Kate Versus the Meteorite

It came as a surprise, a gift from no one in particular: a blush-pink postcard tucked beneath the bottle of sunscreen in my Sephora order, emblazoned with an utterly mystifying collection of words. HANGOVERx PILLOW BALM (What?) We LOVE your lips even when you don’t (What?) Infused with mineral-rich stardust (WHAT?) The shiny pink button […]

Guest Post: Weird Rock, Weirder Story

“There is an aspect to this story that is weirder than you can imagine.” That sentence was e-mailed to me by a geologist, Jan Kramers, at the University of Johannesburg in the waning days of 2017. I had e-mailed him about a paper of his in Geochimica et Cosmochmica Acta. The title of the paper […]

Great Balls of Fire

Early Monday morning, a fireball lit up the night sky over Wisconsin. For a just a second, dark became light. And then there was an explosion followed by a terrifying sonic boom. Loretta Brockmeier, a resident of Random Lake, Wisconsin, a town about 40 minutes north of Milwaukee, got up to use the bathroom and […]