💬 Quoted…​​ “[DART’s success] builds optimism about humanity’s capacity to protect the Earth from an asteroid threat.”

After five months of analyzing the data from its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – where NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid at high speeds – the agency concluded a similar mission can effectively alter the trajectory of a potentially hazardous asteroid headed towards Earth. Though this isn’t exactly a spur-of-the-moment thing: the agency said it would need to be warned at least several years – and preferably decades – before the asteroid’s projected impact.

🦋 Stat of the Day: 50 years = how long it had been since anyone saw a giant lacewing (pictured above) in eastern North America, before Penn State professor Michael Skvarla came across a specimen outside an Arkansas Walmart in 2012. So why are we reporting on this now?

• Well, Skvarla had initially misidentified the bug as a common antlion. But when he used it for an in-class demonstration in 2020, he slowly realized – along with the rest of his class – that the specimen was actually a super-rare insect that dates back to the Jurassic era, per a recently published study co-authored by Skvarla himself.

🤯 Did You Know?... There are 292 different ways to make change for a dollar.

📖 Worth a Read: Here's why you should make a habit of having more fun → (NPR)