Make your own travel movie with Google Earth

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It’s not just for maps. You can build a visual scrapbook of your trips, complete with photos, notes, and slideshows.

🚀 NASA+ is coming to Netflix: Starting this summer, you’ll be able to stream rocket launches, astronaut spacewalks and views of Earth from the ISS right on Netflix. More details and schedules will drop closer to launch. Psst, you can watch NASA+ for free on the agency’s website with no ads.

10,000 years

That’s how long ago Meuse Woman walked the Earth, give or take a Netflix binge. Before the wheel, before writing, before Stonehenge, there was her. Now she’s got a face (thanks, science) and a pending fan vote to pick her name out of Margo, Freya or Mos’anne.

🪐 Airbnb, but make it space: NASA’s phasing out the ISS, and now startups like Axiom, Starlab and Blue Origin want to rent you a bed …100 miles above Earth. The vibes range from “luxe scientific Airbnb” to “inflatable gym bag for astronauts.” All racing to launch before 2030. “Room with a view” now means dodging space junk at brunch.

99.999%

That’s how much of Earth’s gold is locked in the core. It’s basically a global treasure chest we’ll probably never open. There’s enough down there to coat the entire planet in 1.5 feet of gold. It’s staying put unless you’ve got a plan to drill through 1,800 miles of molten iron. Somehow, Bitcoin mining sounds less complicated now. 

Over 200

That’s how many times one guy let snakes bite him. On purpose. He’s been building immunity for years to help cook up a universal antivenom. Most antidotes only work on one species, but his blood has already helped save mice from 13 of the 19 deadliest snakes on Earth. Talk about taking one for the team. Repeatedly.

Surprise, iPhone 13 users: You just got a freebie. Apple’s iOS 18.5 will unlock satellite connectivity for iPhone 13 models. No hardware changes, just a software update. It’s carrier-dependent, so your provider might still hold you hostage, but it’s free to enable. Finally, you can ignore texts from space, not just Earth.

1 billion

The number of humanoids Morgan Stanley expects to exist by 2050. Yes, that’s one bot for every eight people on Earth. So if your coworker gets replaced by a robot, don’t panic, statistically, so will you. If you’re picturing WALL-E with better knees and worse social skills, you’re not far off.

🐭 Ex-Disney worker headed to prison: After getting fired, Michael hacked company servers and messed with restaurant menus. He changed prices, added curse words, locked employees out of their accounts and, the kiss of death, even marked peanut items as “peanut-free.” The penalty? Three years in prison, definitely not the happiest place on Earth.

🛰️ High stakes laser tag: Amazon just fired its first 27 Kuiper satellites into orbit to take on Starlink, planning for 3,200 total. SpaceX already has 7,200 up there. Hope Earth’s atmosphere enjoys the new bumper-to-bumper congestion. 

🛸 This is space-cial: The James Webb Space Telescope picked up traces of dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide 124 light-years away, gases that, on Earth, only come from microorganisms like phytoplankton. The catch? It could also be from some chemical process we just don’t understand yet. Cue the X-Files theme.

Three per day

Satellite or rocket parts crash back to Earth. A 4-inch shard from the ISS punched through a Florida roof last month, as if those hurricanes weren’t bad enough. We may hit 15 daily as Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper launch more satellites. Did you hear about the film they’re making, where Dallas gets destroyed by space junk? Debris Does Dallas. (Thank you for that chuckle.)

🪐 A fishy planet: Scientists just got a whiff of something suspicious on K2-18b, a distant “hycean” world 120 light-years away. While scanning its atmosphere, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope picked up dimethyl sulfide, a gas that, here on Earth, only comes from living things like plankton. Looks like SpongeBob’s nemesis finally made it to the big time. 

🚀 Baby, you’re a satanist: People can be so weird. Katy Perry, Lauren Sánchez and four other high-profile women just flew 66.5 miles above Earth in a Blue Origin rocket, crossing the Kármán line, officially entering space during the 11-minute joyride. Conspiracy theorists on X took to declaring the launch a satanic hoax filmed in a Hollywood pool, using green screens and scuba tanks, and that the mission patch is a satanic goat sigil if you squint, flip it and lose your mind. 

$3 million

How much NASA is offering to anyone who can invent tech that recycles space poop. Why? Well, there are already 96 bags of human waste sitting on the moon from the Apollo missions. NASA wants to avoid adding to the mess or hauling it back to Earth by turning it into something useful. Uh … space compost, anyone?

3,028

How many people made Forbes’ 2025 Billionaires List. Leading the pack? Elon Musk at $342B, Mark Zuckerberg at $216B and Jeff Bezos at $215B. Altogether, the list is worth a ridiculous $16.1 trillion! For perspective, they could literally give every person on Earth $2,000, but they won’t.

8.2 billion

How many people we thought were on Earth. Researchers studied 35 years of data and say we’ve been underestimating rural populations by 53% to 84%. Turns out people are a lot harder to count when they don’t live near a Census office.

Space advertising: Imagine stepping outside to look at the stars … and seeing a giant glowing billboard in the sky. That could soon be a reality, with Russian companies planning to launch swarms of laser-equipped satellites to project light into Earth’s low orbit. The kicker? There’s no global ban on this yet. 

👽 Just for the record, sleeve them alone: This is wild. NASA launched the Voyager 1 and 2, each carrying a Golden Record filled with photos and audio representing life on Earth almost 50 years ago. Think a nursing mother, nature pics and human speech. The kicker? Both spacecraft are experiencing major power problems. Aliens are more into comet books anyway.

NASA’s new mission to deal with space junk is Apollo G: Over 11,000 satellites orbit Earth. When they crash into each other, it creates junk. (We’re talking 40K pieces of debris in low orbit.) The fix: ELROI (Extremely Low Resource Optical Identifier). In you and me terms, it’s a solar powered, stamp-sized device that’s a license plate for space identification and communication.