NASA confirmed Friday that it successfully altered an asteroid’s orbit for the first time, demonstrating a technique that could one day help deflect a hazardous space rock from Earth. The experiment began in 2021 when a spacecraft slammed into Dimorphos, a small asteroid that orbits the larger Didymos. New observations from telescopes around the world show that, along with debris blasted into space, the impact shortened Dimorphos’ orbital period by about 0.15 seconds. While tiny, scientists say such changes can compound over decades, potentially shifting an asteroid’s path enough to avoid a collision with Earth. Neither Didymos nor Dimorphos has ever posed a threat to the planet. Large impacts remain rare but powerful: the largest recorded in modern history occurred in 1908, when the Tunguska event flattened the Siberian forest with energy equivalent to roughly 185 Hiroshima bombs.
True Spies
The Gehlen Organization
How did former Nazi intelligence officers end up under American protection?
In the wreckage of 1945, as the Third Reich collapsed and Soviet forces pushed west, Reinhard Gehlen began planning for the next war. As head of Foreign Armies East, he had spent years gathering intelligence on the Red Army. Before Germany surrendered, he hid caches of those files in Bavaria, then offered them to the Americans in exchange for protection. It was a remarkable pitch: treat me not as a prisoner, but as an asset.
The timing worked in his favor. Washington knew very little about Soviet military intentions, and the Cold War was already taking shape. Gehlen and a circle of former officers were flown to the United States, where they wrote thousands of pages of reports and sold themselves as indispensable experts on the communist threat. Back in occupied Germany, that relationship grew into a clandestine network that became known as the Gehlen Organization.
But the operation quickly darkened. Its ranks filled with former SS, Gestapo, and other compromised figures, many shielded from prosecution because they were now considered useful. What began as a stopgap intelligence measure soon became something far larger, murkier, and harder to control.
Join historians Norman Goda and Gerald Steinacher in this week’s podcast selection, 'The Gehlen Organization', to uncover how the US rebuilt a spy network from the ashes of the Third Reich.
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Scientists in Texas are testing that idea after a new experiment showed the hardy legumes can survive in simulated lunar soil. In a study published in Scientific Reports, researchers explored whether crops could grow in the harsh, mineral-rich dust that astronauts would encounter beyond Earth.
Earlier work using real lunar samples from the Apollo missions proved plants could sprout in Moon soil, but the results were rough. The plants showed signs of stress and absorbed high levels of heavy metals. This time, researchers tried a different approach. They coated chickpea seeds with powdered arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, a soil fungus that helps plant roots expand and pull nutrients more efficiently. Some samples also received fertilizer produced by red wiggler worms.
The combination made a difference. Chickpeas treated with the fungal powder survived at least two weeks longer on average than untreated plants grown in the same lunar-like soil. The fungi also helped limit the roots’ uptake of metals such as iron, aluminum, zinc, and copper.
Articles
Oswald's Mexico Mystery
What was Lee Harvey Oswald doing in Mexico weeks before JFK’s assassination?
In late September 1963, just weeks before President John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald arrived in Mexico City for a six-day trip that still puzzles investigators. During his stay, he visited both the Cuban consulate and the Soviet embassy seeking travel visas that would allow him to reach Havana and ultimately the Soviet Union. The city was already thick with intelligence activity, and the CIA monitored the embassies closely, recording phone calls, photographing visitors, and tracking movements across the diplomatic district. According to later accounts from the CIA’s Mexico City station, the material gathered on Oswald alone filled several suitcases of memos, photographs, and recordings.
The visit raised eyebrows at the time. Oswald struggled through conversations in Spanish and Russian, returned repeatedly to the Cuban consulate after forgetting documents, and reportedly made claims about expedited Soviet visas that diplomats knew were impossible. One account later cited by the FBI even suggested Oswald boasted about killing Kennedy during the trip, though investigators never confirmed the claim.
The episode left lingering questions. US officials in Mexico had been informed of Oswald’s activities, yet key details remained buried in intelligence files for decades. Discover more in this SPYSCAPE article.
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Researchers have developed an injectable mixture of liver cells that can act as a backup organ when the body’s own liver begins to fail. In experiments on mice, scientists injected the cells into fatty tissue, where they linked up with nearby blood vessels and formed what researchers describe as a “satellite liver.”
Once connected to the bloodstream, the implanted cells began performing some of the organ’s basic tasks. Over the eight-week study, published in Nature Biotechnology, new blood vessels grew around the cluster, delivering oxygen and nutrients that allowed the cells to keep functioning. The liver is one of the body’s busiest organs, responsible for roughly 500 jobs, including filtering bacteria from the blood and breaking down medications. Researchers say the approach could help stabilize patients with severe liver disease, buying time while they wait for a transplant.
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