that temporarily blocked the sunlight that usually reflects off of the lunar surface, giving it its glow. In its place fell a deep shadow. But the moon did not vanish from the sky entirely. Bright white sunlight contains all of the colors of the visible spectrum—colors that break apart and spill out when the light passes through a prism or through the sky after a storm, producing a dazzling rainbow. During the eclipse, the sunlight the Earth was blocking similarly separated into its constituent colors, with blue wavelengths being scattered through the atmosphere, while longer red wavelengths passed right through and traveled to the moon. The result: The darkened moon glowed a distinct orange-red—a phenomenon popularly called a blood moon. The cosmic dance did not last long; the Earth continued on its orbital path and the moon began to brighten again after just over an hour. That was enough time, however, for countless professional and amateur photographers to capture dramatic pictures of the blood moon—images that are circulating around the world today. The eclipse was a little gift from the heavens to us. Here are some of the best images of that passing loveliness.